Winning the Third World: Sino-American Competition during the Cold War examines afresh the enduring rivalry between the United States and China during the Cold War. Gregg A. Brazinsky shows how both nations fought vigorously to establish their influence in newly independent African and Asian countries. By playing a leadership role in Asia and Africa, China hoped to regain its status in world affairs, but Americans feared that China’s history as a nonwhite, anticolonial nation would make it an even more dangerous threat in the postcolonial world than the Soviet Union.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.

Albert Camus’s L’Etranger has been best-seller for so long, we forget it was ever anything else.  But literary classics are made, not born: though The Stranger was a book very few readers understood or appreciated when it was published in 1942, it became a household name—a regular on lists of the great books of the 20th century.  Alice Kaplan delved into publishers’ archives to uncover a key episode in L’Etranger’s career: the first translation of the French novel into English, in the United States and in England, four years after its publication—in 1946, when the war in Europe had been over for only a year.  This is a tale of two cities, involving an author, his publishers, his translator, and his readers and reviewers.

Alice Kaplan, John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University, is a specialist of 20^th century France.  She works at the intersection of literature and history, using a method that allies archival research with textual analysis. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the French Légion d’Honneur as well the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History for The Collaborator (2000). Recent books include Dreaming in French (2012) and Looking for The Stranger (2016).

Monday, May 1, 2017
4:00pm-5:30pm
6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom
Woodrow Wilson Center

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.

Are we deranged? Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? Ghoshexamines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events makes them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining.  This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres.  In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictions and counterintuitive elements.

Amitav Ghosh is an acclaimed author whose novels include the Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), The Glass Palace, and The Shadow Lines.  The Great Derangement is his first major work of nonfiction since In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.