Intersections (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.

In the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube-Europe's second longest river-hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river's dynamics, as did new activities related to trade, industrialization, sanitation, recreation, and agriculture. Taking a unique environmental perspective to explore questions of transnational solidarity and identity, The Danube Empire argues that the Danube River served as both a catalyst and a tool for institution building. Drawing on primary sources in German and Hungarian, Robert Shields Mevissen reconstructs how various communities throughout the empire viewed and shaped river engineering works as a means to promote material wellbeing and economic vitality. As they negotiated their conflicting and overlapping interests, they engaged government at all levels, from the imperial to the local, through democratic and civic avenues. Offering new insights into the state's normative development and robust civil society, Mevissen shows how an empire, in reshaping a river, reshaped itself.