We are pleased to announce below the exciting schedule of speakers for the spring 2020 season of the Washington History Seminar (WHS). The seminar is one of Washington D.C.’s most intellectually vibrant venues for thinking about the past and establishing its relevance to the present. Further details and RSVP instructions will be made available closer to the date of each event by visiting the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program website.

January 13 Sidney Blumenthal on The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln: Volumes I-III

January 21 (Tuesday) David Roll on George Marshall Defender of the Republic

January 27 Jeremy Popkin on A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution

January 30 (Thursday) Norman Naimark on Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty

February 3 Astrid M. Eckert on West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands

February 10 Amy Offner on Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Development States in the Americas

February 24 Lawrence Glickman on Free Enterprise: An American History

March 2 Amy Aronson on Crystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life

March 9 Duncan White on Cold Warriors: Writers Who waged the Literary Cold War

March 16 Giuliana Chamedes on A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican's Battle to Remake Christian Europe

March 23 Eric Weitz on A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States

March 30 Eileen Boris on Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019

April 6 Sarah Miller-Davenport on Gateway State: Hawaii and the Cultural Transformation of America

April 13 Kristina Spohr on Post Wall Post Square: How Bush, Gorbachev, Kohl, and Deng Shaped the World after 1989

April 16 (Thursday) Archie Brown on The Human Factor:  Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher, and the end of the Cold War

April 20 Sarah Wagner on What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home from the Vietnam War

April 27 Thavolia Glymph on The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation

May 4 Sarah Milov on The Cigarette: A Political History

May 11 John Connelly on From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe

May 18 Benjamin Hopkins on Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State

Sessions take place on Mondays (unless noted above) at 4:00 pm, at the Woodrow Wilson Center

The seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.