Mailing address
One Brattle Square 501
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Mailbox 134
Cambridge, MA, 02138
David Ekbladh
Research Fellow, International Security Program
Contact:
Telephone: 617-384-8061
Fax: 617-496-0606
Email: david.ekbladh@tufts.edu
Experience
David Ekbladh is assistant professor of history at Tufts University. His first book, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, looks at the place of development ideas in American foreign relations during the twentieth century and will be published by Princeton University Press at the end of 2009. His current project, Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s, explores how a new understanding of international affairs emerged from a transnational discourse contending with the collapse of world order during the Depression years. This led a profound revision of American perceptions, politics, and institutions that remain foundations for our present understanding of the U.S. role in the world. Ekbladh holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University where he was a Pacific Basin Fellow at the East Asian Institute. Articles of his have appeared in The Wilson Quarterly, World Affairs, and Diplomatic History. Among other awards, he has been an Olin Postdoctoral Fellow with International Security Studies at Yale University and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also worked for the Carnegie Corporation of New York on conflict prevention and international affairs issues.
November 2009
The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order
Book
By David Ekbladh, Research Fellow, International Security Program
The Great American Mission traces how America's global modernization efforts during the twentieth century were a means to remake the world in its own image. David Ekbladh shows that the emerging concept of modernization combined existing development ideas from the Depression. He describes how ambitious New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority became symbols of American liberalism's ability to marshal the social sciences, state planning, civil society, and technology to produce extensive social and economic change. For proponents, it became a valuable weapon to check the influence of menacing ideologies such as Fascism and Communism.
November 4, 2009
"Muddling Through: How Development's Past Shapes Its Future"
Op-Ed
By David Ekbladh, Research Fellow, International Security Program
International development is back. President Barack Obama has given it significance in U.S. strategy not seen since the Cold War. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's much touted "Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review," emphasizes her own belief that it is, "a core pillar of American power."
