In July 1944, at a hotel in Bretton Woods, a mountain village in New Hampshire, negotiators designed a new global economic system with America at the heart. Currencies were pegged to the dollar, and the dollar to gold. An International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created. The 1930s had demonstrated the perils of protectionism and nationalism; what was needed, thought Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, was a new system to ensure prosperity and trade after the war. America would be the unquestioned leader.
The following April, delegates gathered in San Francisco to ratify a charter for the United Nations, with both America and the Soviet Union agreeing to participate.
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.