About this item
From 1944 to 1946, as the world pivoted from the Second World War to an unsteady peace, Americans in more than two hundred cities and towns mobilized to chase an implausible dream. The newly-created United Nations needed a meeting place, a central place for global diplomacya Capital of the World. But what would it look like, and where would it be Without invitation, civic boosters in every region of the United States leapt at the prospect of transforming their hometowns into the Capital of the World. The idea stirred in big citiesChicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and more. It fired imaginations in the Black Hills of South Dakota and in small towns from coast to coast. Meanwhile, within the United Nations the search for a headquarters site became a debacle that threatened to undermine the organization in its earliest days.
About the Author
Mires is also the author of Independence Hall in American Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) , which will be issued in paperback in Fall 2013, and a co-author of the textbook The American People (Pearson) . A resident of Philadelphia, she teaches history at Rutgers University-Camden and is director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities. She was a winner of the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award for Independence Hall in American Memory and a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting with other staff members of the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel in 1983.
