National History Center

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 familiar with this effort in Indochina. But early in the Cold War the United States viewed newly independent Burma as nearly as important as Vietnam. Because Burma shared a long border with China and chose a strictly neutral international stance, the U.S.-Burma relationship was fascinating, delicate, and complex.

Kenton Clymer, a fellow at the Wilson Center, is Distinguished Research Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. His two-volume history of U.S.-Cambodia relations won the Ferrell Prize in 2005 from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His other books are about John Hay, Protestant missionaries in the Philippines, and American interest in India’s independence. He is currently writing a history of U.S. relations with Burma.

The seminar will meet at 4 p.m. in the Woodrow Wilson Center’s 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room in the Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop. Reservations are requested because of limited seating. Please e-mail HAPP@wilsoncenter.org or call 202-691-4166.

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 antecedents of changes in liberal internationalist thinking that later found expression in the 1990s, ideas that led to a set of presumptions that justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and that underpinned the Wall Street meltdown of 2008.

Tony Smith is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His books include The French Stake in Algeria (1978); The Pattern of Imperialism (1981), and A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (Routledge, 2007).

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 elements of the West German new left and its terrorist offshoots were its advocates. Herf drew on published and archival sources to shed light on this history and on its place in the global anti-Zionist campaign of the 1970s challenged by Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the United Nations.

Jeffrey Herf is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Maryland. His most recent book, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009), was awarded the German Studies Association’s 2011 Sybil Milton Prize for work on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. His previous books include The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (2006) and Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (1997). “A protean hatred” is the working title of his current research project.

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 Russian Tsar? In this presentation to the Washington History Seminar, Margaret Macmillan discussed the current state of the debate and suggested ways of considering the issue.

Margaret MacMillan is the Warden of St. Antony’s College and a Professor of International History at Oxford University. Her books include Women of the Raj (1988, 2007); Paris 1919 (2002); and Nixon and Mao (2007). Her most recent book is The Uses and Abuses of History (2009). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

A webcast and podcast of this session are available at The Outbreak of World War I.

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 Katanga. Significantly, as Stephen R. Weissman argued in this presentation to the Washington History Seminar, the Lumumba case illuminates some of the reasons behind the continuing lack of adequate accountability in contemporary covert action.

Stephen R. Weissman is the author of American Foreign Policy in the Congo 1960–1964 (1974) and A Culture of Deference: Congress’s Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy (1995). He has been a political science professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, Fordham University, and the Université Libre du Congo. He served on the staff of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa from 1979 to 1991 (the last four years as staff director).

A webcast and podcast of this session are available at The Lumumba Assassination and CIA Accountability.

Exploration is a subject that carries both mythic and modern associations, Dane Kennedy of George Washington University told the Washington History Seminar April 2. Its mythic associations cut across cultures, focusing on the heroic individual whose arduous journey is as much about self-discovery as it is about the discovery of new places and peoples. In its modern guise, exploration is identified with the rise of the West, and it places emphasis on scientific and technological achievement, state power, and national prestige. What exploration tells us about how we have sought to see ourselves and the world we inhabit was Kennedy’s larger subject.

Dane Kennedy is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. He has written several books on the British imperial experience. The most recent of these is The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005). Kennedy currently has two books in press, The Challenge of the Continents: The British Exploration of Africa and Australia (Harvard University Press) and an edited volume on the history of exploration (Oxford University Press).

A webcast and a podcast of this session are available at Reassessing Exploration: The West in the World.

Even as news accounts focus on bloody scenes of ethnic tension around the world, there are quieter, less well reported stories of ethnic peace. In this presentation to the Washington History Seminar, Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac highlighted several examples and delved into why they have worked when others have not. Why did the diverse ethnic population of Marseille remain calm as riots spread through France in 2005? In this and other cases, they argued, there is a common ingredient: a willingness to confront and deal fairly with a tangled history. Meyer and Brysac also discussed Flensburg, once an epicenter of a notorious German-Danish struggle, now an example of trading land for peace; and cases from  Australia, Russia, and Queens, NY.

Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac are co-authors of Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Mastery in Central Asia (1999); and Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (2008). Their most recent book, just published, is Pax Ethnica: Where and How Diversity Succeeds (2012). Meyer served on the New York Times editorial board and previously was a foreign correspondent and editorial writer for the Washington Post. Brysac, formerly a prize-winning documentary producer for CBS News, is author of Resisting Hitler: Mildred Fish Harnack and the Red Orchestra (2002).

A webcast and podcast of their seminar are available at Peaceful Resolution of Ethnic Tensions.

The issue of German responsibility has long dominated discussions about the July 1914 crisis that preceded the First World War. That paradigm is now eroding. Recent research shows a more aggressive Franco-Russian alliance, a more placid Anglo-German relationship, a more assertive Austria-Hungary, and internal crises among all of the great powers on the eve of Sarajevo. In this presentation to the Washington History Seminar, Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. addressed this paradigm shift, noting findings that suggest different approaches to 1914 and suggesting new, comparative ways to conceptualize the July crisis.

Williamson has taught at West Point, Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the University of the South. He has written frequently about the origins of the First World War. His books include The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War (1969) and Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (1991). His recent articles have focused on the roles of General Henry Wilson and Count Leopold Berchtold in the July crisis. He has often argued that Russian actions in 1914 require reevaluation and that German actions should be judged from a comparative, rather than unilateralist, perspective.

A webcast and podcast of his seminar are available at July 1914: Revised and Revisited.

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center. Wm. Roger Louis and Christian Ostermann are the co-directors. The seminar meets weekly during the academic year, January to May and September to December. See www.nationalhistorycenter.org for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts. The seminar is grateful for support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the French denounced the U.S. as “domineering,” criticized our policies, rejected “Reaganomics,” and hailed a farmer who trashed a McDonald’s site as a national hero.   Yet at the same time they said they liked Americans, fought with us in Desert Storm, deregulated their economy, and flocked to see Hollywood movies.  How does a historian square persistent anti-Americanism with French esteem for the U.S. and receptivity to Americanization?   In this presentation to the Washington History Seminar, “Unmitigated Gaul: The French Confront America, 1980-2000,” Richard Kuisel of Georgetown University deciphered French attitudes toward American policies, practices and values during these turbulent years.

Kuisel holds a joint appointment at the Center for German and European Studies and the History Department at Georgetown University where he teaches contemporary European history. His award-winning book, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (1993), was a prequel to his new study: The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (2011).

A webcast and podcast of his seminar are available at Unmitigated Gaul.

The National History Center sponsored several sessions at the American Historical Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting in Chicago. Among them were four sessions that were part of the “Historians, Journalists and the Challenges of Getting It Right” initiative we have co-created with the AHA and two centers at USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication. All or part of three sessions are available on the internet. C-Span recorded and broadcast “Publishing and the American Century.” The History News Network recorded and placed on its website portions of “Interpreting the Arab Spring.” And one of our USC partners, the Norman Lear Center, has posted to USC Annenberg’s YouTube channel an illustrated version of “American Biography and the Cold War.”

Articles about the History Center at the Annual Meeting, the Getting It Right sessions, and another NHC-sponsored session, “The History Major in Liberal Education: Practical Application of the National History Center’s Report to the Teagle Foundation,” appeared in the December, March and February editions of the AHA’s monthly newsmagazine, Perspectives. Inside Higher Ed published an article on the “Interpreting the Arab Spring” session in its January 11, 2012 issue.