Description
Book SynopsisAlthough cultural diplomacy has become an increasingly fashionable term embraced by academics, foreign-service personnel, and private sector commercial and cultural interests, the very practice of this idea remains conspicuously challenging to define. This book takes on this problem, advancing a new understanding of cultural diplomacy that results from a historical investigation of a single area of government and private sector partnership, and what became in the mid-twentieth century the most prominent manifestation of this alliancethe cultural exhibitions sent abroad to tell America's story with the goal of winning hearts and minds. To illustrate this point, selected exhibitions and the intentions of the policymakers who proposed them are interrogated for the first time beside archival documentation, writings from the history of design, advertising, science, as well as art historical and museum studies theories that addressvarious aspectsof the history of collecting and display,all
Trade ReviewAndrew Wulf gives us a first-rate study of American cultural and public diplomacy during the Cold War. Not incidentally, it is a marvelous study of international exhibitions and world's fairs as mirrors of Cold War America. -- Robert W. Rydell, Director of the Montana State University Humanities Institute, Montana State University
Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Andrew Wulf's remarkable book deftly reveals the heart of the U.S. government's approach to the Cold War and its attitude to its own identity through the history of its international exhibitions. Wulf's work takes its place on the short shelf of essential texts on the history of U.S. public diplomacy or for that matter any nation's self-representation overseas. -- Nicholas J. Cull, Director of the Master's in Public Diplomacy program at the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, and author, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1946-1989
Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: From Megafauna to Megashows to the MoMA: A Historical Overview of U.S. Cultural Exhibitions Abroad Chapter 2: Confusion Makes Its Masterpiece: U.S. Participation in 1950s Trade Fairs Chapter 3: A “Carefully Planned Bombardment:” The American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959 Chapter 4: Of Pleasure Domes and Moon Rocks: The U.S. at the Montreal and Osaka Expos, 1965-1970 Chapter 5: The Unfinished Reality of Our Revolutionary Experiment: The World of Franklin and Jefferson, 1971-1977 Conclusion Bibliography
