Washington History Seminar Schedule
The Washington History Seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, with support from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. It aims to facilitate the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places and from multiple perspectives. It meets weekly on Monday afternoons at 4 p.m., January—May and September—December. Wm. Roger Louis of the National History Center and Christian Ostermann of the Wilson Center are the co-directors. To go to the schedule of speakers for Spring 2012, please click on Spring Schedule. Below are the lists of speakers from past years. Please click on the event to find out more information or to watch a video presentation of the seminar.
Washington History Seminar, Spring 2011
January 24: Sheldon Garon (Princeton University) on why America spends while the world saves (video)
January 31: Trudy Peterson (Independent Archivist) on war crimes tribunals in Guatemala, Rwanda, and South Africa (video)
February 7: Charles Maier (Harvard University and WWC Fellow) on sovereignty and globalization (video)
February 14: Klaus Larres (University of Ulster) on Churchill and the Cold War (video)
February 28: Henry Laurens (Collège de France) on France and the Arab World
March 7: Katherine Lynch (Carnegie Mellon University) on the French welfare state (video)
March 14: Susan Carruthers (Rutgers University and WWC Fellow) on United States military occupations (video)
March 21: Gabriel Gorodetsky (Institute for Advanced Study & University of Oxford) on Stalin and Operation Barbarossa (video)
March 28: Thomas Schwartz (Vanderbilt University) on Kissinger’s Realpolitik (video)
April 4: Alice Kessler-Harris (Columbia University) on reading history through biography (video)
April 11: Richard Kohn (University of North Carolina) on civil and military relationships (video)
April 18: no meeting
April 25: Don H. Doyle (University of South Carolina and WWC Public Policy Fellow) on the international dimensions of the American Civil War
(video)
May 2: Paul Landau (University of Maryland) on the end of Apartheid (video)
Fall 2010 Seminar Schedule:
- September 20: Frédéric Bozo, Sorbonne & Wilson Center Fellow, on François Mitterrand and the Cold War (video)
- September 27: Caroline Elkins, Harvard University, on reassessing the Mau Mau Rebellion (video)
- October 4: Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, on secularism and gender equality (video)
- October 11: No meeting: Columbus Day
- October 18: Melvyn Leffler, University of Virginia & Wilson Center Fellow, on lessons from the Cold War (video)
- October 25: Timothy H. Breen, Northwestern University, on Ordinary People and the American Revolution
- November 1: Erin Mahan, United States Department of Defense, on weapons of mass destruction (no video available)
- November 8: Brian Harrison, University of Oxford, on the Anglo-American “Special Relationship” video
- November 15: David Hollinger, University of California at Berkeley, on American Missionaries effect on the U.S. (video)
- November 22: Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia, on the history of U.S. foreign policy (no video available)
- November 29: David Painter, Georgetown University, on oil and world power (video)
- December 6: John Pocock, Johns Hopkins, on the decline and fall of empires (video)
Spring 2010 Seminar Schedule
- January 25 Martin Sherwin on the Cuban Missile crisis and the UN (no video available)
- February 8 Chen Jian on Zhou Enlai and the Chinese Revolution–cancelled due to weather; will be rescheduled
- February 15 President’s Day Holiday–no seminar
- March 1 Carol Anderson on African Americans and the struggle for independence in Asia and Africa (video)
- April 12 Eliot Cohen on supreme command and wartime leadership (no video available)
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