Product details
- ISBN 9781041198239
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Greece at the Turning Point: Remembrances of US Foreign Service Families Living and Working in Postwar Greece is a collection of previously unpublished personal memoirs and extracts from private letters, which provides astonishing insight into the experiences of American experts tasked with implementing the Marshall Plan in Greece. Members of the American aid mission, a key division of the larger Marshall Plan across Europe, ushered the United States into its new role as a global superpower. They encountered war-torn Greece at a turning point and worked together to facilitate the reconstruction of a society devastated by the Axis Occupation of World War II and the Greek Civil War. Alongside the official mission, a quieter but equally demanding project unfolded: The work of the American spouses who built households amid scarcity and uncertainty.
Marking the 80th anniversary of the Marshall Plan and coinciding with the contemporary retraction of US international aid programs, this collection offers a fresh, human-scale perspective on one of the Cold War’s most emblematic development efforts. The Greek experience exposes the frictions at the heart of such initiatives—between technical expertise and local knowledge, ambition and restraint, power and partnership—revealing how global policy was lived, negotiated, and reshaped in the intimacy of daily life.
This book will engage policymakers as well as scholars and students of Cold War history and ideology, US foreign aid, diplomacy and memoir studies, and twentieth-century Greece.
Harrison Blackman is a writer based in Los Angeles. A former Fulbright scholar to Cyprus, Harrison earned a BA in history at Princeton before earning his MFA in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The California Post, The Santa Fe New Mexican, Literary Hub, Princeton Alumni Weekly, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Journal of Modern Greek Studies. He is the author of Someone Will Remember Us: A Novella (2027) and has contributed to The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis (2024) and Region (2023).
Gonda Van Steen holds the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in the Department of Classics at King’s College London, UK, where she also directs the Centre for Hellenic Studies. She is the author of six books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece (2000); Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire (2010); Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands (2011); Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (2015); and Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece (2019). Gonda edited The Battle for Bodies, Hearts and Minds in Postwar Greece: Social Worker Charles Schermerhorn in Thessaloniki, 1946-1951 (2024) and co-edited The War for Anatolia and the Remaking of International Order: Greece, Turkey and the End of the First World War (2026).
