Berlin, May 1915. Three feminists on an historical mission — Jane Addams and New York native Alice Hamilton from the United States, and Aletta Jacobs from the Netherlands — meet Wilbur H. Durborough. The American photographer and filmmaker had traveled to Berlin with his cameraman, Irving G. Ries, to shoot footage for his war documentary On the Firing Line with the Germans (1915). [Read more…] about Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton & The Hague Women’s Congress
Foreign Policy
Furnishing Foreign Relations: Benjamin Joy’s Sea Chest
The most recent episode of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s (MHS) Object of History podcast “Furnishing Foreign Relations: Benjamin Joy’s Sea Chest,” examines an object from the first diplomatic mission between the United States and India. [Read more…] about Furnishing Foreign Relations: Benjamin Joy’s Sea Chest
The Marquis de Lafayette: A Short Biography
2024 will mark the 200th anniversary of the return of the Marquis de Lafayette (Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette) to America. In 1824, almost 50 years after the start of the American Revolution, the 68-year-old Lafayette was invited by President James Monroe, an old Revolutionary War comrade and lifelong friend, to tour the United States.
Lafayette’s visit was one the major events of the early 19th century. It had the effect of unifying a country sometime fractured by electoral discord and reminding Americans of their hard won democracy. [Read more…] about The Marquis de Lafayette: A Short Biography
The Great Power of Small Native Nations
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Elizabeth Ellis, an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, joins to investigate the uncovered and recovered histories of the more than 40 distinct and small Native nations who called the Gulf South region home during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Ellis is the author of The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (Penn Press, 2022) [Read more…] about The Great Power of Small Native Nations
The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis
At the height of the Cold War, for two weeks in October 1962, the world teetered on the edge of thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier that fall, the Soviet Union, under orders from Premier Nikita Khrushchev, began to secretly deploy a nuclear strike force in Cuba, just 90 miles from the United States.
President John F. Kennedy said the missiles would not be tolerated and insisted on their removal. Khrushchev refused. [Read more…] about The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Sol Bloom: A Manhattan Leader In American WWII Foreign Policy
Sol Bloom (March 9, 1870 – March 7, 1949) was a song-writer and Congressman from New York who began his career as a sheet music publisher in Chicago. He served fourteen terms in the House of Representatives from the West Side of Manhattan, from 1923 until his death in 1949.
Bloom was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1939 to 1947 and again in 1949, an important period in the history of American foreign policy. [Read more…] about Sol Bloom: A Manhattan Leader In American WWII Foreign Policy