Postwar Era Research Articles

Note from the Editors

Previous article FreeNote from the EditorsStephen Brain, Mark D. Hersey, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyreStephen Brain Search for more articles by this author , Mark D. Hersey Search for more articles by this author , and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWhile preparing to compose these notes from the editors, we’ve come to think of them as postcards to the future. Returning from the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Boston, we mused about whether readers receiving this issue in July would recall the environmentally themed items in the news from recent months. Will February’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and the questions it raised about safe building codes in seismically active areas, have receded completely from the public memory? Did the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, spur a sustained conversation about the transport of toxic chemicals and the related environmental justice issues? Have the atmospheric rivers that recently filled California’s reservoirs put an end, however temporary, to thoroughgoing evaluations of western water usage? Events like these, the subjects of tomorrow’s environmental history dissertations, monographs, and articles, rise and fall so quickly in the public consciousness that they can seem ephemeral, evanescent. Yet it is precisely this fleeting quality of the daily news that makes the environmental historian’s vocation all the more important: to revisit key moments from the past, to track the changing relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, and to raise objections when that relationship merits critique.The articles in the July 2023 issue do precisely this, rescuing from obscurity certain historical episodes—some recent, others remote—and correcting scholarly misperceptions about the role that the natural world has played in human affairs, and vice versa. The Reflection essay by the chief historian of the United States Forest Service, Lincoln Bramwell, about the 2018 Camp Fire in California, places in deeper context the apparent rise of catastrophic forest fires in the twenty-first century, arguing that ill-advised human settlement patterns and blithe attitudes about fire have changed more than the climate or other pyrogenic conditions. Hayley Negrin’s essay about colonial diplomacy underscores how important interaction with the nonhuman world was for Indigenous communities by examining the treaties negotiated by the Powhatan leader Cockacoeske and foregrounding the environmental relationships that she negotiated into agreements with the English. Emma Schroeder’s contribution to the issue explores the intersection of gender equity and environmental activism, demonstrating how tightly bound the two have been in the postwar era. And finally, Joanna Linzer’s piece explores industrial pollution in early modern Japan, defying scholarly expectations about class conflict and environmental justice, and revealing that simple formulae about environmental harm moving downhill and toward the less privileged do not necessarily apply in all cases.Like the articles, the book reviews in this issue provoke readers to reassess popular environmentalist arguments. Reviewers ask us to reevaluate what we think we know about issues ranging from plastics pollution to climate migration; from the environmental impact of work, coercion, and slavery to the politics of public land stewardship. Emphasizing the global nature of the field, reviewers evaluate non-English works that synthesize the environmental histories of Finland and Russia for our English-speaking readership.We hope that this postcard to the future finds our readers well, and as always, we are pleased to have such devoted correspondents. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ahead of Print Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 55Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725397 Views: 55Total views on this site HistoryPublished online May 04, 2023 © 2023 Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Technopolitical Construction of a River Basin: Turkey’s Encounters and Adventures with the “TVA Idea”

In the postwar era, the preferred approach to harnessing rivers was through integrated river basin planning (IRBP), which required a holistic focus on the river basin for multipurpose development. While the river basin is taken for granted as the natural unit of development in the definitions of the IRBP concept, this article problematizes the river basin idea and reveals the politics behind what has been deemed natural (scientific), with a specific focus on Turkey’s experience with IRBP. It explores geopolitical and national motivations and challenges in the context of the scaling of the Euphrates-Tigris basin. By approaching IRBP as a process of scale-making, it draws from discussions of the politics of scale in the literature on political ecology, but also incorporates a historical dimension to these discussions with attention to the political and environmental histories of Southeastern Turkey, which became home to Turkey’s first and most extensive IRBP project, the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP).The article stretches the chronological boundaries of GAP to the decades prior to the 1970s, when the project was initiated, by analyzing archival materials, including the proceedings of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, the archives of a daily newspaper, and the expert reports on GAP. The analysis highlights the politics of scale as a powerful constituent of the politics of technological development, and shows the significance of historical analysis to delineate the politics of river basin planning into different layers, including the level of geopolitics, territorial disputes, and international conflicts.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney (review)

