Coffee will be served at 3:30pm. The event will start at 3:45pm followed by a reception with discussion participants.
Program
Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral, built global solidarity networks to support their military and social challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress historic inequalities between Global North and South.
Drawing on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French, and Afrikaans, R. Joseph Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates. Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976, this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford’s anti-communist intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also fueling a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign policy that defined debates over the country’s proper role in the Global South into the 1990s.
Discussants will provide brief commentary on the book.
Chaired by Lydia Walker
Speaker
Joe Parrott is an historian of transnational affairs, international diplomacy, and U.S. politics. His work considers two main themes: the relationship between the Cold War and decolonization (especially in Africa), and how global affairs influenced competing definitions of the U.S. international mission after 1945. He also studies congressional influence on foreign policy, the practice of oral history, and how media (comics, posters, film, etc.) communicate political messages within popular culture and as propaganda.
He earlier co-edited The Tricontinental Revolution with Mark Atwood Lawrence (Cambridge, 2022, Open Access), a major reassessment of the global rise and impact of the militant strand of Third World solidarity that defined the 1960s and 1970s as decades of rebellion. Tricontinentalism encouraged marginalized states and non-state actors from North Vietnam through South Africa to New York City to mount radical challenges to the United States as Cold War interventions highlighted the limits of decolonization and inspired expansive visions of self-determination.
Joe contributes to various media ranging from historical journals to podcasts. Highlights of his academic scholarship include an overview of relations between the United States and Southern Africa for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia; an open-access chapter on how the 1961 invasions of Goa and Angola reshaped United Nations politics; and an article on the US-Mozambican film A Luta Continua, which he helped digitize. Public History efforts include a digital exhibit with WGBH on 1970s Pan-Africanism in Boston, a discussion of the United States and Decolonization on the 15 Minute History podcast, commentary on depictions of the Cold War and Angola in the video game Black Ops II for History Respawned, and a brief history of Captain America for OSU’s Origins.
Joe is currently working on two projects. The first considers transnational solidarity with the minority governments of southern Africa. The second examines how depictions of threat and heroism in U.S. media ranging from comics to video games reflected and reiterated core assumptions about foreign policy during the "American Century."
Before coming to Ohio State, Joe taught at Yale University and the University of Texas, where he received his PhD in History and was involved with the Clements Center for National Security and Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He previously earned a Master of Public Policy and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia and worked at the Miller Center of Public Affairs.
About the International History Seminar
If you are interested in attending this semester’s events and joining the International History Seminar, please send an email confirming your interest to the Hayes Chair Graduate Research Associate, Ian Gammon, at hayeschairgra@osu.edu, and you will be included on the mailing list going forward. Materials will only be pre-circulated to people on the mailing list.
