Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson
In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous calls James Graham Wilson’s America’s Cold War Warrior on the life and legacy of statesman Paul Nitze “a brilliant political biography, elegantly written, rich in archival material.” Nitze was an expert on military power and strategic arms and served as negotiator and diplomat in several administrations from the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.
Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson
In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous calls James Graham Wilson’s America’s Cold War Warrior on the life and legacy of statesman Paul Nitze “a brilliant political biography, elegantly written, rich in archival material.” Nitze was an expert on military power and strategic arms and served as negotiator and diplomat in several administrations from the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Although lesser known than many of his Cold War contemporaries, Nitze notably “took a ‘walk in the woods’ with his Soviet counterpart at arms-control talks in Geneva in 1982, during the Reagan administration,” which “lay the groundwork” for the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first arms-control agreement to abolish an entire category of weapons systems signed by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev five years later. “Wilson sets out to remind us of Nitze’s critical role in a period of dangerous international rivalry,” writes Aldous.
The Dillon Era, a new book by Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The book, which explores the political career of C. Douglas Dillon, the 57th US secretary of the treasury, offers a new perspective of Dillon as an overlooked but deeply influential figure in the presidential administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
The Dillon Era, a new book by Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The book, which explores the political career of C. Douglas Dillon, the 57th US secretary of the treasury, offers a new perspective of Dillon as an overlooked but deeply influential figure in the presidential administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Aldous “makes a persuasive case for Dillon’s beneficial role in the tumultuous history of postwar America,” writes Philip Terzian for the Wall Street Journal. “Along the way, he invokes testimonials from JFK (who, according to his brother Robert, thought Dillon ‘a brilliant man’) and approbation from the economist Paul Samuelson and the campaign chronicler Theodore H. White, as well as from the New York Times editorial page, which coined the phrase that furnishes the book’s title.”
According to New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, of all the reading one can do to put the events of the film Oppenheimer into historical and political context, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, is the one that will restore “a corrective to the movie’s final act, in which the spirit of a simplifying anti-anti-communism prevails over the political complexity that Nolan carries off for most of the film.”
New York Times Opinion: Bard Professor Sean McMeekin’s Book on Stalin Is Recommended Reading for Historical Context on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
According to New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, of all the reading one can do to put the events of the film Oppenheimer into historical and political context, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, is the one that will restore “a corrective to the movie’s final act, in which the spirit of a simplifying anti-anti-communism prevails over the political complexity that Nolan carries off for most of the film.” McMeekin’s book examines Stalin, not Hitler, “as the central figure in the global conflagration, an instigator and manipulator and ultimate victor” of the Second World War, writes Douthat. “And any viewer of Oppenheimer the movie would be wise to hold the malignancy of Stalin, the scale of his success at both conquest and manipulation, in mind while watching its complex hero’s complex fate unfold.”
Book Review: Professor Richard Aldous Reviews Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman
For the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous reviews author, columnist, and professor Samuel G. Freedman’s most recent book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, calling it “a powerful and captivating read.” Examining Humphrey’s early life and political career, Freedman asserts that Humphrey’s 1948 speech, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, advocating for civil rights legislation and racial equality made the Democratic Party confront its position on civil rights, and “set into motion the partisan realignment that defines American politics right up through the present”—also marking the beginning of the civil rights movement in America long before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision desegregating schools and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Aldous writes: “This is a big claim to make of the man and the moment, so it is to Mr. Freedman’s credit that by and large he makes his case thoughtfully and persuasively.”
Three Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad
Three Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. This cohort of Gilman scholars will study or intern in more than 80 countries and represents more than 520 US colleges and universities in all 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
Dance major Zara Boss ’25, from Portland, Maine, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, via CIEE for spring 2024. Boss also received a $5,000 Freeman-ASIA award, which provides scholarships for US undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need to study abroad in East or Southeast Asia. “Being a Gilman scholarship recipient is an incredible honor, as it will allow my life-long aspiration of studying in Japan to come to fruition. I am very grateful for the opportunity to be immersed in the language and culture and am immensely looking forward to studying literature and dance in Tokyo this upcoming spring,” said Boss.
