Aelwen D. Wetherby (2011-2012 Research Fellow) has recently published Private Aid, Political Activism: American Medical Relief to Spain and China, 1936-1949 (University of Missouri Press), a study of medical relief and U.S. foreign relations. Although serving vastly different peoples in strikingly distant landscapes, the three aid organizations focues on in this book illustrate a transition in how Americans responded to foreign conflict and how humanitarian aid was used as a political tool in Spain and China in the 1930s and 1940s. The story of these small and relatively unknown organizations can help refine the historical undertanding of the development of humanitarianism and the evolution of global citizenship in the twentieth century.
Aelwen is a Historical Research Fellow at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) through a fellowship administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. At DPAA, she conducts research into missing and unresolved casualties from the Asia and Pacific regions of World War II.