HOTCUS 2021 Winter Symposium: Americans in the World, February 20, 2021, on Zoom. Jane Adams presided over the International Congress of Women in The Hague in 1915, Jesse Owens made sporting history at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Eslanda Robeson attended the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana in 1958, and in 1968 Dale Smith marched with German student activist Rudi Dutschke in Berlin. These individuals all played a crucial role in connecting America to the world and likewise played a central role in complicating the ideological underpinnings of the American Century abroad. In a field long dominated by an institutional focus on diplomatic exchanges, military interventions, and foreign trade, diplomatic history’s cultural turn has significantly shifted its gaze to the role of non-state actors—students, artists, missionaries, athletes, and scholars,  among others—to examine their impact on the United States’ connections with the world and their multivalent role in the creation of […]