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New Day Cafe: Iceland's 80th Birthday [1]

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Date: 2024-06-24  

JSTOR recently ran some cool info for the 80th anniversary of Iceland, celebrated this year.

“Eighty years ago, on June 17, 1944, Iceland became an independent republic, its economy and politics transformed by World War II. A lingering American presence and a rapidly developing Cold War emphasized Iceland’s strategic importance, moving the new nation from “just slightly off the edges of the map of the known world,” as Karen Oslund describes it, to the geopolitical center.

And from there, Iceland seems to have hurtled through history, experiencing the Cod Wars of 1958–59 and 1972–73, those multifaceted disputes that shaped global maritime and territorial law; the 1986 Reykjavík Summit, when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met to discuss nuclear arms control; the 1989 elections, when Icelandic voters put the first democratically elected female president in the world, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, in office; the 2008 financial crisis, during which Iceland’s entire banking system failed; the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, which shut down air traffic and economies across Europe; and the 2016 introduction of the Viking Clap to the world of football.

All of this is to say that Iceland has changed a great deal in the last eight decades. That this holds true of the natural—as well as the socio-political—landscape is demonstrated by three collections of photographs in the Fiske Icelandic Collection, shared by Cornell University Library via JSTOR.”

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