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I'd like to thank the anonymous reviewers for MAH, as well as Brooke Blower, Sarah Phillips, and the editorial assistants for their comments and interventions. This piece has seen several forms and many audiences. I thank, for their comments or questions: in Berlin, Alex Starre, Frank Kelleter, and Christian Lammert; in Amsterdam, George Blaustein, Babs Boter, and Renee de Groot; in Munich, Andrew Preston, Michael Kimmage, Angus Burgin, Uwe Lübken, Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Mary Nolan, Daniel Geary, Casey Blake, Brendon O'Connor, and Emily Levine; in Washington, Chris Nichols, Andy Seal, Dara Orenstein, Andrew Johnstone, and Michaela Hoenicke Moore; in Irvine, Hadji Bakara, Paul Murphy, Justin Reynolds, and Andrew McNally; in San Francisco, Paul Kramer, Adriane Lentz-Smith, and Chris Nichols; in San Juan, Sandhya Shukla and Brooke Blower. And elsewhere, too: Jenifer Van Vleck, Andrew Friedman, Naoko Shibusawa, Daniel Immerwahr, Michael Kramer, and Melani McAlister.
“There are no distant points in the world any longer,” announced Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, in the opening moments of his 1943 bestseller, One World. Wide use of the airplane and a global war had not only shrunk space, he argued, but also pushed Americans toward a new understanding of their nation's political responsibilities. “Our thinking in the future,” he declared, “must be world-wide.”1
Willkie's book recounted the story of the much-followed round-the-world trip he made in the late summer of 1942. Carrying messages to Allied leaders from his former rival, President Franklin Roosevelt, Willkie flew 31,000 miles in 49 days, making extended stops in the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China. Enlivened by his homespun charisma and his easy encounters with world leaders and ordinary citizens alike, Willkie's book enjoyed great popular success and brought Americans one of the most compelling examples of “world-wide” thinking to emerge from the war. The Willkie moment—a period of two years between his trip in 1942 and his abrupt death in the fall of 1944—marked the high point for American visions of wartime internationalism.
Willkie was no innovator. He picked up on internationalist ideas already in circulation, and used his sudden fame to offer Americans the most widely read, seen, and heard version of an emerging world picture—a new set of imagined geographies through which they might understand the...