Tracing Post-World War II Book and Library History in the UNESCO Archive

This paper will discuss what the UNESCO archive reveals about the origins and earliest actions of the organization in the realm of post-World War II cultural reconstruction. The paper specifically focuses on UNESCO’s work in responding to the wartime confiscation and destruction of books and libraries. These original findings reveal the nature and extent to which the roots of UNESCO are inextricably linked to the horrors of World War II and its aftermath. Scholars have only recently begun to delve deeply into the UNESCO archives in order study, reconstruct, and write UNESCO's organizational and cultural history. This attention is long overdue as the UNESCO archives document over seventy years of people, ideas, innovations, achievements, setbacks, and failures, all of which are critical to a broad yet nuanced understanding of twentieth-century world history.