Losing hearts and minds : American-Iranian relations and international education during the Cold War

__Losing Hearts and Minds__ analyzes the relationship between the United States, Iran, and their citizens between the Second World War and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Rather than a narrow focus on the security and economic considerations of U.S. policymakers, the book explores how the educational networks that brought Iranian students to the United States helped define the contours of the binational relationship during the Cold War era. The United States aimed to create a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socio-economic development. However, the educational networks that connected the United States and Iran also created a transnational community of Iranian students and American progressives that engaged with the language of rights to contest U.S. support for the shah, elevate human rights thinking over modernization theory in the international community, and contribute in their own way to the Iranian Revolution.

Matthew K. Shannon provides readers with a reminder of a brief and congenial phase of the relationship between the United States and Iran. In Losing Hearts and Minds, Shannon tells the story of an influx of Iranian students to American college campuses between 1950 and 1979 that globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and produced alliances between Iranian youths and progressive Americans.

Losing Hearts and Minds is a narrative rife with historical ironies. Because of its superpower competition with the USSR, the U.S. government worked with nongovernmental organizations to create the means for Iranians to train and study in the United States. The stated goal of this initiative was to establish a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socioeconomic development. Despite these goals, Shannon locates the incubation of at least one possible version of the Iranian Revolution on American college campuses, which provided a space for a large and vocal community of dissident Iranian students to organize against the Pahlavi regime and earn the support of empathetic Americans. Together they rejected the Shah’s authoritarian model of development and called for civil and political rights in Iran, giving unwitting support to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Introduction : Education Between Iran And The West -- The Foundation : Education, Development, And The Tenuous Path Of The 1950s -- The Window : Negotiating Modernization And Rights During The Kennedy Era -- The Youth : Student Internationalism During The Global 1960s -- The Boom : America's Iran In The 1970s -- The Reckoning : Human Rights, Iran, And The World -- Conclusion : The Internationalisms Of The Iranian Revolution. Matthew K. Shannon. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Mode Of Access: World Wide Web.