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If surfing had become thoroughly Americanized by the first few decades of the twentieth century—though always, as Isaiah Helekunihi Walker has shown, in the context of ongoing resistance from the Hawaiian people—Americans increasingly sought to make it global.9 Ironically enough, it was two Hawaiian men, the legendary lifeguard George Freeth and the five-time Olympic medalist Duke Kahanamoku, who perhaps most famously helped plant the roots of global surf culture. But they were not alone. By the 1950s and 1960s, thriving communities of surfers could be found not only in the United States but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, France, and Great Britain. Surfing, moreover, entered the commercial and political mainstream. Hollywood developed a fascination with Southern California beach culture, churning out such motion pictures as the Gidget series and the popular comedies of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, while those charged with crafting U.S. foreign policy gave the surfing lifestyle a bit part in official Cold War cultural diplomacy.

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