News and Events

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.

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.

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.”

More History News

Book Review: Professor Richard Aldous Reviews Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman

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.”

Read more in the Wall Street Journal

Post Date: 07-17-2023

Three Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

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

Post Date: 05-23-2023

Bard College Division of Social Studies Announces Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor in Historical Studies

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.

Post Date: 05-11-2023

“The Real Developmental Engine:” Jeannette Estruth on the Relationship between Silicon Valley and the Military-Industrial Complex for The Drift

“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.”

Read More in The Drift

Post Date: 02-28-2023

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”

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.”

Read More in the Times Union

Post Date: 02-14-2023

Professor Richard Aldous Explores Parallels between a Cold War Spy Plane Crisis and China’s Balloon Incident for the Washington Post

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.”

Read more in the Washington Post

Post Date: 02-07-2023

Historical Study Events

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2025

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

A Talk by Peter Vale, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In mid-May each year, following the annual sorghum harvest, the heads of the Bayeke and Basanga of the southern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), known as Katanga, declare: tuye tukadie mukuba, “let’s go eat the copper.” But what does it mean to “eat” copper? This talk traces the evolution of this unique idea during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. In drawing together copper artifacts, oral accounts, colonial ethnographies, historical images, and postcolonial propaganda, this talk suggests that the “eating” of copper represents the deep material and conceptual tie between agriculture and mining in Central African environmental systems.

Indigenous miners consistently re-imagined modes of human engagement with the earth and its resources to foster new economic and ecological potentials. The historical persistence of this notion of “eating copper” underscores the profound cultural and economic attachments that have shaped Congolese communities’ relationships to extraction in a locale that has become the epicenter for global decarbonization and inequality initiatives.

Peter Vale is a historian of Africa, specializing in environmental systems, political economy, and empire to decolonization. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His present book project, The Copper Eaters: Inventing Capitalism in Central Africa, asks why, despite persistent economic decline and devastating ecological consequences, Congolese (DRC) workers, residents, and officials have maintained such a deep attachment to a copper mining industry dominated by extractive, foreign capital. Drawing on community bulletins in Kiswahili, Kisanga, and French; interviews with miners and executives; and archives across seven countries, he traces the layering of social institutions, environmental knowledge, and political interests that have shaped Congolese expectations towards mineral extraction. He is also working on developing a second research project, tentatively titled Pan-African Skies, which will offer the first transnational history of African airlines.

Monday, February 10, 2025

Friday, February 7, 2025

News and Events

Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson

Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson

Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

New York Times Opinion: Bard Professor Sean McMeekin’s Book on Stalin Is Recommended Reading for Historical Context on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

New York Times Opinion: Bard Professor Sean McMeekin’s Book on Stalin Is Recommended Reading for Historical Context on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Book Review: Professor Richard Aldous Reviews Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman

Three Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

Bard College Division of Social Studies Announces Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor in Historical Studies

“The Real Developmental Engine​:” Jeannette Estruth on the Relationship between Silicon Valley and the Military-Industrial Complex for The Drift

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”

Professor Richard Aldous Explores Parallels between a Cold War Spy Plane Crisis and China’s Balloon Incident for the Washington Post

Historical Study Events

2025

“The Real Developmental Engine:” Jeannette Estruth on the Relationship between Silicon Valley and the Military-Industrial Complex for The Drift