A List
10/1/07

SLU LIBRARIES CELEBRATE PROF'S BOOK ON MILITARY FAMILIES

CANTON - The Friends of Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries at St. Lawrence University will celebrate Assistant Professor and Margaret Vilas Chair of History Donna Alvah's book Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965 at an event on Friday, October 5, at 4 p.m. in the Josephine Young Room of Owen D. Young Library. Alvah will speak at the event, which is open to the public, free of charge.

Published earlier this year by New York University Press, Alvah's book looks at the role that American military families played as ambassadors abroad during the Cold War years. As thousands of wives and children joined American servicemen stationed at overseas bases in the years following World War II, the military family represented a friendlier, more humane side of the United States' campaign for dominance in the Cold War. Wives in particular were encouraged to use their feminine influence to forge ties with residents of occupied and host nations. In this untold story of Cold War diplomacy, Alvah describes how these "unofficial ambassadors" spread the United States' perception of itself and its image of world order in the communities where husbands and fathers were stationed, cultivating relationships with both local people and other military families in private homes, churches, schools, women's clubs, shops and other places.

Alvah is a graduate of the University of California at Irvine, with a master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis. She also has written an essay on military families in Heidelberg 1946-1965, which will appear in a collection titled GIs in Germany: The American Military Presence 1945-2000 (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), as well as pieces in Americans at War: Society, Culture and the Homefront and Dictionary of American History.

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