Saving Europe with Tammy Proctor

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Saving Europe: First World War Relief and American Identity by Tammy Proctor. John Mitcham will join Tammy Proctor in conversation.

Thursday, March 20

9am PT/ 10am CT/ 12pm ET/ 4pm GMT

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" "First we crushed our enemy, then saved him from starvation," Walter Cronkite intoned in a 1963 episode of the CBS television series The Twentieth Century. Designed to commemorate the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of US aid to Europe during World War I, the episode explained that the American military had "crushed" other nations in both world wars, a violence described as a necessary corrective in order to subsequently unleash "the spirit of the American people." This humanitarian "spirit" manifested as material relief not only to friend but also to former foe. With only a small commentary on the ingratitude of some recipients, the documentary emphasized for Americans their unique role in global peacekeeping and prosperity, functioning as a global patriarch, bearing both carrots and sticks.

Saving Europe offers a transnational history of American aid and intervention in Europe between 1914 and 1924, a period when the US simultaneously tightened its borders and expanded its reach. In that crucial decade after the outbreak of World War I, Americans saw themselves in a novel role as protectors of European cultural heritage and as rescuers of vulnerable populations, making them worthy successors to earlier global powers. Saving Europe shines a light on how the US wielded "soft" power in the interwar period through food, dollars, and reconstruction projects. In case studies of Belgium, France, Austria, Germany, and Poland, it traces the development of American views of their role in the wider world as well as European responses to this intervention, providing valuable context for later US global aid and development regimes after World War II."

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Tammy M. Proctor is Distinguished Professor of History and Interim Director of the Heravi Peace Institute at Utah State University. She also serves as co-editor of the Journal of British Studies. She is best known for her books, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (2003), Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918 (2010), Gender and the Great War (with Susan Grayzel), and An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp (with Sophie de Schaepdriver). Proctor is also an expert in the history of international Girl Scouting as well as Boy Scout and Girl Guide history in Britain. Publications on Scouting include Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting (2009). She teaches courses on both world wars, the Holocaust, sport history, and world history.

John Mitcham is Department Chair and the Albert C. Labriola Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Duquesne University. His book, Race and Imperial Defense in the British World, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 and was a finalist for the Templer Medal.  He is currently finishing a book The Empire Club: Imperial Politics, White Supremacy, and the Making of the British Commonwealth (under contract with Oxford University Press).  John is the General Editor of the journal Britain and the World.