Reviewed by: Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney Nancy Janovicek Campbell, Lara, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, eds.–Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. 324 p. Feeling Feminism is a fascinating collection of essays about second-wave feminist activism in Canada because it centres the very thing that has been used to justify women’s exclusion from politics for centuries: emotion. Drawing on feminist political theory that rejects the dichotomy of emotional feminine reaction and rational masculine reason, the editors explain that the essays are not about ‘emotional’ women but, rather how women “used emotion for control” (p. 18). Informed by affect theory and the history of emotion, the essays examine diverse organizations and actions to demonstrate how women mobilized their emotions to challenge gendered inequalities. Following critical race theorists (in particular bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patrician Hill Collins, and Gloria Anduzula), the essays demonstrate that emotions can be productive because they create activist communities based on shared experiences. But emotional bonds among activists can also be exclusionary; to be a useful lens for analysis, historians must be aware of how emotions are shaped by hierarchies of power. The essays are attentive to how bonds of connectedness forged in passionate activism often shame those who do not meet—or may reject—activists’ ideals and imaginations of equality. [End Page 200] A central theme of the book is that emotions are both individual and public. Contributions by Whitney Wood and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh use letters to examine women’s emotional responses to maternal health and potential threats to their children’s health. Drawing from her research on pain in childbirth, Wood examines letters mothers wrote to Grantly Dick-Read, who promoted “natural childbirth” to counter the medicalization of childbirth in the postwar era. Women expressed pride that they had endured the pain of childbirth, shame if they did not, and anger if they believed that unwanted medical intervention had robbed them of the experience. Krasnick Warsh uses mothers’ “fan mail” to Frances Oldham Kelsey thanking her for preventing thalidomide from being approved in the United States. She argues letters to well-known people is a unique epistolary form because the intent is to direct action. Individual letters produced collective anger about male control over childbirth and the threat to children’s health fuelled the women’s health movement. Activism entails a range of emotions, often simultaneously, because of the various gendered and racialized life experiences of organizers. Essays by Kevin Brushett and Josette Brun et al. examine women working in male-dominated spaces. Using the Company of Young Canadians (CYC) to reassess the origins of the second wave in the New Left, Brushett argues that the burnout and isolation that CYC women experienced informed their feminist practice of understanding the connections between the personal and the political. Disempowerment in a male-dominated environment helped them envision a different way of doing politics based in developing a nurturing community. Using the 1981 Women’s Journalists’ Conference in Quebec, Josette Brun, Laurie Leplanche, and Sophie Doucet examine the emotional tension in the discussions about succeeding in a male-dominated profession based on competitiveness while trying to adapt the profession to accommodate women’s familial responsibilities. While proud of their accomplishments, women at the conference also talked about the shame, guilt, and embarrassment caused by time away from children. Alienation and isolation were common experiences in women-only groups, too. Funké Aladejebi examines black teachers’ anger and frustration in the Federation of Women Teachers’ Association of Ontario. Her analysis of white women’s inability to hear black women’s discussions of racism within the profession demonstrates how hierarchies of emotions could exist within a group and also for the need to centre race in affect theory. Sarah Nickel draws on Dian Million’s theorization of “felt knowledge” to examine a range of emotional responses in British Columbia Indigenous women’s activism and argues that “political work is emotional in nature, just as emotions are, in fact, labour” (p. 74). Activists mobilized mourning, exhaustion, and loss to make critical interventions into the colonial legal...

When Berle and Galbraith Revived Political Economy: A Study of Cross-Fertilization (1933–67)

AbstractThis article reconstructs the intellectual cross-fertilization between Adolf Berle Jr. (1895–1971) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) to account for their institutionalist challenge to “conventional economics” that revived political economy. It goes back to the origins of The Modern Corporation and Private Property before analyzing Berle and Galbraith's answers to a set of fundamental questions. What is the nature of modern competition? What is the nature of the modern corporation? What is the role of the state? And how should American liberalism be reinvented to cope with the social issues raised by the transformation of American capitalism in the postwar era? Their answers to these questions reveal the deep affinities between the theoretical and political dimensions of their work. This research contributes, then, to the history of the institutionalist movement in the postwar period and its affinities with qualitative liberalism.

Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein

Reviewed by: Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein Marni Davis Allison E. Schottenstein. Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2021. 415 pp. During the postwar era, a significant proportion of whites who participated in civil rights actions and organizations were American Jews of European descent. This phenomenon has given rise to popular assumptions of a civil rights–era political alliance—a “golden age” of Black-Jewish relations, inspired by a shared history of marginalization and common liberal political leanings. But such notions beg for closer and more critical examination. The history of interactions between Blacks and Jews in the United States has been shaped by immense socioeconomic disparities that have influenced their conceptions of one another, often generating tensions between them, since the abolition of slavery. Black Americans and white American Jews have also disagreed on political issues like immigration, urban renewal, and Zionism, which unsettles the idea of an uncomplicated Black-Jewish coalition. Indeed, the very concept of “Black-Jewish relations” might conceal more than it illuminates, as it suggests an inherent distinction between the two categories and overlooks the historical presence of individuals and communities who identified as both. But any historical analysis of this subject should also include consideration of geographic region. Most historical studies of Blacks and Jews have focused on the cities of the American North and Midwest. In Changing Perspectives, Allison E. Schottenstein looks south, applying the framework of Black-Jewish relations to the history of Houston, Texas, in the twentieth century. Today the most enthnoracially diverse city in the South, Houston has been a central player in the Sunbelt’s postwar economic growth. But Jim Crow was a totalizing force there midcentury, as it was throughout the region, and Black Houstonians were consistently obstructed from sharing the benefits of the city’s growth. Houston’s small Jewish population, on the other hand, found general social acceptance and significant upward mobility throughout the Jim Crow era—in no small measure because they were of European origin, and could avail themselves of neighborhoods, schools, and other civic amenities limited to whites. Still, many Jews feared that their acceptance was provisional, their status vulnerable; for this reason, or perhaps because they simply accepted the racial hierarchy from which they benefited, the Jews of Houston were peripheral players in the city’s civil rights movement. [End Page 205] With a focus on the actions of communal leadership and elected officials, Schottenstein’s community-study approach provides a detailed top-down account of Jewish Houston’s internal discourse on race and politics. (Her study of the city’s African American leadership and institutions is far less thorough and consistent.) A few of Houston’s Jewish leaders had expressed support for racial desegregation in schools and other public accommodations, even before Brown v. Board of Education, and were enthusiastic participants in municipal organizations that advocated interracial cooperation. But the larger community’s approach to the subject had been “to take a back seat” in the movement proper, to “leave the vocal roles to others” (103). The principal reason for their unwillingness to take a public stand on the matter, Schottenstein contends, was unease. Houston’s Jews encountered social antisemitism in the form of restrictive covenants and exclusionary elite country clubs. In moments of local anti-Communist fervor, they were blamed for “creeping socialism” because of Jewish participation in liberal interracial organizations. Occasionally, more vicious and frightening forms of antisemitism surfaced, as when George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party founder who blamed Jewish Communists for racial integration, came to town. They also feared violence, and not without cause; in early 1960—a few years after a rash of synagogue bombings throughout the Southeast—Houston’s Congregation Emanu El suffered a bomb threat, and a swastika was graffitied on a nearby Jewish-owned grocery. Anxious that their status and their physical safety were conditioned on their willingness to abet white supremacy, Houston’s Jewish leadership, with a few exceptions, tended toward silence. They distanced themselves from those who spoke out, took a gradualist approach to the desegregation...

Animalistic Attributes to Humans in the Greek Post-war Prose: From Realism to Modernism

This article analyzes the reasons, the means and the potential of using animalistic characteristics in the description of humans in Greek post-war prose (G.P-W.P). It deploys several seminal works of the Greek writers Nikos Kasdaglis, Alexandros Kotzias and Spyros Plaskovitis using specific criteria for their selection. The analysis of the works reveals that the animalistic motif is used to show the dehumanization of humans, caused by the extreme social conditions during World War II and the post-war era, which marked this generation of writers, and its allegorical dimension.

