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The post-war boom in international travel made tourism a question for international diplomacy. Focusingon the growth of bilateral tourism agreements during the Cold War, this article shows how the meaning oftourism was negotiated by and between governments on either side of the East–West divide. While previous research on tourism in the Cold War has focused on the threat tourist traffic posed to nationalsecurity in socialist states, the present study also considers the dilemmas it presented to liberal democracies. The article analyses the intersections of tourism with issues of foreign trade, cultural exchange andhuman contacts, which shaped the contestations over tourism throughout the Cold War.

This article demonstrates the value of “scalable reading” of historical travel guides, combining traditional close reading with computer-assisted distant reading. Aiming to scrutinize the persistence of older tourist attractions under communism, we analyse guidebooks intended for similar audiences but produced under different political regimes. More specifically, we compare three travel guides to the same geographical area produced between 1905 and 1959: one to communist cold war Czechoslovakia, one to democratic interwar Czechoslovakia, and one to the Habsburg-era Czech lands and Slovakia. We analyse the geographic distribution of attractions by geolocating the guidebook toponyms and visualizing them with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This distant reading is complemented with a hermeneutic analysis grounded in a close reading of the guidebook text. The combination of these approaches documents the similarities in the symbolic representation of the country’s attractions across political caesuras and provides a methodological template for future explorations of travel guides with historical GIS.

This essay presents the little-known story of the first westernpackage tour to the postwar Soviet Union along with neverbefore-seen photographs from the journey. It also introducesthe digitized Oddner archive, which contains an abundance ofvisual sources on the Soviet Union of 1955.

Contemporary media history is a rapidly growing field that extends far beyond traditional studies of technology or institutions such as radio, film, and television. This volume expands the scope further still to analyse ephemeral, mundane phenomena long overlooked by media historiography. In eight original essays, the volume demonstrates the strengths of a broad concept of the media. The first part centres on media systems and media events, with studies of spiritist séances, Gallup polls, the mediated persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the burial of a Swedish statesman in 1915. The second part focuses on media materialities and infrastructure such as art replicas, ring binders, tourist guidebooks, and media technology in the IKEA home. Aimed at students and academics alike, Expanding Media Historiesoffers new empirical research, which engages critically with key concepts in media history today.

This article analyses the transnational production processes of foreign correspondence in the Cold War. It examines the double role of foreign correspondents as reporters and Cold War political agents. Recent scholarship has explored the activities of Western correspondents reporting from the Communist world. Little is known, however, about Eastern bloc correspondents in the West. Drawing on the rarely studied files on East German foreign correspondents held by the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, the article problematizes the image of GDR journalists as obedient intelligence officers and highlights the dilemmas of journalists deployed to defend national interests. Focusing on the Nordic countries in the mid1970s, the article provides detailed insights into the politics and practices of East German foreign correspondence before the digital revolution. The article thus shows the benefits of going beyond the traditional focus on media content to analyse the daily practices as well as the political and symbolic significance of journalism. It contributes to the growing historical research on foreign correspondents and the media in East Germany and beyond.