Elisabetta Bini, European University Institute, Florence, “From Colony to Oil Producer: International Oil Politics in Libya, 1951-1969”;

Michael Collins, University College London, “Sir Andrew Cohen: Decolonization, Political Economy and Imperial Ideology in British Africa, c. 1945-1968”;

Darcie Fontaine, University of South Florida, “Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the Transition to Independence in Algeria, 1962-1970”;

Timothy Daniel Haines, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Decolonization, Nation-States, and Cross-border Hydropolitics in the 1948 India-Pakistan River Dispute”;

George Karekwaivanane, Balliol College, Oxford, “Law, Politic, and Decolonization in Zimbabwe, 1960-1980”;

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, University of Amsterdam, “U.S. Diplomats and Dutch Public Opinion during the New Guinea Question, 1956-1962”;

Maurice Labelle, University of Akron, “Combating the Legacy of Empire: Arab Anti-Americanism and the United States in Lebanon, 1947-1961”;

Elisabeth Leake, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, “The Development of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, 1936-1965”;

Erik Linstrum, Harvard University, “The Human Factor: Experiments with Psychology in the British Empire, 1898-1960”;

Brian McNeil, University of Texas at Austin, “Frontiers of Need: Decolonization and the International Battle over Humanitarian Aid in Biafra, 1967-1970”;

Sarah Miller-Davenport, University of Chicago, “Hawa’ii Statehood and Changing Ideas of Race, Nation, and American Consumer Culture in the Post-World War II Period”;

Andres Rodriguez, University of Southampton, “‘Decolonizing’ China: Globalizing and Localizing Postwar Visions of State and Society in Republican China, 1945-1949”;

Ethan R. Sanders, University of Cambridge, “Decolonization and the Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar: The Historical Legacy and Its Political Implications”;

Claire Wintle, University of Brighton, “Museums and Decolonization: Collecting and Display Practices as Microcosms of Political Encounter”; and

Akhila Yechury, London School of Economics and Political Science, “Debating Identity: The Indian ‘Nation-State’ and the Decolonisation of French India.”

The seminar is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is hosted by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.  This year it will meet from July 8 through August 3.  During those four weeks, the participants will research their topics at the Library, the National Archives, and other repositories in the Washington, DC area; discuss the phenomenon of decolonization; and critique each other’s work. Each will produce a publishable article or chapter of approximately 6,000 words.

The seminar is directed by Wm. Roger Louis, University of Texas at Austin, the director of the National History Center. Faculty members for 2012 are Jennifer L. Foray, Purdue University; Dane Kennedy, George Washington University; Philippa Levine, University of Texas at Austin; Jason Parker, Texas A&M University; and Pillarisetti Sudhir, American Historical Association.

Kimball is the Robert Treat Professor at Rutgers University. He has written Forged in War (1995), as well as books on the Morgenthau Plan and the origins of Lend-Lease. He has published over 50 essays on Churchill, Roosevelt, and the era of the Second World War. He was Pitt Professor at Cambridge University 1987-88, and is an academic adviser to The Churchill Center.

As usual the seminar will meet at 4 o’clock Monday afternoon, but the location has changed slightly. We now gather in the Moynihan Board Room on the 6th floor of the Wilson Center. The Center is housed in the Ronald Reagan Building, 13th and Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Federal Triangle Metro stop. Reservations are requested because of limited seating: HAPP@wilsoncenter.org or 202-691-4166.

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center, with assistance from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.  Looking ahead, on Monday, February 6, Wilson Center Fellow Julia Clancy-Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson will discuss North Africa before and after French colonialism.

Links may be found on the NHC website in the wrap-ups of each session, to be found below and in this site’s monthly archive, or at “Washington History Seminar” under “Programs.” Here is a quick list that will take you to the session wrap-up and its link to the webcast.

Sept. 12: Stephen Kinzer (Boston University), Iran 1953 (webcast not yet available)

Sept. 19: Rob Litwak (Wilson Center), “Rogue States”

Sept. 26: Wm. Roger Louis (Texas), Hammarskjold and his Critics

Oct. 3: Gideon Rose (Editor, Foreign Affairs), How We Botch the Ends of Wars

Oct. 10: No Meeting – Columbus Day

Oct. 17: Hope M. Harrison (Wilson Center/GWU), The Contested Legacy of the Berlin Wall

Oct. 24: Linda K. Kerber (Iowa/AHA Past President), Statelessness in 20th Century America

Oct. 31: Nigel Ashton (LSE), Missed Opportunities for Peace

Nov. 7: Gavin Wright (Stanford), Economic Effects of Civil Rights

Nov. 14: Ronald Steel (Wilson Center), Reassessing Walter Lippmann

Nov. 21: Phyllis Leffler (Virginia), Black Leaders and Leadership

Nov. 28: James Hershberg (GWU), Could the Vietnam War Have Ended Earlier? (webcast not yet available)

Dec. 5: Tom Bender (NYU), American Exceptionalism in Global Perspective

Kevin Kenny, Professor of History at Boston College, began the third year of the Washington History Seminar with an exploration of how and why the Irish and their adversaries chose the sixteenth American President as their champion.  Kenny’s books include Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (2009), The American Irish (2000), Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998), and (as editor), Ireland and the British Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (2003). He is currently writing a book on the concept of diaspora.

