dust cover information:
Brent Ashabranner was a foreign service officer with the agency for International Development in Nigeria in 1961, when Sargent Shriver asked him to develop the first Peace Corps program there. Later, he was transferred to India, where he became director of the Peace Corps program in late 1964. In 1966, he took over in Washington as director of all volunteer training, and the following year President Johnson named him Deputy Director of the Peace Corps---a position from which he resigned in 1969. He is now director of Asian programs for the Pathfinder Fund, a non-profit foundation concerned with family planning and population problems. Author of numerous books on American and African folklore and history, Mr. Ashabranner lives in Kensington, Maryland, with his wife and two daughters.
Thousands of young Americans answered John Kennedy's call to "ask what you can do for your country" by joining the agency he created for international service---the Peace Corps. In this book a former Deputy Director of the Peace Corps traces its growth from a vague campaign promise to an actual program with 15,000 volunteers serving in more than sixty countries.
Brent Ashabranner brings to A MOMENT IN HISTORY a deep love for the Peace Corps he helped develop, as well as profound insights into its shortcomings. He discusses the difficulties of training "B.A. generalists" to do very complicated jobs, and notes the troubles the Peace Corps brought on itself through almost uncontrolled expansion in its early years, a growth pattern that many volunteers referred to bitterly as "the numbers game." But he describes as well, with scores of examples, the Peace Corps' achievements. In short, he has written a candid, informative, and absorbing book about a truly unique institution---one that has succeeded in capturing the entire wood's imagination.
Table of Contents Part I: The First Decade of the Peace Corps
Chapter 1: The Peace Corps is Born: 1960-62
Shriver and the Beginning
"The Towering Task"
Executive Order 10924
A Separate Peace Corps
The Beginning OverseasChapter 2: The Year of the Volunteer: 1962
Arrival and Departure
A View from America
Volunteers Outside ClassroomsChapter 3: Growing Pains:; 1963-66
The Lost Leader
The Rise of the BA Generalist
Size and the Generalist
Community Development: Bottomless Pit for BA Generalists
Volunteers as Teachers: What Else Do You Do?
India: The Peace Corps World in One Country
Volunteer Life: Another View
A Note on Volunteer Health
The Peace Corps Gets a New LeaderChapter 4: A Step Toward Maturity: 1967-69
Wiggins Resigns
BA Generalists for Specialist Jobs
The Emergence of Training
The Peace Corps' Color Problem
A Smaller Peace Corps
The Shadow of VietnamChapter 5: Mr. Nixon's Peace Corps: 1969-70
Part II: The Peace Corps in a World at War
Chapter 6: The Peace Corps and Global Politics
Chapter 7: The Cold War
Chapter 8: Nationalism and Xenophobia
Chapter 9: The Returned Volunteer in a Divided America
Chapter; 10: A Brief Summing Up
We live at a very special moment in history .... Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are caught up in the adventures of asserting their independence and modernizing their old ways of life. These new nations need aid in loans and technical assistance just as we in the northern half of the world drew successively on one another's capital and know-how as we moved into industrialization and regular growth.
President John F. Kennedy
Special Message to the Congress
on Foreign Aid, March 22, 1961work under copyright
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