News about the National History Center or the history profession.
In her political biography of Jean Monnet, Sherrill Brown Wells explains how this visionary and entrepreneurial internationalist who never held an elective office, never joined a political party, and never developed any significant popular following in his native France, became one of the most influential European statesmen in the 20th century. In this presentation to [...]
The legacy of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War is still with us in the form of Security Council Resolution 242 and the continued Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and the West Bank. In this seminar talk, Charles D. (Carl) Smith will discuss the Johnson administration’s decisions before, during, and after the war. He will trace [...]
In their 1996 book, Islam and Democracy, John Esposito and John Voll examined the intersection of politics and religion in five Islamic countries. They pointed to the emergence of pro-democracy movements in Islamic societies despite resistance from authoritarian regimes, arguing that to understand the multiple political trajectories in these countries, commonalities as well as historical [...]
In the 19th century, tens of thousands of Europeans and others relocated to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. How can the era of French colonialism be assessed in relation to the broader patterns of settlement, labor, colonial rule, and decolonization? What are the connections between that era and today’s movement of labor migrants from [...]
Warren Kimball edited Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, published by Princeton University Press in 1984. In his presentation to the January 30 edition of the Washington History Seminar, he reflected on the problems he faced in compiling letters and other communications, on research in the pre-computer age, and on his thoughts about the two [...]
Through the kindness of our partner in the Washington History Seminar, the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, webcasts of all but two fall 2011 sessions are now available. The sessions featuring Stephen Kinzer and James Hershberg have not yet been posted on the Wilson Center website. Links [...]
“Lincoln, more than any other American, and more than most great men of any country,” the Irish Times remarked in 1920, “is an international character.” All sides to the “Irish Question”—from Éamon de Valera to David Lloyd George—found occasion to invoke Abraham Lincoln. Approaching Irish political history from this angle casts fresh light on the [...]
The National History Center will sponsor seven sessions at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago January 5-8. Topics range from environmental history to Scotland’s role in the British Empire to the future of the history major in liberal education. The Center will also inaugurate a new initiative, “Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of [...]
The National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars have released the spring schedule for their weekly Washington History Seminar. The seminar takes place each Monday afternoon at 4 p.m. at the Wilson Center in downtown Washington, DC. Check the National History Center website for announcements of the individual sessions. Jan. 23: [...]
In the last seminar of the fall semester, Thomas Bender of New York University asked whether American history is truly exceptional when seen in global context. Following World War II, he said, the dominant narrative of U.S. history posited “American exceptionalism.” That assumption shaped historical scholarship and Cold War policy. More recently a neo-conservative belief [...]