Performing “Bifurcated Homelands”: Touring the Chinese Diasporas in Bangkok and Singapore, 1945-1960s

From the end of the Second World War to the Cold War era, Chinese theatre troupes and performers endorsed by “bifurcated homelands” – the Republic of China (ROC) in Taipei and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing – travelled to Southeast Asia to battle for the hearts and minds of the Chinese diaspora through one potent means: dance, which has so far not garnered the attention it deserves. This article locates the performative linkages in two scenarios: (1) the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated theatre troupe Zhong Yi and its diasporic tours in Singapore and Bangkok in the immediate postwar era; (2) the experiences of the Taiwanese folk dancer Lee Shu Fen and her dancing legacy in Southeast Asia during the Cold War era. Situated in the burgeoning field of the “Chinese cultural Cold War,” this article argues for a “performative” angle that examines both the tours and the performing arts in the context of the shifting power realignment as a manifestation of Cold War geopolitics in Asia. While stressing the competing nature of the idea of “bifurcation,” this article goes further to prove the mutual influences and mirroring effects in the imaginings of Chineseness by both the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Interview with Professor Kalevi Holsti: Brief Reflections on the Discipline of International Relations and World Problems

The long-run trend in the decline of interstate war is notable. Once a common feature of all civilizations and geographical areas, the world since 1945 has featured a very low probability that two or more states would resolve their conflicting interests by armed conflict. The probability that in any given year war between states will occur has declined to less than one percent. This pattern contrasts with the prevalence of domestic violence since 1945. Wars within states have made up the vast majority of armed conflicts, but our models of International Politics have little to say about them. But the benign International situation of the post Cold War era has begun to crumble. The Russian attack on the Ukraine, tensions over Taiwan, the lapse of arms control agreements, the arms build-up of China and India are indicators of increased dangers and greater probabilities of armed conflicts between states. Cyber wars, as between Israel and Iran, have also appeared. The certainties of the Cold War era have been replaced by uncertainties and higher risks.

Life and work between home and “homeland”: a narrative inquiry of transnational Chinese adoptees’ identity negotiations across time and space

Abstract Unlike Korean or Vietnamese adoptees who came to the U.S. during the postwar era, Chinese adoptees are mostly abandoned female infants under China’s one-child policy from 1980 through 2015. Little work has documented Chinese adoptees’ identity (trans)formation across time and space. This study examines how three Chinese adoptees from the U.S. who chose to go to Taiwan to teach English make sense of their Chinese heritages and their lives in and out of Asia. Drawing on the frameworks of positioning and chronotopic identities, this cross-sectional, multiple case study documents the participants’ identity (trans)formations through their narratives on their moves across the U.S., China, and Taiwan during different points of their lives. Our adoptee participants’ home and work experiences over time represent diverse pathways for their negotiations of various aspects of their identities – linguistic, cultural, Chinese, American, Asian American, and adoptee – in their life trajectories transnationally. Their diverse experiences complicate current understandings of adoptee identities within and across the adoptive home, the “homeland” of their birth places, and beyond.

“You'll Never Walk Alone”: School Crossing Guard Associations and Labor Feminism in the Postwar United States

Abstract In the years immediately following World War II, cities and townships across the United States implemented public safety programs to oversee road crossing for children outside schools. The crossing guards assigned to coordinate safe passage at busy intersections were primarily women and, as part-time workers, were a distinct sector of an expanding public sector workforce. This article highlights the origins of these public safety initiatives and how crossing guards formed associations in the 1950s and 1960s to secure economic improvements. These independent organizations articulated an important variant of labor feminism in the early postwar era, and attention to the agendas put forward by these women opens new insight into this aspect of working-class activism. Into the 1970s, many guard associations merged with AFL-CIO unions, especially the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), becoming a catalyst for a range of programs that prioritized the needs of working women in collective bargaining agreements. The article concludes with an overview of the issues crossing guards and their organizations face in an age of increasing austerity in the new century.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Jürgen Habermas and the Public Intellectual in Modern Democratic Life

