Amanda Kay McVety – författare

Enlightened Aid is a unique history of foreign aid. It begins with the modern concept of progress in the Scottish Enlightenment, follows its development in nineteenth and early twentieth-century economics and anthropology, describes its transformation from a concept into a tool of foreign policy, and ends with the current debate about aid's utility. In his 1949 inaugural address, Harry Truman vowed to make the development of the underdeveloped world a central part of the United States government's national security agenda. This commitment became policy the following year with the creation of Point Four-America's first aid program to the developing world. Point Four technicians shared technology, know-how, and capital with thirty-four nations around the world. They taught classes on public health and irrigation, distributed chickens and vaccines, and helped build schools and water treatment facilities. They did all of it in the name of development, believing that economic progress would lead to social and political progress, which, in turn, would ensure that Point Four recipient nations would become prosperous democratic participants in the global community of nations. Point Four was a weapon in the fight against poverty, but it was also a weapon in the fight against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower reluctantly embraced it and Kennedy made it a central part of his international policy agenda, turning Truman's program into the United States Agency for International Development. Point Four had proven itself to be a useful tool of diplomacy, and subsequent administrations claimed it for themselves. None seemed overly worried that it had not also proven itself to be a particularly useful tool of development. Using Ethiopia as a case study, Enlightened Aid examines the struggle between foreign aid-for-diplomacy and foreign aid-for-development. Point Four's creators believed that aid could be both at the same time. The history of U.S. aid to Ethiopia suggests otherwise.

Amanda Kay McVety has written the first history of the international effort to eradicate rinderpest - a devastating cattle disease - which began in the 1940s and ended in 2011. Rinderpest is the only other disease besides smallpox to have been eradicated, but very few people in the United States know about it, because it did not infect humans and never broke out in North America. In other parts of the world, however, rinderpest was a serious economic and social burden and the struggle against it was a critical part of the effort to fight poverty and hunger globally. McVety follows the deployment of rinderpest vaccines around the globe, exploring the role of the environment in the understanding of development, internationalism, and national security. She expands the standard Cold War narratives to show how these concepts were framed not only by economic and political concerns, but also by biological ones.