Historical Studies major Chi-Chi Ezekwenna ’25, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea via tuition exchange from fall 2023 to spring 2024. “Receiving the Gilman scholarship has allowed for a dream that has been fostering since I was 12 years old to finally become a reality. I used to believe that the chance to visit Korea would only come much later down the road, yet I was positively proven wrong, as being a Gilman recipient has allowed me the chance to go during my college career,” said Ezekwenna.
Bard College Conservatory and Economics dual major Nita Vemuri’24 has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Paris, France for summer 2023. “I am beyond thrilled to learn more about French music and its relationship to the French language in Paris with the help of the Gilman scholarship,” said Vemuri.
Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 38,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded more than 3,600 Gilman scholarships during the 2022-2023 academic year.
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org
Bard College Division of Social Studies Announces Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor in Historical Studies
Bard College’s Division of Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor of History. His tenure-track appointment will begin in the fall of the 2023–24 academic year.
Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a historian of cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He is co-editor of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Dumbarton Oaks Press, 2022), and has published articles on the history of scholarship, Byzantine oratory, and late medieval politics. Aschenbrenner is also currently working on a monograph about political and ideological competition over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world titled Empire Beyond Rome: Antiquity, Legitimacy, and Power in the Mediterranean, 1200–1550, under contract with Princeton University Press. His other projects investigate the collection and interpretation of Byzantine material culture in the early modern Mediterranean and unrecognized intersections between scholarship and colonialism's materials and mentalities.
Aschenbrenner earned a BS from the United States Naval Academy in 2000 and served as a US Navy Special Operations Officer until 2009. He studied global and medieval history at Georgetown University and King's College, London, finishing his joint MA in 2012. He received his PhD in medieval history from Harvard University in 2019.
“The Real Developmental Engine:” Jeannette Estruth on the Relationship between Silicon Valley and the Military-Industrial Complex for The Drift
“Despite the persistent myth that Silicon Valley was built by rogue engineers in Palo Alto garages, federal funding — especially from the military — has long been the real developmental engine of the American technology sector,” writes Assistant Professor of History Jeannette Estruth for The Drift. Estruth traces the history of Silicon Valley and its innovations, both software and hardware, outlining the longstanding partnerships between the technology sector and the federal government. “High tech’s value has long been in producing war-making technology for the federal government,” Estruth writes, a relationship that, she argues, has historically gone both ways. With public criticism of “Big Tech” on the rise, “the public is falling out of love” with Silicon Valley and its ilk. The question now, she writes, is “whether Washington could be persuaded to do the same.”
Myra Young Armstead Spoke with the Times Union about the Life and Legacy of James F. Brown, “One of the Country’s First Black Master Gardeners”
While slave narratives—“first-person retellings of the enslaved experience”—were persuasive to white abolitionists and widely distributed, quieter but no less important details about the early years of emancipation can be found in the diaries of one of the country’s first Black Master Gardeners, James F. Brown. Myra Young Armstead, vice president for academic inclusive excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies, spoke with the Times Union about Brown’s life and legacy. “In the period before the Civil War, freedom in the most obvious sense for a runaway meant emancipation,” Armstead said. “It also meant freedom from wage slavery, and freedom to operate in the civic sphere. We can explore the many meanings of freedom in the antebellum period through James’s diary.”
Professor Richard Aldous Explores Parallels between a Cold War Spy Plane Crisis and China’s Balloon Incident for the Washington Post
A diplomatic dispute over an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon seen over Montana echoes a similar Cold War event, writes Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, for the Washington Post. In the U-2 crisis of 1960, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, reversing years of progress in relations between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “Lessons from that crisis tell us two things,” writes Aldous. “That unexpected events can destroy years of diplomatic effort; and that the Chinese are likely now scrambling in a panic to get their story straight.” In a statement analogous to China’s current response, NASA had claimed that the plane was used for weather research and gone off course, which Eisenhower was obliged to renounce when he later took responsibility for the spy planes used for information gathering. “The concern about the historical parallel with 1960,” Aldous continues, “Is that the U-2 crisis marked the beginning of one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.”