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Jürgen Habermas and the Public Intellectual in Modern Democratic Life

Bastard Theatres and Human Dregs: Cultures of Illegitimacy on 42nd Street

This article uses newspaper and trade press archives to chart the evolution of the phrase ‘legitimate theatre’ in relation to theatres on New York’s 42nd Street that were built by 1920 and converted to moving pictures by the early 1940s. Various surrounding industrial and social tensions – the transition from live performance to movies, the derided status of exploitation and adult films, the perceived degradation of the area in the post-war era, and the drive for its wholesale redevelopment that gathered pace in the 1970s – are examined. The shifting implications of the term ‘legitimate theatre’ in this context, from an established industry descriptor to a means of moral judgement on these venues’ output and audiences, are thereby shown to illuminate the broader cultural and economic histories of the 42nd Street area, revealing a process of differentiation and exclusion from perceptions of mainstream popular culture that would eventually become weaponised to justify the demolition of the area for the purposes of corporate capital.

Historic missed opportunities and prospects for renewal: Turkey-EU relations in a post-Western order

ABSTRACT Turkish-European Union (EU) relations in the broader context of the transatlantic alliance have been one of the defining features of Turkish foreign policy in the post-war era. The article identifies elements of the cyclical nature of the relationship and missed opportunities, notably in the 1970s and the early 2000s, which have been costly both to Turkey and the EU. Domestic politics and crises both in Turkey and the EU have played an important role in shaping the long-term dynamics of this complex and mutually important relationship. The emerging post-Western order has contributed to the decline and recent stalemate in Turkey-EU relations. The article probes into the possibilities of a revival in Turkey-EU relations and consider whether the Russian war against Ukraine will create a new opportunity for a revival of the relationship as part of a new wave of enlargement, which was not on the agenda previously.

What is good drinking water? 41 Years of risk perception on water quality in the vicinity of the Nuclear Research Centre Karlsruhe, 1956–1997

AbstractThis article traces the historical evolution of risk perception around the Nuclear Research Centre Karlsruhe, Germany, from 1956 to 1997. It does so by targeting the evolution of water‐related risks. Federal hopes in the postwar era that the Nuclear Research Centre would bring progress and prosperity clashed with local values and local perception of nuclear engineering as dangerous to health and the environment. Various conflicts arose and opponents made use of their past lived‐knowledge to foster their arguments against future decision‐making, mobilizing stories from the past to shape the future. The conflict culminated in the 1990s, when the municipality decided to lease the Centre's waterworks for future drinking water supply. The main argument of the article is that even though the public discourse shifted over the years from water pollution toward greater risks such as nuclear meltdowns, the local risk perception stayed with the water‐related risks. The article shows how the locals perceived and narrated their risk perception against the decision‐making of authorities as well as against the reasoning of scientists and experts.

Stan Hochman, Unfiltered: 50 Years of Wit and Wisdom from the Groundbreaking Sportswriter

Stan Hochman, Unfiltered: 50 Years of Wit and Wisdom from the Groundbreaking Sportswriter

Japan-Iran relations in the post-war era: The Middle Eastern dilemma for Japan

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran did not change its policy towards Japan, which was not only perceived separately from the West, but was also a major customer of its raw resources and a potential economic donor. In turn, Japan had to pursue the policy of unstable balancing towards Iran, by coordinating its Middle Eastern policy with its strategic ally, the United States, and simultaneously trying to preserve close ties with Iran, which were important from the point of view of maintaining energy security. The article shows how Japan tried to maneuver between these two countries: it took steps to realize large-scale economic projects in Iran’s energy sector, to limit sanctions, which were minimal on its side, etc., and simultaneously participated in the anti-Iran campaign pursued by Western countries under the pressure of the US, or under the influence of major crises in the region (for example, the Iran-Iraq War). Japan continues to face this “Middle Eastern dilemma” in present times as well. It could partly have been solved by the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program in 2015, were it not for the fact that, two years later, under the US administration of Donald Trump, the US-Iran relations worsened significantly. Nevertheless, in this period, Japan successfully tried its mediatory potential, making use of its good relations with both parties of the conflict: on the one hand, it refused to participate in the US operation in the Strait of Hormuz, on the other, it halted the unfreezing of Iran’s funds in its banks, which had been blocked after the introduction of sanctions by the US administration of Donald Trump. Recently, the activization of China in the region has become a factor of risk for Japan’s Middle Eastern policy, as China tries to use the weaking positions of the US and to occupy the vacuum that was left in its wake, which is illustrated by the signing of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement between Beijing and Tehran in March 2021. This forces Japan to deliberately strengthen its positions and expand its presence in Iran. It appears that Japan’s approaches to solving the “Middle Eastern dilemma” deserve special attention in the future as well.