A webcast of Kenny’s seminar is available at Abraham Lincoln and the Irish.

The Washington History Seminar is jointly sponsored by the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, with assistance from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

“Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting Right” is a joint venture of the History Center, the AHA, and two centers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism, the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and the Norman Lear Center.  The collaboration is based on the idea that historians and journalists can learn from each other as they pursue accuracy and acuity.

“Imagine if journalists, under deadline pressure, had easy access to relevant historians in order to add depth and context to their stories,” said Martin H. Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center. “Imagine if historians who use journalism as primary source material had a more intimate understanding of how journalists craft narratives in real time.  Building bridges like that, which could help both professions, is one of the aims of this project.”

For more on the Getting It Right panels and the NHC’s other sessions, see an article on them in the December issue of the AHA’s magazine, Perspectives, at http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2011/1112/National-History-Center-at-the-Annual-Meeting.cfm.

Jan. 23:            Kevin Kenny (Boston College), Abraham Lincoln & the Irish

Jan. 30:            Warren Kimball (Rutgers), F.D.R. & Churchill

Feb. 6:             Julia Clancy-Smith (WWC & Arizona), North Africa & French colonialism

Feb. 13:           John Voll (Georgetown), secular, religious leadership in the Middle East

Feb. 20:           NO MEETING – Presidents’ Day

Feb. 27:           Sherrill Brown Wells (George Washington), Jean Monnet

Mar. 5:            Carl Smith (Arizona), the legacy of the 1967 War

Mar. 12:          Richard Kuisel (Georgetown), the French confront America

Mar. 19:          Sam Williamson (University of the South), August 1914

Mar. 26:          Ross Johnson (WWC), Radio Free Europe

Apr. 2:            Dane Kennedy (George Washington), exploration

Apr. 9:            Stephen Weissman, the Lumumba assassination & CIA accountability

Apr. 16:          Margaret Macmillan (Oxford), lessons of the First World War

Apr. 23:          Jeffrey Herf (Maryland), Anti-Zionism in Germany

Apr. 30:          Bettye Collier-Thomas (WWC), African-American women

May 7:            Kenton Clymer (Northern Illinois), Burma

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. His scholarly work has been focused on intellectual and cultural history; his most recent work, however, has been devoted to exploring the ways in which American history has been embedded in histories larger than itself, some of which are global in extent. His books include Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006).

A webcast of Bender’s seminar is available at: American Exceptionalism in Global Perspective.

The Washington History seminar is a joint venture of the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. As always, it takes place at the Wilson Center in the Ronald Reagan Building, 13th and Pennsylvania, NW, in downtown Washington, DC (Federal Triangle Metro stop).  It is supported by a gift from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Reservations are requested because of limited seating: HAPP@wilsoncenter.org.

James G. Hershberg is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and former director of the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project. His book Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam will be co-published by the Stanford University Press and Wilson Center Press in January.

John Carland, who has held official history positions in the Departments of Defense and State over the past twenty-five years as a specialist in the history of the United States and the Vietnam War, will comment.

As always, the seminar meets at 4 p.m. in the 4th floor conference room at the Wilson Center in the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, in downtown Washington, DC.  Please RSVP to HAPP@wilsoncenter.org.

Phyllis Leffler is the Director of the Institute for Public History and Professor at the University of Virginia.  She is the co-author (with Joseph Brent) of Public History: A Philosophy and Paradigm and Public History Readings.   She has published award-winning articles in The Public Historian and The Magazine of Virginia History and Biography, and most recently, “Black families and fostering of leadership” (with Hephzibah Strimic-Pawl) in Ethnicities. 

A webcast of Leffler’s seminar is available at Black Leaders and Leadership.

A joint venture of the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars with the support of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Washington History Seminar welcomes individuals interested in the historical context of contemporary affairs. Graduate students are especially encouraged to attend. Reservations are requested because of limited seating: HAPP@wilsoncenter.org.

Lippmann began his career in 1910. He ended it six decades later as America’s most honored journalist. In the intervening years he edited the greatest newspaper of its day, Pulitzer’s World, wrote books on public opinion and public policy, created a newspaper column that was required reading, and left his imprint on virtually every important issue of American public life. Yet perspectives change from decade to decade, and today Lippmann seems a rather neglected figure. Steel asked: does his work have an enduring legacy for the present?

Ronald Steel is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California and twice a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center. His books include Pax Americana (1967), Temptations of a Superpower (1995), and Imperialists and Other Heroes (1971). His 1980 biographical study, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, received honors including the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Award, and the Book Critics Circle Award.

Steel’s seminar was also part of  a new initiative, “Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting It Right,” co-sponsored by the National History Center, the American Historical Association, and the Norman Lear Center and the Center for Communication Leadership & Policy at USC Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism. The project aims to help journalists and historians learn from each other as they pursue the twin goals of accuracy and acuity.

A webcast of the seminar is available at Reassessing Walter Lippmann.

A joint venture of the National History Center and the Wilson Center with the support of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Washington History Seminar welcomes individuals who are interested in the historical context of contemporary affairs. Graduate students are especially encouraged to attend.  Reservations are requested because of limited seating: HAPP@wilsoncenter.org.