National History Center events, including sessions at the American Historical Association annual meetings and more.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 presentation to the Washington History Seminar, Charles D. (Carl) Smith discussed the Johnson administration’s decisions before, during, and after the war. [...]
The National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars have released an updated schedule for the spring 2012 semester of the Washington History Seminar, the Monday afternoon series they co-sponsor with assistance from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The seminar meets at 4 p.m. each Monday during the academic [...]
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 [...]