History
In 1956, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sought diplomatic alternatives to the wars he witnessed as a soldier, general and Allied Commander. On September 11, 1956, he called a White House conference of 100 top American leaders, who joined him in creating the People to People initiative, focused on creating cultural exchange programs. The idea for this conference came after a Geneva summit, where Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev expressed enthusiasm for exchange programs as a means to ease Cold War tensions. Participants in this conference included Joyce Hall, comedian Bob Hope, and Walt Disney, who became one of the founding directors of People to People and later drew inspiration from the initiative to create the "It's a Small World" attraction in 1964.
The program was originally sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency, a branch of the Federal Government. In 1961, Eisenhower decided that it should be preserved by private citizens and asked Joyce Hall, founder of Hallmark Cards, to facilitate the privatization. In 1962, the first delegation of university students traveled overseas and stayed with families all over Europe. The first Student Ambassador Program was organized in 1962, with regular programs beginning in 1967. Until expansion in the 1980s, the organization only sent a few hundred students abroad each year. In 2002, People to People International granted a license to operate student programs under the People to People Student Ambassador Program name to Ambassadors Group, which had been formed as a separate company out of the Ambassadors Education Group.
Read more about this topic: People To People Student Ambassador Program
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)