Book ID: CBB001212965

Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation's Humanitarian Awakening (2013)

unapi

Irwin, Julia F. (Author)


Oxford University Press


Publication Date: 2013
Physical Details: xii + 273 pp.; ill.
Language: English

This first book narrates the early history of American foreign relief and assistance as a way of guiding the international community in peaceful cooperation and modernization towards greater stability and democracy. It tells the story of how the United States government came to realize the value of overseas aid as a tool of statecraft. A prime case in point is the American Red Cross, a quasi-private, quasi-state organization. Established in 1882, the ARC was a privately funded and staffed organization, primarily dependent on volunteer labor. However, it shared a special relationship with the U.S. government, formalized by Congressional charters, which made it the "official voluntary" aid association of the United States in times of war and natural disaster. Together, international-minded American progressives---a generation of American health professionals, social scientists, and public intellectuals---made the ARC into a vehicle for the global dissemination of their ideas about health, social welfare, and education. They urged their fellow citizens to reject their traditional attachments to isolationism and non-entanglement and to commit to "humanitarian internationalism." Their international activities included feeding, housing, and anti-epidemic projects in wartime France, Italy, Russia, and Serbia; the development of playgrounds, education initiatives, and child health clinics in postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia; correspondence programs to unite American children and their international peers; and the extension of all of these efforts to U.S. territories, sites where the conceptual lines between foreign and domestic blurred in the U.S. imagination. This history calls attention to the ways that private organizations have served the diplomatic needs of the U.S. state, as well as been an institutional space for Americans who wanted to participate in international affairs in ways that deviated from official state agendas. By the mid-1920s, voluntary humanitarian interventionism had become the basis for a new set of American civic and political obligations to the world community.

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Reviewed By

Review Warren, Kathryn Hamilton (2014) Review of "Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation's Humanitarian Awakening". Journal of American History (pp. 290-291). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001212965/

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Authors & Contributors
Armstrong, Melissa Diane
Pringle, Yolana
Geissler, Wenzel
Thomas, Karen Kruse
Starr, Paul
Shin, Dongwon
Concepts
Public health
Medicine and politics
Medicine and government
Health care
Globalization; internationalization
Prevention and control of disease
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
20th century, late
Places
United States
Soviet Union
Brazil
Southern states (U.S.)
Uganda
Cuba
Institutions
UNICEF
African National Congress
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
American Public Health Association
World Bank
World Health Organization (WHO)
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