Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy (Book)
Title: Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy
Author: Danielle Fosler-Lussier
Editor: Rachel Berchten
Abstract: During the Cold War, thousands of musicians from the United States traveled the world under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Presentations program. The musicians competed with Soviet and Chinese performers to enhance the reputation of American culture, but they also built meaningful personal connections with people in other lands. Through personal contact and the media, State Department-sponsored concerts created subtle musical, social, and political relationships on a global scale. These relationships turned individual musicians and audience members into citizen-diplomats, changing their perspective and re-defining what citizenship meant in the Cold War world.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520284135
Secondary URL: http://musicdiplomacy.org/
Access Model: Available for purchase from May 2015
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520284135
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Database of Cultural Presentations (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Database of Cultural Presentations
Author: Danielle Fosler-Lussier
Author: Eric Fosler-Lussier
Abstract: The data presented here represents partial information about the U.S. State Department's Cultural Presentations Program from 1954-1980. These data were collected during the research for Music In America's Cold War Diplomacy. The two major archival repositories represented in this database are these: • National Archives at College Park, Maryland. Records are principally located in Record Group 59 (General Records of the Department of State). • ARK: University of Arkansas Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Fayetteville, Arkansas. MC468, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection. This database represents a first attempt to organize the extant data about the State Department’s Cultural Presentations program, which began in 1954. The database is far from complete for the following reasons: * The U.S. government keeps only a tiny fraction (about 5%) of the records it generates. Most of the extant archival records of cultural presentations tours are incomplete; some tours are not documented at all in existing State Department records. There are fewer records for tours in the early-to-mid 1960s than for tours in the 1950s. * I have not had the resources to survey all the extant records. My primary focus was on the time period between 1954 and the early 1970s; later tours are poorly represented in the data collected here. * Performers’ itineraries were subject to change. Local circumstances often forced significant alterations to the plan for each tour. Revised itineraries may not have been generated or preserved. * Many documents about cultural diplomacy have not yet been collected from personal collections and the archives of groups that traveled. The database should therefore be used as a starting point only. Nonetheless, it offers scholars and other interested persons a way to find out who went where on State Department-funded musical tours.
Year: 2015
Secondary URL: http://musicdiplomacy.org/database.html
Access Model: Open access

Permalink: https://apps.neh.gov/publicquery/products.aspx?gn=FA-55637-11