1968 was a pivotal year in U.S. and global history. In the United States, students protested the Vietnam War. In France, they protested university conditions and sparked worker strikes across the country. In Mexico City, they protested state violence. This was also the year when the peaceful protest known as the “Prague Spring” flourished in Czechoslovakia, when Martin Luther King planned a Poor People’s March on Washington, and when Robert Kennedy ran for president. But ...

In the 1970s, the filmmakers Masao Adachi and Jean-Luc Godard each created a sophisticated essay film that used the Palestinian revolution to reflect questions of truth, representation, media circuits, and the relationships that can and cannot be formed through them. This talk shifts attention away from these well-known works to focus on the films Palestinians themselves were making at this time, exploring how they engaged differently with the ideas that animated Adachi and Godard, as ...

Paul Thomas Chamberlin argues that the Cold War, long regarded as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between the West and East blocs, fostered a series of deadly conflicts that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy accord hung over Europe, ferocious wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten. In chronicling this violent history, ...

Professor Salim Yaqub will discuss his new book, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945, which traverses the broad sweep of postwar U.S. history. It explores how Americans of all walks of life—political leaders, businesspeople, public intellectuals, workers, students, activists, migrants, and others—struggled to define the nation’s political, economic, geopolitical, demographic, and social character. The book chronicles the nation’s ceaseless ferment, from the rocky conversion to peacetime in the early aftermath ...

Drawing on her current book project, Communist Neverland, Elizabeth McGuire tells the story of the Stasova International Children’s Home, an elite orphanage and boarding school for the children of Communist Party leaders from all parts of the globe. Professor McGuire will focus in this talk on “Jimmy Ruegg,” one of the Stasova home’s many “mystery children.” Jimmy spent his earliest years in the International Settlement in Shanghai, believed he was German, and thought he had ...