International Seminar on Decolonization is a summer program generously sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to bring together young historians from the U.S. and aboard to Washington, DC to study to discuss the history of decolonization in the 20th-century. The seminar will run in July in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]