Although there have been many studies of U.S.–Soviet diplomacy in the twentieth century, most explorations of people-to-people diplomacy begin in the 1980s and to not take into account the early contacts in the revolutionary period and 1920s. This study explores in greater depth the religious figures, radical activists, entrepreneurs, engineers, social workers, and others in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union who reached across the barriers of ideology and culture and history to forge tentative but real human connections in an attempt to further better understanding between the two countries. All of these efforts prefigured the much more heralded "citizen diplomacy" efforts of the 1980s, which helped end the Cold War.

As one of the few surviving archaeological sites from the medieval Christian kingdom of Nubia, Qasr Ibrim is critically important in a number of ways. It is the only site in Lower Nubia that remained above water after the completion of the Aswan high dam. In addition, thanks to the aridity of the climate in the area, the site is marked by extraordinary preservation of organic material, especially textual material written on papyrus, leather, and paper. Particularly rich is the textual material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, written in Old Nubian, the region's indigenous language. As a result, Qasr Ibrim is probably the best documented ancient and medieval site in Africa outside of Egypt and the Maghreb. Medieval Nubia is the first book to make available this remarkable material, much of which is still unpublished. The evidence discovered reveals a more complicated picture of this community than originally thought. Previously, it was accepted that medieval Nubia had existed in relative isolation from the rest of the world, subsisting on a primitive economy. Legal documents, accounts, and letters, however, reveal a complex, monetized economy with exchange rates connected to those of the wider world. Furthermore, they reveal public festive practices, in which lavish feasting and food gifts reinforced the social prestige of the participants. These documents prove medieval Nubia to have been a society combining legal elements inherited from the Greco-Roman world with indigenous African social practices. In reconstructing the social and economic life of medieval Nubia based on the Old Nubian sources from the site, as well as other previously examined materials, Giovanni R. Ruffini corrects previous assumptions and provides a new picture of Nubia, one that links it to the wider Mediterranean economy and society of its time.

This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin. During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel. This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.

This study challenges the rose-tinted view of the interwar period in Romanian history, which is often judged against the darkness of almost five decades of Communist rule. Romania, like several of the states of Eastern Europe, emerged from the First World War as it had entered it, as a predominantly agricultural country, and one of its major problems was the condition of the peasantry. This volume’s focus is the drive to improve that condition, on the collapse of democracy, and the search by Romania’s leaders for strategies to secure the state, to assert the country’s independence, and to maintain its territorial integrity in the face of the threat to the European order posed by two totalitarian systems, represented by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By examining recent scholarship, this volume provides the most up-to-date account of Romania’s predicament in the interwar years. Romania, 1916–1941 is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in foreign policy, politics, society, internationalization and late development in interwar Central and Eastern Europe.

The third volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World covers the volatile period between 1900 and 1945 when the United States emerged as a world power and American engagements abroad flourished in new and consequential ways. Showcasing the most innovative approaches to both traditional topics and emerging themes, leading scholars chart the complex ways in which Americans projected their growing influence across the globe; how others interpreted and constrained those efforts; how Americans disagreed with each other, often fiercely, about foreign relations; and how race, religion, gender, and other factors shaped their worldviews. During the early twentieth century, accelerating forces of global interdependence presented Americans, like others, with a set of urgent challenges from managing borders, humanitarian crises, economic depression, and modern warfare to confronting the radical, new political movements of communism, fascism, and anticolonial nationalism. This volume will set the standard for new understandings of this pivotal moment in the history of America and the world.

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