National History Center events, including sessions at the American Historical Association annual meetings and more.
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 will reflect on the problems he faced in compiling letters and other communications, on research in the pre-computer age, and on his thoughts about the [...]
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 [...]
The Vietnam War cost the lives of more than 58,000 Americans (and millions of Vietnamese) and convulsed U.S. politics and culture in the 1960s. Could it have ended years earlier, and with a far smaller toll? Evidence from long-hidden communist sources sheds new light on one of the war’s most controversial and enduring mysteries: it [...]
Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, discussed “Why We Botch the Ends of Wars” at the October 3 meeting of the Washington History Seminar. Rose argued that a persistent theme in American history is a failure to plan carefully for the aftermath of wars. Obsessed with the military aspects of their struggles, neither military [...]
National History Center Director Wm. Roger Louis presented “Dag Hammarskjold, His Critics, and the United Nations in 1956″ to the Washington History Seminar on Monday, September 26. Rashid Khalidi’s talk on Arab nationalism, originally planned for that date, has been rescheduled to September 10, 2012. Hammarskjold, Louis argued, was more controversial as UN Secretary-General in [...]
Rashid Khalidi’s presentation on Arab nationalism, set for September 26, will be rescheduled. The seminar will go on as planned, however. Wm. Roger Louis will discuss UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold’s role in the Suez crisis of 1956.