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.

Konrad H. Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill will discuss his latest book entitled Reluctant Accomplice: "Good Germans" in the War of Annihilation, 1939-1942. Comprised of wartime letters written by Jarausch's father, Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Hitler's army in Poland and Russia. The book brings the letters together to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, begins to doubt the war's moral legitimacy.

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.

Few events in the history of the twentieth century are as controversial, politicized, and laden with emotion 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 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.