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This volume of TheCambridge History of America and the World opens as World War II ends and the United States stands at the pinnacle of its power relative to the rest of the world. Indexes of that power abound: In 1950, for instance, the United States accounted for only 6.0 percent of the world population – but 27.3 percent of all economic activity (and a far larger share of industrial production), along with 66.3 percent of world military expenditure. Other forms of American global power were just as significant but harder to measure: the United States had taken the lead diplomatically, treating wartime allies like England and France as junior partners; it took a harsher attitude toward its other major wartime ally, the USSR. Economic and military strength, along with the ability to shape world politics – these very real and concrete forms of global power – were hardly the only dimensions of American power in the decades since World War II.
The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.
Over the last decade or so, intellectual historians in and beyond the US field have deepened their engagement with the historical profession's “transnational turn.” This welcome development should hardly be a surprise; after all the turn, which began for Americanists in the late 1990s, owed a good part of its erudition and its energy to some of the most distinguished intellectual historians of that time. Thomas Bender convened four conferences at NYU's La Pietra villa—itself part of some intellectual-history footnotes in the early twentieth century—and also made major scholarly and organizational contributions to the field. Two of the most frequently cited works that made the case for the “internationalization of US history”—avant la lettre—were by similarly preeminent intellectual historians Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg. Other scholars, like David Hollinger, encouraged such work in their students before undertaking a more robustly transnational approach themselves. A wealth of scholarship in recent years has not just continued this tradition but expanded it, with intellectual historians individually and collectively pursuing their subjects across geographic borders as well as methodological boundaries. Two recent edited collections showcase work by scholars (mostly mid-career or younger) and contemplate the possibilities and the limits of different scales and methods of investigating the past in its broadest contexts.
The relationship between mobilization and immobilization in Nazi total war was dynamic rather than static over time, space and circumstance. In the long view the Nazis could regard human and material resources devoted to the total destruction of 'racial inferiors' as part of a broader total war. At the same time this exertion represented considerable costs at the expense of the total war against the nation states fighting Nazi Germany, though the wartime increase in mobilization of prison and camp labour compensated for this. There were several categories of Germans wholly or partially immobilized, by age, by mental or physical condition, by disposition, or by gender. The immobilization was met with a costly and labour-intensive Nazi campaign to integrate disabled soldiers into the war economy. While most homosexuals remained, undetected, part of the Nazi war effort, the debate over their nature and utility is an instance in the realm of science and medicine of the dynamics of mobilization and immobilization.
John Dewey, like many other American intellectuals between the world wars, was fascinated by Soviet events. After visiting Russia in 1928 he wrote excitedly about the “Soviet experiment” and especially about Soviet educational theorists. In his early enthusiasm Dewey hoped that the US and the USSR could learn from each other, especially among the cosmopolitan group of progressive pedagogues he met on his trip. Observing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s, though, his optimism dissipated; at the same time he came to emphasize historical and cultural differences between the US and the USSR. The result is apparent in Dewey's writings in the late 1930s (especially Freedom and Culture, 1939), as he began to evaluate the Soviet Union in terms that would have been anathema to him a decade earlier. He increasingly blamed Russia's cultural heritage for inhibiting Soviet development along the lines he had envisioned. Dewey's transformation suggests the importance of a cultural reading of American ideas about the USSR. Many American observers joined Dewey in seeing the USSR as the product of Russian culture, with its historical traditions and its own national character—and not just as the instantiation or betrayal of a political doctrine.