Capital of the World
The Race to Host the United Nations
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
From 1944 to 1946, as the world pivoted from the Second World War to an unsteady peace, Americans in more than two hundred cities and towns mobilized to chase an implausible dream. The newly-created United Nations needed a meeting place, a central place for global diplomacy—a Capital of the World. But what would it look like, and where would it be? Without invitation, civic boosters in every region of the United States leapt at the prospect of transforming their hometowns into the Capital of the World. The idea stirred in big cities—Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and more. It fired imaginations in the Black Hills of South Dakota and in small towns from coast to coast.
Meanwhile, within the United Nations the search for a headquarters site became a debacle that threatened to undermine the organization in its earliest days. At times it seemed the world’s diplomats could agree on only one thing: under no circumstances did they want the United Nations to be based in New York. And for its part, New York worked mightily just to stay in the race it would eventually win.
With a sweeping view of the United States’ place in the world at the end of World War II, Capital of the World tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in pursuit of an extraordinary prize and the diplomats who struggled with the balance of power at a pivotal moment in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Most know that UN headquarters rest in midtown Manhattan overlooking the East River, but what many do not know and what Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Mires delivers in this entertaining account are the improbable twists and turns the organization took in settling on that location. In a refreshing turn, Mires offers insight into "a period that lies midway between the booster strategies of the nineteenth century...and the more intense place marketing and branding efforts of cities around the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century," keeping the story firmly focused on the efforts to determine a location while leaving the more minute details of the UN's formation for other scholars to explain. As a result we are treated to ambitious visions of a world capital tucked into South Dakota's Black Hills, or isolated Sugar Island near Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The quick dissolution of plans calling for 40 to 50 square miles of land one can hardly imagine Westchester County, New York, as home to a teeming international metropolis to a mere parcel in New York City deftly summarizes the grand ambition and brief optimism of lasting peace that permeated existed after the end of WWII.