Franco-American emotional relations in the early Cold War 1948-1949

In 1949, the French people sent 52,000 objects to Americans in thanks for their

military aid in the Second World War, and their humanitarian aid ever since. The

gifts - vases, handkerchiefs, books, drawings, ceramic figurines, dolls, knitted baby

hats, silk wedding dresses, military medals, smoking pipes - were packed into 49

antique boxcars and arrived in New York City in February 1949. The Gratitude

Train, as it was known, drew in large crowds across the country, and celebrations

were organised across the nation as each state received a boxcar. Afterwards, the

gift objects were distributed to the public or preserved by state museums and

archives.

Through the little-known story of the Gratitude Train, Ludivine Broch re-thinks

transatlantic relations in the early Cold War period, 1946-49. An area of history

typically examined through the lens of political tension and economic

reconstruction, she asks what objects, emotions, and civilians can tell us about the

complexity of those immediate postwar years, and about the politics of gratitude

which helped shape the post-war world.

Ludivine Broch is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster. She

is the author of Ordinary Workers: French Railwaymen, Vichy and the Holocaust

(2016) which was published by Cambridge University Press and translated into

French with Tallandier. She edited a volume on France in the period of the World

Wars, has contributed chapters to edited volumes and written several articles on the

topic of rescue in the Holocaust, memory, railwaymen and most recently on

colonial resisters in Vichy France. Her work has appeared in Diaspora,

Contemporary European History and French Politics, Culture and Society. She is

currently working on a history of material culture, emotions and international

relations in postwar France which has been funded by the British Academy and

Leverhulme.

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University of Westminster - Regent Campus, Room RS152-153, 309 Regent Street and ONLINE (a Zoom link will be sent a few days before the event), London, United Kingdom

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