Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From jazz as a Cold War secret weapon to how the suffragettes influenced Mahatma Gandhi, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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How the U.S. Used Jazz as a Cold War Secret Weapon

Billy Perrigo
Time

Almost exactly 60 years ago, in the crisp, early spring of 1958, a young boy from California named Darius shuffled through the streets of Warsaw. He shivered; it still felt like winter, and snow frosted the bullet holes that peppered the city’s buildings, a stark reminder that the Second World War had concluded little more than a decade previously. Poland was in Russia’s sphere of influence, and Darius was there as part of a mission orchestrated by the U.S. State Department. His brief: to gain exposure to foreign cultures, and not cause any trouble. This moment was a new experiment in what is known as “cultural diplomacy.” Darius was tagging along because his father, the famous pianist Dave Brubeck, was a jazz ambassador.

The State Department hoped that showcasing popular American music around the globe would not only introduce audiences to American culture, but also win them over as ideological allies in the cold war. The Brubeck Quartet’s 12 performances in Poland were some of the first in a long tour that would never stray far from the perimeter of the Soviet Union. They passed through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Other tours would allow jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie to trumpet American values in newly decolonized states in Africa and Asia. The idea was always the same: keep communism at bay by whatever means possible. [continue reading]

“Art as a Weapon”: Japanese Proletarian Literature on the Centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution

Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field
Asia-Pacific Journal

One hundred years have passed since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It’s surely one of the signal events of the modern era, a project whose significance for humanity is hardly exhausted by its history, including the disastrous, tragic history of Stalinism. A scholarly and curatorial boom in works and exhibits in the centenary reflecting on the impact of the revolution suggests it is not forgotten, even in the former first world, but its legacy remains clouded behind a veil of Cold War hysteria.¹ What complicates matters is that the emotions, and even some of the apparatuses, of that half-remembered, misremembered history are being mobilized in the prosecution of the War on Terror. It may also be that the mad fury of our present makes us too impatient to open ourselves to the aspirations driving that massive transformation of a society still in the midst of war, its population mostly illiterate, desperately cold and hungry, in the throes of awakening to what was their due as human beings. But it’s precisely because of the misery and dread produced by unbridled neoliberalism and reckless militarism, along with unmistakable signs of ecological devastation that we, in fact, need to learn about a historic effort to pursue a different vision of modernity—one that insisted on universal literacy and health care, gender and racial equality, and the reimagining of society such that it would both enable and express those goals.

The very fact of the Russian Revolution galvanized working people and intellectuals around the world, even as their governments did their military best to topple the fledgling state. The Japanese government outdid their European and American Allies, leaving a sizable army in Siberia until 1922, two years after the others had withdrawn. From this alone might be gauged the fierceness of the repression directed at the growing numbers of men and women, in cities and the countryside, joining unions, beginning to think of themselves as socialists and even as communists, though parties bearing those names would never become legal in imperial Japan.  [continue reading]

One Man’s Search to Find the Families of the “Deportees” in the Famous Woody Guthrie Song

Jason Daley
Smithsonian

On January 28, 1948, the engine of a plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, about 60 miles southwest of Fresno, California, killing 32 people. Gabriel Thompson at SFGate.com reports that the incident was the deadliest plane crash in California history, the type of tragedy that typically takes over the newspapers and spawns biographies and memorials to the deceased.