Beyond Versailles: Recovering the Voices of-Nurses in Post-World War I U.S.-European Relations.

From late 1918 to 1922, the American Red Cross (ARC) enlisted roughly six hundred American nurses and scores of female auxiliary staff to labor in post-World War I continental Europe, Russia, and the Near East, mostly stationed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkan states, and Siberia. The ARC nurses ran health clinics, made home visits, and opened nurse training schools. Close readings of letters, diaries, official reports, and published articles help recover the place of these women in postwar European history and the history of U.S. foreign relations. Their writings reveal their perceptions about eastern European and Russian politics and culture, their assumptions about the proper U.S. role in the region's affairs, and their efforts to influence popular U.S. discourse on these topics. This article argues that American nurses and support staff are central-yet neglected-players in the history of U.S.-European affairs. Through its bottom-up approach, it offers a more personal and intimate perspective on the history of U.S. international relations during this time.

Sauvons les Bébés: child health and U.S. humanitarian aid in the First World War era.

From 1917 to 1923, the American Red Cross organized an array of long-term child health projects in Europe as part of its larger wartime and post-war humanitarian efforts. Across the continent, the organization established child health clinics, better baby shows, playgrounds, fresh air camps, and courses for women on infant and child hygiene. Hundreds of U.S. doctors, nurses, and other child welfare professionals traveled to Europe to administer these programs. These activities call attention to American efforts to reform the health of European youth and, in so doing, to reshape European medicine and European society more broadly. Moreover, they suggest the importance of child-centered medical relief-and the history of medicine more broadly-to the history of U.S. foreign relations.

Nurses without borders: the history of nursing as U.S. international history.

During World War I and its aftermath, thousands of U.S. nurses put their domestic careers on hold to work overseas. Many volunteered in the wake of war and disaster. Others worked as instructors in nursing schools and as the staff of fledgling public health agencies. This article charts the international travels of four especially mobile nurses, whose globetrotting careers took them to Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. These women aspired to tackle world health issues, motivated by the conviction that the spread of U.S. professional nursing ideas stood to modernize the world. This article tells these nurses' stories and analyzes their ideologies of development and progress. In so doing, it demonstrates that professional women, working outside state channels, played a principal role in expanding U.S. influence in the world. Moreover, it makes the case for the centrality of nursing history to the history of U.S. foreign relations.