Charlene Mires

Could you imagine your hometown as the Capital of the World? At the end of the Second World War, Americans in more than 200 cities and towns did exactly that. From big cities to small towns, from coast to coast and from North to South, civic boosters fought to attract the attention of the new United Nations and to offer their communities as the UN's future home.

Charlene Mires, an award-winning historian and journalist, wondered why. She followed the trail of the civic boosters of 1945-46 from New York to San Francisco, from Detroit to New Orleans, and to such seemingly out-of-the-way places as Tuskahoma, Oklahoma, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. The result is Capitals of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations (NYU Press, 2013).

Mires is also the author of Independence Hall in American Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), which will be issued in paperback in Fall 2013, and a co-author of the textbook The American People (Pearson). A resident of Philadelphia, she teaches history at Rutgers University-Camden and is director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities. She was a winner of the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award for Independence Hall in American Memory and a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting with other staff members of the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel in 1983.