Thursday, January 3, 2013: 1:40 PM
Balcony K (New Orleans Marriott)
Grace V. Leslie, Brandeis University
In April 1960, influential U.S. scholar, activist, and teacher Caroline Ware breathed a sigh of relief as she completed the final edits on the nearly 2,000 pages of
The History of Mankind: Scientific and Cultural Development Volume VI: The Twentieth Century. She had spent the last six years working with scholars, collaborators, and national governments around the world to craft a one-of-a-kind history for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). No aspect of the project had been easy and Ware was more than happy to send the volume to UNESCO in hopes of seeing it in print within the year. Instead, it took six. When Ware accepted author-editorship in 1954, she had found the idea of writing “history from an international viewpoint and to encompass the whole suite of human experience . . . majestic;” now she watched helplessly as the opposing forces of the Cold War threatened to destroy her vision for a “truly international” history.
Born in the optimism of the immediate post-World War II years, the UNESCO History of Mankind was one of the first attempts to write, not simply a history of the world, but one that was deliberately and insistently international in its creation, form, and content. Examining the six years of the UNESCO project after Ware submitted her volume, particularly the endless objections of the Soviet Union to the volume’s version of history, provides an important window into what happens when liberal internationalism, historical scholarship, and the efforts of world cultural organizations to promote global integration collide with Cold War geopolitics. Today, as historians pursue the recent transnational turn and UNESCO updates the History of Mankind, it is especially crucial to understand the contentious debates that defined, and ultimately crippled, this first effort to write a “truly international” world history.
