Sarah Wambaugh and the Experimental Modernism of Interwar Plebiscites*

Sarah Wambaugh (1882-1955) was, and in many ways remains, the preeminent scholarly expert on the legal and political history of plebiscites, as well as their practical use as legal and political instruments in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet although once well-known to a wider public of historically minded legal and international thinkers and leading politicians, from James Brown Scott to Henry Morgenthau and Colonel House in America, she is today a mostly forgotten figure. So too, is her sense of the plebiscite as a tool of democratic possibility.