Book Review: Rosemary Righter, Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order (New York, NY: A Twentieth Century Fund Book, 1995, 421 pp., $29.95 hbk.)

The United Nations Information Office (UNIO), dating from 1942, holds the distinction of being both the first international agency of the embryonic UN network and the first to hold the United Nations label. Run from 1942 to 1945 from two offices in New York and London, these two were merged at the end of World War II to form the UN Information Organisation, and subsequently transformed into the Department of Public Information run from UN headquarters in New York. This article adds to the history of the UN by exploring the origins and development of the UNIO during 1940–41, when it was a British-led propaganda operation to gather US support for the allied war effort. It also examines the UNIO from the viewpoint of the power transition from Britain to the United States that took place during the war, and how this reflected a transition of internationalisms: from the British view of world order through benevolent imperialism to the American view of a progressive campaign for global development and human rights.

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Book Review: Chiang Pei-heng, Non-Governmental Organizations at the United Nations: Identity, Role and Function (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981, 355 pp., £29.00)

Millennium Journal of International Studies ◽

10.1177/03058298820110030709 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

pp. 268-270

Author(s):

Rolando Gaete

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

United Nations ◽

Governmental Organizations ◽

Non Governmental Organizations ◽

The United Nations ◽

And Function ◽

Role And Function

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Reviews

Contributions to the History of Concepts ◽

10.3167/choc.2013.080208 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 119-143

Author(s):

Silke Schwandt ◽

László Kontler ◽

Anu Korhonen ◽

Marie-Christine Boilard ◽

Johan Strang

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Human Rights ◽

United Nations ◽

Political Thought ◽

Cambridge University ◽

The United Nations ◽

Emotional Knowledge

Burkhard Hasebrink, Susanne Bernhardt, and Imke Früh, eds., Semantik der Gelassenheit: Generierung, Etablierung, Transformation [Semantics of detachment: Formation, establishment, transformation] (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2012), 319 pp.Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter, eds., Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 240 pp.Ute Frevert, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, Nina Verheyen, Benno Gammerl, Christian Bailey, and Margrit Pernau, Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische Spurensuche in der Moderne [Emotional knowledge: In search of lexical clues in modernity] (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2011), 364 pp.Julia Harfensteller, The United Nations and Peace: The Evolution of an Organizational Concept (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011), 355 pp.Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 351 pp.

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