Digging Deeper: Discovering Blithewood – Guided Garden and Arboretum Tour
Blithewood10:00 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4 Join Amy Parrella ’99, Bard Horticulture & Arboretum Director, for a delightful experience exploring the grounds of the Blithewood Estate on Bard College campus. This guided outdoor tour will provide an immersive experience of the landscape of Blithewood Garden. Learn about historic and current plantings, garden architecture and its current rehabilitation project, and what’s in bloom. Enjoy the natural splendor of the grand landscape overlooking the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains from a restored historic viewpoint. The Friends of Blithewood Garden will provide the tour. All proceeds from this event will support the rehabilitation of Blithewood Garden.
10:00 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4 Blithewood
9/21
Saturday
Saturday, September 21, 2024
"The Shifting Tides of New York Foodways in the early 19 th century"
Lavada Nahon, Culinary Historian The Pavilion at Bard Montgomery Place Campus2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Layfette’s return visit in 1824 came at a time when dining in New York’s elite households was slowly shifting towards a more French approach to what was served. These changes impacted not just what was on the tables, but the equipment found in their kitchens, and the skills required of their cooks. Beginning with what was there before the Rev War, this overview of changing foodways will explore the who, what and when of things, and end with looking at what could have comprised the “rich and sumptuous” ball supper held in Layfette’s honor at Clermont. Schedule of Events 2:00 pm "The Shifting Tides of New York Foodways in the early 19 th century" Lavada Nahon, Culinary Historian
3:00 pm "Interlude" Teatime
3:30 pm "Brought up at Ancram:" Tracing Diverse Stories in Livingston Valley" Nicole S. Maskiell, Dartmouth College
4:45 pm Guided Walk on the Grounds
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Pavilion at Bard Montgomery Place Campus
9/21
Saturday
Saturday, September 21, 2024
"'Brought up at Ancram:" Tracing Diverse Stories in Livingston Valley"
Nicole S. Maskiell, Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Dartmouth College The Pavilion at Bard Montgomery Place Campus3:30 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 In my talk, I will highlight how foregrounding the names and stories of those enslaved by the Livingston Family uncovered a largely untapped social landscape that is, with every passing day, changing for the better. The importance of such stories remains relevant in a region dominated by the tales and tangible legacies of wealthy landholding families. I will explore the techniques used to pursue their lives as well as how it remains a work in progress to highlight the lives of the still largely uncredited builders, planters, sowers, millworkers, shepherds, and others who constructed and maintained the built environment attributed to wealthy elites in the Hudson Valley.
Dr. Nicole S. Maskiell is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College, and the author of Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (2022). She has appeared on CSPAN, the podcast Ben Franklin’s World, and in a Historic Hudson Valley documentary film about the life and legacy of Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse, an early female trader and enslaver. She is series editor for the upcoming book series Black New England from the University of Massachusetts Press, which highlights innovative research on the history of African-descended people in New England from the colonial period through the present day.
Schedule of Events 2:00 pm "The Shifting Tides of New York Foodways in the early 19 th century" Lavada Nahon, Culinary Historian
3:00 pm "Interlude" Teatime
3:30 pm "Brought up at Ancram:" Tracing Diverse Stories in Livingston Valley" Nicole S. Maskiell, Dartmouth College
4:45 pm Guided Walk on the Grounds
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Pavilion at Bard Montgomery Place Campus
10/08
Tuesday
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: Unlearning at the Threshold of the Museum
Center for Human Rights and the Arts Talks Series RKC 1036:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 In this lecture, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay invites the audience to stay at the threshold of the museum in order to recognize the impossibility of decolonizing museums without decolonizing the world. Refusing to study what was plundered as mere objects as museums command us to do, but rather as evidence of a destroyed world, Azoulay decenters the category of “restitution,” and proposes to understand plunder as communal remains. Azoulay weaves the plunder of objects stolen from Jews in Europe—and their partial restitution within the broader picture of European plunder from other places, among them from the world of her ancestors in the Maghreb, from Palestine, and West Africa, in an attempt to undo the exceptionalization of “the Jews” which continues to serve Euro-American imperial interests on a global scale.
Arie M. Dubnov, George Washington University Hegeman 1064:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Three pivotal terms— "refugee," "return," and "repatriation" — played an exceptionally significant role in shaping international planning and discourse after World War II. Exploring the interconnections of international history and the history of political and religious concepts, the talk examines how these terms acquired distinct meanings within the framework of international policies and how they echo to this day in the context of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.
Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. He was a G.L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a participant in the National History Center’s International Decolonization Seminar, and recipient of the Dorset Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.