This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.
The absence of formal state structures for the conduct of cultural relations until 1938 has led to the assumption that Americans abandoned a noble tradition of liberal cultural exchange in the Cold War, when state and private organizations co-operated in a propaganda battle against the Soviet Union. This article re-examines the realities of American cultural diplomacy in inter-war Europe by focusing on a group of key actors: philanthropic foundations founded by the Rockefeller and the Carnegie families. Far from being apolitical, foundations operated with the tacit approval of the state and reliably furthered American interests abroad but their nongovernmental status also made them vulnerable to foreign intelligence.'Winning hearts and minds'; 'cultural imperialism'; 'a specialised form of statecraft, concerned with information and value transmission'; or simply 'goodwill stuff' -these are all more or less accurate definitions of cultural diplomacy, an area of foreign relations that is currently receiving much attention.
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