Emma McKone | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Emma McKone
Title: The United States Information Agency and Domestic Support for Public Diplomacy During the Cold War
Majors: History; Political Science
Minor: Museum Studies
Advisors: Madonna Hettinger, Jeffrey Lantis
During the Cold War, the United States Information Agency (USIA) carried out extensive American public diplomacy operations, a type of foreign policy that was designed to conduct diplomacy with other countries through communication to and with their publics. I am interested in what Americans thought of public diplomacy, especially how they perceived programs directed at foreign audiences. This independent study seeks to answer the question: How did American perception of a foreign threat through ideological congruency with USIA program content, urgency of foreign relations with the target country, and the USIA鈥檚 ability to mobilize American minds shape domestic support for the agency from 1959-1999? Using case studies of two USIA programs, the U.S. pavilion at the 1967 World鈥檚 Fair 鈥淓xpo 67鈥 in Montreal, Canada, and Radio Mart铆, a radio station developed in the 1980s to disseminate information to Cuba, this project performs an empirical analysis that examines domestic reactions to USIA programs through language and imagery from printed and archival sources to determine whether three factors of a perceived foreign threat 鈥 ideological congruency, urgency, and mobilization 鈥 contributed to support for the agency. This work examines the role that domestic publics play in shaping public diplomacy and what factors affect how they perceive it, a phenomenon that is under-represented in the literature of American foreign policy. Next steps for research include examining the role interest groups play in support for public diplomacy and how avenues of support have changed since the end of the Cold War.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