From Hilltop Landmarks to Suburban Place Makers: Brisbane’s Post-War Religious Territories and Communities

ABSTRACT This paper examines the shifting urban and architectural manifestations of Christian churches built in twentieth century Brisbane, the capital of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia. In doing so, it considers how religious communities contributed to the formation of Brisbane’s modern cityscape. Based on texts published in the journals of Brisbane’s four largest Christian denominations, a chronological mapping of the development of the city’s religious territories from 1945 to 1977, and an architectural analysis of a select number of Brisbane churches, this paper demonstrates how during the post-war era Brisbane’s Churches shifted their urban planning approach from representational hilltop landmarks to community centres, and their architectural manifestation from grand (modern) monuments to suburban place makers. It also discusses what urban and community building strategies were pursued in this multi-denominational religious territory, and how this affected church architecture. While comparable shifts did occur elsewhere, both abroad and interstate, the paper argues that Brisbane, with its hilly topography, property-oriented religious leaders, and lack of government-funded community infrastructures, heightened opportunities for the Churches to use modern architecture and urban planning to express their faith and social values.

Rethinking the history of education: considerations for a new social history of education

ABSTRACT In the 2020s, there are both societal and academic reasons to reflect on the field of history of education. In this article, we focus on the issue of the social, which remains central to the field as we acknowledge that society shapes education and education shapes society. By exploring the social on theoretical, methodological and broader societal levels, we provide suggestions for how we can rethink the field of educational history in the future. In line with a postmodern emphasis on particularity and complexity, we do not present any simple or general answers. We do not promote a return to the social history accounts of the post-war era and its emphasis on social class, economic development and the state. Instead, we encourage efforts to rethink the terms social and society on the basis of both classic social history accounts and the lessons learned from new cultural history of education. What would a new social history of education look like in the twenty-first century, and how can we write updated histories on education and society today?

Beyond Peace and Security: The UN Transition Assistance Group in Namibia and its Importance for Contemporary Constitution-Making

In her article “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-war Inheritance,” Anna Saunders focuses on constitution-making as an international practice of the past three decades and suggests that its “epistemic boundaries”—namely, the separation between the formal and material dimensions of constitution-making and the latter's exclusion from contemporary constitution-making assistance—were primarily established by scholarly work on constitution-making in the post-war era. Saunders explicitly acknowledges that her account is not the only possible history of constitution-making assistance. In this essay, I add a different layer to that history, focusing on the UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia. UNTAG is often considered the first instance of international constitution-making assistance, a practice that is generally understood to have emerged after the end of the Cold War. However, UNTAG's mandate, including its constitution-making assistance component, was in fact conceived many years before its actual deployment, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. The essay shows that UN constitution-making assistance pre-dates the end of the Cold War and is linked to UN efforts to forge modern nation-states in the context of decolonization. I argue that this early case of constitution-making practice was an important blueprint for further iterations of international constitution-making assistance, not least because of the continuous involvement of individual international civil servants. Lastly, the case of Namibia is significantly different from the cases that inspired scholarly work in the post-war era, and we might ask to what extent the post-war inheritance affected this early international practice. I end with a brief reflection on Saunders's call to address the material dimension of constitution-making and caution against overemphasizing substantive questions in constitution-making assistance.