National History Center

Journalist-historian Stephen Kinzer will inaugurate the 2011-2012 Washington History Seminar Monday, September 12, with a presentation entitled “Iran 1953 and the Uses of Middle Eastern History.”

A professor at Boston University, Kinzer covered more than 50 countries on four continents in over 20 years as a correspondent for the New York Times. His books include Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (2001) and All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003).  He will explore the lasting consequences of the 1953 British-American coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and their role in the upheaval now spreading throughout the Arab world.

Co-sponsored by the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the weekly Washington History Seminar provides historical perspectives on current international and national affairs.  It meets every Monday during the academic year at 4 p.m. at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.  It is supported by a grant from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.  Future sessions are scheduled to include Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose on how wars end, historian Rashid Khalidi on Arab nationalism, and historian Hope M. Harrison on the contested legacy of the Berlin Wall.

To be added to the seminar’s e-mail announcement list, please contact National History Center Associate Director Marian J. Barber at mbarber@historians.org.

In the last Washington History Seminar for the semester, Paul S. Landau, historian at the University of Maryland, will discuss “South Africa and the End of Apartheid” on Monday, May 2, 2011 at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center.

Upon his release from prison, Nelson Mandela led the crowd in a rousing chant of the old resistance phrase, “Come Back Africa.” Now, twenty years later, we may begin to ask what kind of Africa is coming back. The question can be addressed by looking beyond the struggle of the African National Congress to focus on ordinary people’s mobilizations in the past. A history of generational conflict, chiefship, and trans-ethnic solidarity continues to be felt in the present.

Paul S. Landau teaches history at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (2010), and The Realm of the Word (1995). His current research focuses on the turn to violence in the 1960s in the history of the struggle against Apartheid.

To watch a video presentation of this seminar, please click here.

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

This is the last seminar for the semester.  The series will begin again Monday, September 12, 2011. Please check back with the Center to see the schedule.

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

At the next Washington History Seminar, Don H. Doyle of the University of South Carolina will explore “America’s International Civil War” on Monday, April 25 at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center.

While the military contest between North and South dragged on inconclusively over four years, an equally crucial contest of diplomacy, ideology, and propaganda was waged abroad. Powerful economic interests and anti-democratic sympathies favored the South. On the other hand there was a reservoir of popular good will toward the “Great Republic” and widespread antipathy toward human slavery. Each side sought to shape foreign debate over the “American Question.” The Union won only when it learned to align its cause with what foreigners understood to be an ongoing international struggle for liberty, equality, and self-government.

Don H. Doyle is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Among his publications are Secession as an International Phenomenon (2010); Nationalism in the New World, edited with Marco Pamplona (2006); Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (2002). Currently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he will be a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in the coming year.

To watch a video presentation of this seminar, please click here.

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Professor Richard H. Kohn of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is featured at the next Washington History Seminar on Monday, April 11 at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center. He will be focus on “Civil Military Relations: At the Heart of Military History.”

Military historians of the modern era have often neglected the relationship between the armed forces and the state, particularly its effect on outcomes in war and military policy and activity during peacetime. Yet some of the more famous writing on military theory have emphasized the importance of the topic. Military historians of the United States, as the literature reveals, have only now begun to address the subject systematically and in depth.

Richard H. Kohn has taught military history at the City College of New York, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, the National and Army War Colleges, and–after serving as Chief of Air Force History for the USAF (1981-1991)– at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His publications have focused on American military and national security policy. With Peter Feaver he has edited Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (2001).

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

At the next Washington History Seminar on Monday, April 4 at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center, Alice Kessler-Harris will present “American Biography After the Cold War.”

What are the issues of judgment, perspective, and stance that confront historians whose subjects played a role in debates about Stalinism, McCarthyism, and Communism? In the years when the Cold War shaped perceptions, historians identified themselves with particular political positions. But what is the view toward such issues today? Is the intellectual Cold War over? Or does it still constrain our minds and our words? Lillian Hellman will serve as a case in point.

Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History at Columbia University.  She is also Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Her recent books include In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in the 20th-Century America (2001) and Gendering Labor History (2007), which contains her essays on women’s work and social policy. Recently, she has turned her attention to the problems of writing history through the eyes of individuals.  She is currently the President of the Organization of American Historians.

