May 1st, 2012
In the last Washington History Seminar of the spring semester, “The United States, Burma, and the Cold War, 1948-1965,” Kenton Clymer will argue that after the Chinese Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949 (and even more so after the Korean War), United States foreign policy focused on stopping communist expansion into Southeast Asia. Americans are [...]
April 26th, 2012
How did it come to be that liberal internationalism (or “Wilsonianism”), which did so much to establish American preeminence in world affairs between 1945 and 2001, contributed so decisively to the recent decline of American power? The answer, Tony Smith argued in this presentation to the Washington History Seminar, lies in an analysis of the [...]
April 18th, 2012
In “At War with Israel? Anti-Zionism in East Germany and the West German Radical Left from the 1960s to the 1980s,” Jeffrey Herf argued that antagonism to Zionism was a protean and adaptable force in twentieth-century Germany. From drastically different political starting points, leaders of the Nazi regime, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and [...]
April 10th, 2012
The consequences of World War One were so momentous that it is sometimes assumed that there must be a single overarching explanation or a single culprit. The difficulty we have faced ever since the war ended is that historians cannot agree. Were the causes the alliances or the railway timetables? The German Chancellor or the [...]
April 5th, 2012
For 50 years, controversy has swirled over alleged U.S. Government responsibility for the assassination of the former Belgian Congo’s democratically elected Prime Minister. New analysis of documents, memoirs and interviews shows that the CIA Congo Station Chief was an influential participant in the Congo Government’s decision to “render” Lumumba to his bitter enemies in secessionist [...]
