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By John Krige

In 1945, the USA was once not just the most powerful monetary and army energy on the planet; it used to be additionally the world's chief in technology and expertise. In American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of technological know-how in Europe, John Krige describes the efforts of influential figures within the usa to version postwar medical practices and associations in Western Europe on these in the US. They mobilized political and monetary aid to advertise not only America's clinical and technological agendas in Western Europe yet its chilly conflict political and ideological agendas as well.Drawing at the paintings of diplomatic and cultural historians, Krige argues that this test at medical dominance by means of the usa could be visible as a sort of "consensual hegemony," related to the collaboration of influential neighborhood elites who shared American values. He makes use of this inspiration to investigate a sequence of case reports that describe how the united states management, senior officials within the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the NATO technology Committee, and influential individuals of the medical establishment--notably Isidor I. Rabi of Columbia collage and Vannevar Bush of MIT--tried to Americanize clinical practices in such fields as physics, molecular biology, and operations learn. He info U.S. aid for associations together with CERN, the Niels Bohr Institute, the French CNRS and its laboratories at Gif close to Paris, and the never-established "European MIT." Krige's learn exhibits how consensual hegemony in technological know-how not just served the pursuits of postwar ecu reconstruction yet grew to become otherwise of protecting American management and "making the realm secure for democracy."

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Additional resources for American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

Example text

Faced by a skeptical Congress, Truman exaggerated the danger beyond the particular circumstances that had triggered it. He implied that the United States was embarked on a crusade, not simply to check the possible expansion of Soviet power in the European theater, but to oppose Communism wherever it appeared. 9 Truman’s resort to universalistic rhetoric was intended to win support for his program among conservative isolationists who were committed to America first but also inveterately hostile to Communism.

60 A top secret appendix to a CIA report published on 27 October 1948 was circulated along with the ONR material. ”62 The best way to minimize these risks was to concentrate support on “pure research of the academic type” and only fund applied research in very specific cases. 63 The focus on basic research had many advantages. ”64 All were not only beneficial to Europe but to the United States as well. International cooperation, Compton wrote, would help “increase . . our basic scientific and technical knowledge,” and also “replenish our stockpile of ideas,” which had been depleted during the war.

This account is not intended to provide a comprehensive survey of the state of science in early postwar Italy or Germany. Rather, its parameters are set by the questions asked and reports written at the behest of the RDB by the Office of the Assistant Naval Attaché for Research in London (and these concentrated almost exclusively on physics). In other words, what follows is a summary of the information that was fed back to policymakers in the RDB about the state of affairs in these two countries and how they reacted to what they learned.

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