After World War II, American statesman and scholar Lincoln Gordon emerged as one of the key players in the reconstruction of Europe. During his long career, Gordon worked as an aide to National Security Adviser Averill Harriman in President Truman's administration; for President John F. Kennedy as an author of the Alliance for Progress and as an adviser on Latin American policy; and for President Lyndon B. Johnson as assistant secretary of state. Gordon also served as the United States ambassador to Brazil under both Kennedy and Johnson. Outside the political sphere, he devoted his considerable talents to academia as a professor at Harvard University, as a scholar at the Brookings Institution, and as president at Johns Hopkins University. In this impressive biography, Bruce L. R. Smith examines Gordon's substantial contributions to U.S. mobilization during the Second World War, Europe's postwar economic recovery, the security framework for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and U.S. policy in Latin America. He also highlights the vital efforts of the advisers who helped Gordon plan NATO's force expansion and implement America's dominant foreign policy favoring free trade, free markets, and free political institutions. Smith, who worked with Gordon at the Brookings Institution, explores the statesman-scholar's virtues as well as his flaws, and his study is strengthened by insights drawn from his personal connection to his subject. In many ways, Gordon's life and career embodied Cold War America and the way in which the nation's institutions evolved to manage the twentieth century's vast changes. Smith adeptly shows how this "wise man" personified both America's postwar optimism and as its dawning realization of its own fallibility during the Vietnam era.

In this book, Rafael R. Ioris critically revisits the postwar context in Brazil to reexamine traditional questions and notions pertaining to the nature of Latin America’s political culture and institutions. It was in this period that the region lived some of its most intense and successful experiences of fast economic growth, which was paradoxically marred by heightened ideological divisions, political disruptions, and the emergence of widespread authoritarian rule. Combining original sources of political, diplomatic, intellectual, cultural, and labor histories, Ioris provides a comprehensive history of the fruitful debates concerning national development in postwar Brazil, a time when the so-called country of the future faced one of its best moments for consolidating political democracy and economic prosperity. He argues that traditional views on political instability have been excessively grounded on an institutional focus, which should be replaced by in-depth analysis of events on the ground. In so doing, he reveals that as national development meant very different things to multiple different social segments of the Brazilian society, no unified support could have been provided to the democratically elected political regime when things rapidly became socially and politically divisive early in the 1960s. Innovating in its multidimensional analytical scope and interdisciplinary focus, Transforming Brazil provides a rich political, cultural, and intellectual examination of a historical period characterized by rapid socio-economic changes amidst significant political instability and the heightened ideological polarization shaping the political scenario of Brazil and much of Latin America in the Cold War era.

Beginning in 1954, Apr. issue lists studies in progress; Oct. issue, completed studies.