July 14, 2016. On Bastille Day, Kluge Fellow Michael Sizer discusses the popular politics of late medieval Paris (1380-1422) and what bearing it may have on the way we understand popular political culture today. The late Middle Ages was one of the most tumultuous periods in European political history, featuring revolts, riots, popular preachers, processions, and other engagements of the people in the political realm that was "unheard of in previous times" according to one chronicler of the period. Speaker Biography: Michael Sizer is a historian with interests in political culture and philosophy, cultural history, interdisciplinary studies of literature and ideas, urban history, and the history of revolt and revolutio. He received his Ph.D. in medieval French history from the University of Minnesota in 2008, and during his graduate studies he was also a fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7515
July 28, 2016. Kluge Fellow Jeong-Mi Park discusses how the South Korean government controlled prostitution catering to servicemen in the last century, in the context of war, military occupation, economic development and globalization. She also reveals the ways in which the Korean government worked to change the perception of sex workers from "dangerous" women into "patriotic" citizens who contribute to national security. Speaker Biography: Jeong-Mi Park earned her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at Seoul National University. She worked as a research assistant professor at Hanyang University as a historical sociologist. She has analyzed the historical transformations of state policies, citizenship and social movements in South Korea from a perspective of gender and sexuality. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7552
Aug. 18, 2016. This talk by Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South Juan Cole will provide a tour of the irenic messages of the Qur'an. The Muslim scripture, the Qur'an or Koran, has been analyzed a great deal for its ideas on a whole range of subjects, from late antique economic practices to notions of the just war. The literature on its ideas regarding peace, however, is remarkably small. Yet peace is central to this book on a whole range of dimensions, from community relations to inner, mystical composure, to visions of heaven and the world after the Judgment Day. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7500
May 26, 2016. John Sexton, immediate past president of New York University and current Kluge Chair in American Law in Governance, offers his perspective on the future of American higher education. The university has been one of American society's most durable institutions for more than a century -- and the modern research university its most sophisticated presentation. Yet globalization, technology and market forces are likely to reshape the form and function of the research university in the coming decades. What are the relevant forces and what are their likely effects? For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7494
May 12, 2016. Kluge Fellow Theo Christov examines the language of Emer Vattel's "Law of Nations" (1758) and the impact of Vattel on turning the newly rising United States into an international actor and eventual global power. One of the most reliable authorities during the Continental Congress (1774-1789), "Law of Nations" was not only the most consulted book on how to turn dependent British colonies into independent political actors on the international stage; it also marked the Declaration of Independence chiefly as a declaration of interdependence with other major European powers and the Constitution as a powerful statement of international law. Speaker Biography: Theo Christov is assistant professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is also been a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University and received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2008. He is the author of "Before Anarchy: Hobbes and His Critics in Modern International Thought." For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7444
May 5, 2016. Four medical researchers at the forefront of developing treatments for depression present new findings in a special conference held at the Library's John W. Kluge Center. The program was part of the annual meeting of the Library of Congress Scholars Council. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7417
June 23, 2016. Kluge Fellow Andrew Devereux examined the legal and moral questions of empire on the threshold of the early modern era by casting light on Spain's expansionary ventures in the Mediterranean basin in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. His talk focused on Spain's Mediterranean expansion, particularly on Spanish designs on the Holy Land and the ways in which the acquisition of the title to the defunct crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem served as the basis for legal arguments justifying war and conquest in a range of lands inhabited by non-Christian peoples. Speaker Biography: Andrew Devereux is assistant professor of history at Loyola Marymount University. He is a historian of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. Devereux earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where his dissertation examined Spanish imperial ideologies in the context of the Mediterranean world. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7409
May 19, 2016. Kissinger Chair Bruce Jentleson looks across five dimensions of global peace and security--major power geopolitics, building international institutions, fostering reconciliation of peoples, advancing freedom and human rights and promoting sustainability. Who were the 20th century world leaders who forged transformational breakthroughs in global peace and security? Why did they make the crucial choices that they did? How did they pursue their goals? What are the lessons for the 21st century global agenda? Jentleson structures the profiles of leaders in a Who-Why-How-What framework to both gain better understanding of key 20th century events and draw lessons for 21st century challenges. Kissinger Chair Bruce Jentleson looks across five dimensions of global peace and security--major power geopolitics, building international institutions, fostering reconciliation of peoples, advancing freedom and human rights and promoting sustainability. Who were the 20th century world leaders who forged transformational breakthroughs in global peace and security? Why did they make the crucial choices that they did? How did they pursue their goals? What are the lessons for the 21st century global agenda? Jentleson structures the profiles of leaders in a Who-Why-How-What framework to both gain better understanding of key 20th century events and draw lessons for 21st century challenges. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7393
