Poland and the Making of Transnational Social Science - (Histories of Internationalism) by Olga Linkiewicz (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book explores the intertwined histories of internationalism and nationalism in the interwar period to examine how political demand for expert knowledge reshaped transnational networks between Eastern Europe and Anglo-American actors.

Book Synopsis

This book explores how American internationalism and Eastern European social science influenced and reshaped each other in the 1930s, giving rise to the phenomenon of transnational social science.By tracing interactions between Polish and Jewish scholars and American internationalists, it reveals how politically relevant knowledge-on nations, nationalism, and migration-evolved into the area studies on Eastern Europe that emerged at American universities during the early Cold War.

Following Woodrow Wilson's interest in Eastern Europe, a group of American internationalists-primarily linked to Columbia University, think tanks, and philanthropists-worked to establish a network of experts in the region. In their effort to support peace and democracy, they sought to advance social-scientific knowledge of Eastern Europe's contested borderlands. Poland and the Making of Transnational Social Science explores how interactions between scholars-Polish and Jewish intellectuals and their American counterparts-shaped interwar transnational thought on self-determination, nationalism and national indifference, anti-Semitism and racial exclusion, migration, and assimilation. This knowledge circulation played a key role in the evolution of 1930s social science and its transition into American Cold War area studies.

Review Quotes

In her long-anticipated book, Olga Linkiewicz tells a complex story of mutual influences between nationalism and internationalism in shaping the political imaginary of the modern social sciences. Responding intently to recent historiographic trends, Linkiewicz's study meticulously reveals and fills a gap hitherto invisible in the history of science and scholarship.
Alexej Lochmatow, Research Associate, University of Erfurt, Germany

Poland and the Making of Transnational Social Science makes a major intervention in our understanding of the global migration of ideas and the ways social scientists in newly independent Poland influenced and were influenced by colleagues in the US during the interwar and early Cold War period. It focuses uniquely on questions of nationalism, minority rights, border-drawing, migration, and other pressing issues of postwar Eastern Europe, demonstrating how these issues also informed the thinking of scholars in the US on the related matters of African American civil rights, antisemitism, and the impact of migration. The study is based on extensive archival research in collections around the world and makes use of previously untapped documentation to tell a unique story.
Keely Stauter-Halsted

About the Author

Olga Linkiewicz is Assistant Professor of History at The Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland.