Description:
- Based on multi-lingual sources (German, Spanish, and English) and multi-archival research conducted in six different countries around the world.
- At the cutting edge of new research trends in the field of international/global history.
- The first work to analyze the important history of official visits to the United States as well as the selling of the "Alliance for Progress."
- Tells the global media history of both the space race and the Vietnam War.
- Goes beyond the domestic context and looks at foreign media and responses.
Brief description:
Sönke Kunkel is Professor of North American History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. His publications include two edited volumes and numerous essays on U.S. foreign policy. He was research fellow at the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Ohio State, and Jacobs University Bremen.
Review Quotes:
"Kunkel provides an empirically grounded framework for understanding the United States as an imperial power that cultivated recognition through pictures." - Diplomatic History
"...a perceptive and well-researched tour of how political leaders realized the utility of the picture and made conscious efforts to take advantage of its power." - American Historical Review
"... fascinating and easy to read, well researched and nicely illustrated. Kunkel has made a very good contribution to the still growing field of visual history." - H-Soz-Kult
"[This study] provides a cogent history of how US policymakers came to understand the importance of the image to building and consolidating post-Second World War global rule. Offering what he terms 'a sensory history of American empire', Kunkel documents how pictures worked to facilitate American empire building - and then, by the late 1960s, how pictures helped to undermine that very process." - Journal of Contemporary History
"I very much enjoyed reading this book--I found it compelling, original in approach, and steeped in fascinating historical detail. It places the symbolic and emotional power of images at the heart of a study into U.S. public diplomacy, but also internationalizes a visual history which takes the spotlight away from the more familiar American domestic media." - Katy Parry, University of Leeds