Sponsored jointly by the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Washington History Seminar meets each week, January to May and September to December, on Monday afternoons at 4 o’clock at the Wilson Center. It aims to facilitate understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and all places and from a variety of perspectives. For the latest schedule, please click on Spring 2012 Schedule. For more information on past speakers, topics, and videos, please click on Washington History Seminar Schedule.
After the first quarter century of development since the overthrow of Communism and the reunification of East and West Germany, how does one draw up a balance sheet? How can one assess the transfer of political institutions, the economic crises, the difficulties of women’s adjustment? There were substantial developments but also significant failures. Many of [...]
During the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln stated that his paramount object was to save the Union, leading many since to question his reputation as “The Great Emancipator.” Emancipation and the nation’s unity were indivisible in Lincoln’s mind, and it was for the fusion and pursuit of these two ideas that British and other foreign [...]
Announcing the 2013 Spring Semester schedule for the Washington History Seminar – Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs. Below are listed the speakers, the dates on which they will be speaking, and their respective topics. January 28: Eric Foner (Columbia), Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation February 4: Michael Dobbs (WWC), origins of the Cold War February [...]
First Lady Michelle Obama’s family – black, white and multiracial – journeyed from slavery to the White House in five generations. Her forbears included slaves who toiled on vast plantations, mixed-race people who lived free for decades before Emancipation, and Irish-Americans who fought for the Confederacy. In this presentation to the Washington History Seminar, Rachel [...]
Iraq was the single mandated territory—out of fourteen—to achieve independent statehood while still under the jurisdiction of the League of Nations. But what kind of “independence” was this? By coming to an agreement with nationalist elites in Iraq, Britain was able to retain control of crucial economic concessions and military rights in this key region [...]
To understand how and why past decisions were taken it is essential to look at them from the inside out, not with hindsight. To comprehend the decision-making process, it helps to study specific choices, such as those: to commit British troops to the Korean War, 1950; to reverse the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal, [...]
Historically, the series of modern revolutions beginning with the American and the French at the end of the eighteenth century led to the attempts to replace ancient and dictatorial systems of government by new, constitutional governments legitimated by a popular election. In the Middle East, a parallel pattern can be seen in the history of [...]
The Iraq war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance with the Iraq government managing resistance and religious diversity and shaping a public culture in which soldiering and martyrdom became markers of privileged citizenship. In this Washington History Seminar session, Dina Rizk Khoury argued that the men and families of those who fought and died [...]
The most famous terrorist group in modern American history was the Weatherman Underground, later called the Weather Underground Organization. An outgrowth of Students for a Democratic Society, Weather was active in 1969 through the 1970s. The standard view of the group holds that because it never actually killed any fellow citizen, unlike its contemporaries, the Red Army [...]
At the end of the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was devoting its energies to reconstruction after the devastation of World War II and establishing control over new client states in Eastern Europe, Joseph Stalin was forced to negotiate a new treaty of alliance with the victorious Chinese Communists. Mao Zedong won significant concessions from [...]