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Unofficial Ambassadors
As thousands of wives and children joined American servicemen stationed at overseas bases in the years following World War II, the military family represented a friendlier, more humane side of the United States' campaign for dominance in the Cold War. Wives in particular were encouraged to use their feminine influence to forge ties with residents of occupied and host nations. In this untold story of Cold War diplomacy, Donna Alvah describes how these unofficial ambassadors spread the United States' perception of itself and its image of world order in the communities where husbands and fathers were stationed, cultivating relationships with both local people and other military families in private homes, churches, schools, women's clubs, shops, and other places.Unofficial Ambassadors reminds us that, in addition to soldiers and world leaders, ordinary people make vital contributions to a nation's military engagements. Alvah broadens the scope of the history of the Cold War by analyzing how ideas about gender, family, race, and culture shaped the U.S. military presence abroad.
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The colonizer abroad : American writers on foreign soil, 1846-1912
Looking at a diverse series of authors--Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London--\"The Colonizer Abroad\" claims that as the U.S. emerged as a colonial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of the sea became a literature of imperialism. This book applies postcolonial theory to the travel writing of some of America's best-known authors, revealing the ways in which America's travel fiction and nonfiction have both reflected and shaped society.
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Our suffering brethren : foreign captivity and nationalism in the early United States
\"In October 1785, American statesman John Jay acknowledged that the more his countrymen 'are treated ill abroad, the more we shall unite and consolidate at home.' Behind this simple statement lies a complicated history. From the British impressment of patriots during the Revolution to the capture of American sailors by Algerian corsairs and Barbary pirates at the dawn of the nineteenth century, stories of Americans imprisoned abroad helped jumpstart democratic debate as citizens acted on their newly unified identity to demand that their government strengthen efforts to free their fellow Americans. Deliberations about the country's vulnerabilities in the Atlantic world reveal America's commitment to protecting the legacy of the Revolution as well as growing political divisions. Drawing on newspaper accounts, prisoner narratives, and government records, David J. Dzurec III explores how stories of American captivity in North America, Europe, and Africa played a critical role in the development of American political culture, adding a new layer to our understanding of foreign relations and domestic politics in the early American republic\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Richard Wright's Travel Writings
Attracted to remote lands by his interest in the postcolonial struggle, Richard Wright (1908-1960) became one of the few African Americans of his time to engage in travel writing. He went to emerging nations not as a sightseer but as a student of their cultures, learning the politics and the processes of social transformation.
When Wright fled from the United States in 1946 to live as an expatriate in Paris, he was exposed to intellectual thoughts and challenges that transcended his social and political education in America. Three events broadened his world view- his introduction to French existentialism, the rise of the Pan-Africanist movement to decolonize Africa, and Indonesia's declaration of independence from colonial rule in 1945. During the 1950s as he traveled to emerging nations his encounters produced four travel narratives-Black Power(1953),The Color Curtain(1956),Pagan Spain(1956), andWhite Man, Listen!(1957). Upon his death in 1960, he left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa, which exists only in notes, outlines, and a draft.
Written by multinational scholars, this collection of essays exploring Wright's travel writings shows how in his hands the genre of travel writing resisted, adapted, or modified the forms and formats practiced by white authors. Enhanced by nine photographs taken by Wright during his travels, the essays focus on each of Wright's four separate narratives as well as upon his unfinished book and reveal how Wright drew on such non-Western influences as the African American slave narrative and Asian literature of protest and resistance. The essays critique Wright's representation of customs and people and employ a broad range of interpretive modes, including the theories of formalism, feminism, and postmodernism, among others.
Wright's travel books are proved here to be innovative narratives that laid down the roots of such later genres as postcolonial literature, contemporary travel writing, and resistance literature.
Virginia Whatley Smith is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Her work has appeared inAfrican American Review,Mississippi Quarterly, andMLA Approaches to Teaching Wright's 'Native Son.'
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The Second Generation : âEmigrâes from Nazi Germany as Historians
\"Of the thousands of children and young adults who fled Nazi Germany in the years before the Second World War, a remarkable number went on to become trained historians in their adopted homelands. By placing autobiographical testimonies alongside historical analysis and professional reflections, this richly varied collection comprises the first sustained effort to illuminate the role these men and women played in modern historiography. Focusing particularly on those who settled in North America, Great Britain, and Israel, it culminates in a comprehensive, meticulously researched biobibliographical guide that provides a systematic overview of the lives and works of this 'second generation'\"--From publisher's website.
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Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism
This illuminating study reevaluates an often overlooked aspect of Mark Twain's writing-his travel narratives-and demonstrates their centrality to his identity and thinking.
Travel books, Jeffrey Melton asserts in this study, are vital to Mark Twain's identity as a writer and to his cultural influence, and not just, as many critics have argued, preliminary sketches or failed attempts at fiction. Furthermore, the identity that Twain establishes for himself in these books as the arch tourist provides the most compelling perspective from which to view his entire body of work.
Melton begins by outlining the conventions of travel writing in the 19th century and proceeds to document Twain's subversion of those conventions to his own ends: a reinvention of the genre. The remainder of the study examines Twain's travel narratives individually, charting a progression from the Old World in The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, in which Twain confronts the limitations of the tourist experience of life and discovers the powers of imagination and self-delusion, to the New World in Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, in which Twain seeks to reconcile his outsider identity with a search for home. The final section considers Twain's last travel narrative, Following the Equator, as Twain searches for a complete escape from the tourist perspective and its imperialistic implications. In the process, Melton shows, Twain's travelogues highlight the author's philosophical and moral evolution as a writer from the worldviews of innocence to experience.
Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism is the first full-length work to treat Twain's travel narratives in depth and in specific context with his contemporary travel writers and with tourism. Academic libraries, students and scholars of American and southern literature, Mark Twain and travelogue enthusiasts-all will welcome this thoughtful look at the 19th century's most popular and best-selling travel writer.
Jeffrey Alan Melton is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery.
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Showcasing the Great Experiment
This book is a history of the Soviet tours of European and American intellectuals, writers, bohemians, professionals, and political tourists who saw the “Soviet experiment” in the 1920s and 1930s. It provides a new framework for understanding the relationship between intellectuals and communism and the Soviet reception of foreign visitors, including the leading fellow-travelers who praised Stalin and Stalinism in the interwar period. The work is based on a far-reaching analysis of the declassified archives of agencies charged with crafting the international image of the first socialist society, including VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad). The book brings this story into new focus as one of the great transnational encounters of the twentieth century. As many visitors were profoundly influenced by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system itself: the experiences of building showcases and tutoring outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making comprise a neglected international dimension to the emergence of Stalinism. Probing entanglements between far-left and far-right ideological extremes, the work pays special attention to the covert interaction between communism and fascism, including Soviet attempts to recruit German “National Bolsheviks” and fascist intellectuals. The unprecedented scope of Soviet efforts to mold foreign, particularly Western public opinion created a new chapter in the history of modern cultural diplomacy. Setting the revolutionary regime's innovations in the context of the entire history of foreign visitors in Russia, the book argues that Soviet mobilization for the international ideological contest directly paved the way for the cultural Cold War.
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