June 2, 2016. Much of central Paris was burned during the Franco-Prussian War that saw the death of the Commune. The resulting ruins of Paris at once became a tourist attraction, and the subject of remarkable photographs made for the tourist trade. The novelist Gustave Flaubert came to visit the ruins, and found in them a lesson for his contemporaries: if only they had understood the novel he had published some months earlier, "Sentimental Education," this cataclysmic destruction never could have happened. Peter Brooks explores that cataclysm, and the specific role of photography in the historiography of the moment. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7369
April 26, 2016. David Hollenbach discusses the number of people displaced by war and other crises, which today is higher than at any time since World War II, and the responsibilities of the U.S., of other nations, and of nongovernmental organizations and religious communities to assist these people. Speaker Biography: David Hollenbach is Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library's John W. Kluge Center. He is the university chair in human rights and international justice at Boston College, where he is also the director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. He was educated at St. Joseph's University with a B.S. in Physics, and then an M.A. from St. Louis University, and a Ph.D. in Religious Ethics from Yale University. Hollenbach has published extensively on Christian ethics, Christian social ethics, human rights, refugees, contemporary theories of justice and the role of religion in public life. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7360
March 17, 2016. Nathaniel Comfort convenes four distinguished scientists on-stage for a live oral history interview about the origins of the RNA world, the world at the dawn of life, before DNA, arising nearly four billion years ago. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7353
Oct. 1, 2015. Alan Lomax Fellow Cece Conway delivers a multimedia presentation on the instrumental and musical history of Appalachian traditional music, with illustration from African and Appalachian musicians, instruments, videos, sounds and images. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7330
April 19, 2016. The second annual Daniel K. Inouye Distinguished Lecture at the Library of Congress featured former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta and former U.S. Sen. Alan K. Simpson, who discussed how the United States balances national security with the protection of Americans' civil liberties. Former White House correspondent Ann Compton, who covered both leaders during their long years of public service, moderated. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7329
April 21, 2016. Jennifer Baum Sevec identifies cross-cultural and interdisciplinary contributions to modern computing using items from the Library of Congress collections. Baum Sevec leverages the information theory of pioneering physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who proposed that the fundamental significance of existence--the "it from bit"--originates in the information-theoretic source of binary indications or bits. The observer-participant dynamic was an elemental part of Wheeler's theory which will figure into Baum Sevec's analysis. Speaker Biography: Kluge Staff Fellow Jennifer Baum Sevec is head of the U.S. Monographs Section in the Library's Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7311
March 31, 2016. Kluge Fellow Ilya Dines discusses his current project to catalogue 150 medieval manuscripts and fragments held by the Library of Congress. He analyzes the importance of the Library's medieval manuscript collection and outlines the role it could play in expanding and deepening understandings of the medieval era. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7313
Feb. 18, 2016. In his "House Divided" speech, Abraham Lincoln accused Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Senator Stephen Douglas of a conspiracy to perpetuate slavery in the United States. According to Lincoln, this conspiracy took form in the 1857 Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which excluded African Americans from U.S. citizenship. Kluge Fellow Rachel Shelden re-examines Lincoln's conspiracy charge in the context of how the federal political system -- and particularly the Supreme Court -- operated in the mid-19th century. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7288
Jan. 14, 2016. Kluge Fellow Anna Browne Ribeiro describes European accounts of travel in Amazonia, depicting a savage and wondrous place. Over the centuries, travel writing fed into Enlightenment thought and vice versa, never losing its fantastical qualities, until Amazonia was transformed into a modern global icon: the relict, sparsely populated virgin forest of a bygone era. Ribeiro examines how, in spite of archaeological evidence that counters this narrative, the language of colonialism shaped, and continues to shape, how the Amazon and Amazonian peoples are depicted, conceptualized, and most importantly, managed. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7281
Oct. 8, 2015. On the 50th anniversary of Immigration Amendments Act of 1965, Ruth Wasem discusses the history of the legislative drive to end race- and nationality-based immigration, from World War II to the passage of the Act, and the importance of the effort in defining the nation that America is today. Following the lecture, two distinguished scholars of immigration, Susan F. Martin and Marta Tienda, provide commentary and discussion. Speaker Biography: Ruth Wasem is Kluge Staff Fellow and a domestic policy specialist in the Library's Congressional Research Service. Speaker Biography: Susan F. Martin is Donald G. Herzberg professor of international migration and director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. Speaker Biography: Marta Tienda is Morris P. During Professor in demographic studies, professor of sociology and public affairs, and director of the program in Latino studies at Princeton University. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7245
Nov. 12, 2015. Three fellows at the Library's John W. Kluge Center discussed the role of the state in establishing geographic, technological and bureaucratic controls over the flow of peoples, cultures and beliefs across borders. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7223
Sep. 17, 2015. German Fellow Sibylle Machat has spent months at the Kluge Center researching images of planet Earth in American children's books from 1843 to the present. How Earth looks from space is well-known today; satellite imagery of the planet is now a part of our collective consciousness. But before public access to photographic representations of Earth, how the planet appeared from space was collectively imagined through the imagery in children's books. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7201