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Thomas A. Schwartz presents “Kissinger’s Realpolitik and American Exceptionalism” at the next Washington History Seminar at the Wilson Center on Monday, March 28, 2011 at 4:00 p.m.

Henry Kissinger is perhaps the most famous and most controversial American diplomat of the twentieth century.  Much of the literature about him emphasizes his geopolitical approach to international relations, his European background, and his advocacy of Realpolitik.  But to a large extent of his foreign policy was fundamentally shaped and conditioned by domestic politics. Kissinger ultimately failed to bring about a different approach to foreign policy, one moving beyond American exceptionalism and toward an understanding of the limits of power.

Thomas A. Schwartz is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.  He is the author of America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (1991), and Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (2003).  He is a former Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Past President of the Society for American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), and a former member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Historian Gabriel Gorodetsky is featured at the next Washington History Seminar on Monday, March 21 at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center.  He will address “The Russian Imperial Legacy– Stalin and the Outbreak of the War in the East: Barbarossa.”

Few events in the history of the twentieth century are as controversial, politicized and laden with emotions as is the launching of operation Barbarossa—the German Invasion of Russia. It has become a fertile ground for conspiracy theories and a subject of unending polemics.  This seminar presentation will discuss a vital but missing dimension: the subjugation of ideological premises to the everlasting Russian imperial legacy as the driving force behind Stalin’s policies on the eve of operation Barbarossa.

Gabriel Gorodetsky is a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was the founder and director of the Cummings Center for Russian Studies at Tel Aviv University and was a Wilson Center fellow.  His books include Stafford Cripps’ Mission to Moscow, 1940-42 (1986), and Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (1999).

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

At the next Washington History Seminar on Monday, March 14, at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center, Professor Susan Carruthers will discuss “The ‘Good Occupation’: Military Government in the American Imagination.”

Military occupation has been a crucial dimension of US foreign relations from the early nineteenth century to the present. The occupations of Germany and Japan in the wake of the Second World War generally were regarded positively. The occupation of Iraq, which initially met with some approbation, eventually tarnished the reputation of the George W. Bush administration. Susan Carruthers will explain the transformation of public attitude.

Susan L. Carruthers is Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark and a Fellow at the Wilson Center. Her books include Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing (2009) and The Media at War (2011).

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Katherine A. Lynch of Carnegie Mellon University is featured in the next Washington History Seminar on Monday, March 7 at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center.  Her seminar is entitled “Rethinking the French Welfare State” and will delineate the French welfare state in long-term historical perspective and consider the multiple strands of tradition, institutions, and policies that contributed to its founding and development. It will link practices to successive political regimes and make comparisons between French and British welfare systems. What are the possible future directions of French welfare policy in view of past precedents and current conditions?

Katherine Lynch is Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. A social historian, she has written on European family history and the histories of charity and poor relief. Her latest book is Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200–1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society (2003).

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

“In Search of ‘la chose franco-arab’” with Henry Laurens, Collège de France, is the next subject at the Washington History Seminar, the weekly history seminar jointly sponsored by the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  It takes place Monday, February 28th, at 4:00 pm at the Wilson Center.

From the eighteenth century until the present, the multitude of French-Arab relationships, positive or negative, constitute what one can call, according to the famous expression of Jacques Berque, “la chose franco-arabe” (“the French-Arab thing”). This seminar presentation will define its history and consequently its nature—and what its future might be.

Henry Laurens holds the Chair in the modern history of the Arab world at the Collège de France. He has published more than twenty books on the history of the Middle East, imperialism, terrorism, and the Mediterranean. His recent publications include L’empire et ses ennemis (The Empire and Its Enemies) (2009).

Reservations are requested because of limited seating.  To reserve a seat at the seminar, contact Miriam Cunningham at 202-544-2422 ext 103.  The seminar takes place at the Wilson Center, located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Federal Triangle Metro stop).

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center and facilitates the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives Click for the Spring 2011 schedule and topics, as well as links to videos of past presentations. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.