During 1935, a transnational social movement coalesced to protest the Italian Fascist régime’s escalating threats to invade Ethiopia. Although the global antiwar movement failed to prevent war, it did, day by day through diffuse acts, transform the dynamics of global politics. Using a repertoire of informal political practices, including mass meetings, street fights, riots, and strikes, the movement enabled common people to directly assert themselves on a question of international affairs. This talk suggests a methodology for a rigorously transnational history capable of reshaping certain contours of international history.
Joseph Fronczak is a historian of the United States and the modern world, specializing in transnational and global history, the history of ideas, and the history of labor and capitalism. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin and he received his Ph.D. from Yale University, in 2014. The following year, he was a Mahindra Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University as part of the interdisciplinary Andrew H. Mellon Foundation Seminar on Violence and Non-violence. At Princeton, he has taught courses in global history and the history of U.S. foreign relations. He has also taught international history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. In the spring of 2016, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is currently writing Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Makings of a Global Left during the Great Depression, which traces the political struggle between fascism and antifascism as it played out in the streets, factories, marketplaces, and plantations of the Depression-era world.