The Washington History Seminar (WHS) series is held weekly on Mondays (unless otherwise noted) during the Fall and Spring academic semesters. The series is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. Recordings of each event are posted to the WHS YouTube channel.  If you have questions about the seminars, please email Rachel Wheatley at rwheatley@historians.org. 

Spring 2024 Semester

More seminars will be added to the schedule soon.

Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of Liberal Order
January 22, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Panelists: James Cronin (Boston Coll.); Helen Parr (Keele Univ.); Gary Gerstle (Univ. of Cambridge)

Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
January 29, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Panelists: Mary Fulbrook (Univ. Coll. London; Natalia Aleksiun (Univ. of Florida, Gainesville)

Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century
February 5, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Panelists: Joya Chatterji (Univ. of Cambridge; Durba Ghosh (Cornell Univ.); Partha Pratim Shil (Stanford Univ.)

Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work
February 12, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Panelists: Laura Robson (Penn. State Univ.), Dane Kennedy (George Washington Univ.), and Ilana Feldman (George Washington Univ.)

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000
February 26, 2024 at 4 PM ET
David Blackbourn (Vanderbilt Univ.), Frank Bösch (Univ. of Potsdam), and Sandrine Kott (Univ. of Geneva)

The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
March 4, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Charles Maier (Harvard Univ.) and Victoria de Grazia (Colubmia Univ.)

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
March 11, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Edda Fields-Black (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.), Kate Masur (Northwestern Univ.), and Erica Ball (Occidental Coll.)

Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Invasion
March 18, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Robert Rakove (Stanford Univ.) and Elisabeth Leake (Tufts Univ.)

Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War
March 25, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Eline van Ommen (Univ. of Leeds), Renata Keller (Univ. of Nevada, Reno), and Mateo Jarquín (Chapman Univ.)

Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
April 8, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Samuel Moyn (Yale Univ.), Michael Kimmage (Catholic Univ.), and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison)

Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century
April 15, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Julia Irwin (Louisiana State Univ.), Sarah Snyder (American Univ.), and Megan Black (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade
May 6, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Elizabeth O'Brien Ingleson (London School of Economics) and Margaret Pearson (Univ. of Maryland, College Park)

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
May 13, 2024 at 4 PM ET
Jennifer Burns (Stanford Univ.), Bruce Caldwell (Duke Univ.), and Debora Spar (Harvard Univ.)

To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power
May 20, 2024
Sergey Radchenko (Johns Hopkins School)