School of Historical Studies

The American Revolution had an enormous, but bitterly divisive impact on European (and Canadian and Latin America) political thought and attitudes. From 1776 began a furious ideological war within the USA over the question of democracy that helped...

What brought about the current chaos in the Middle East? Did the machinations of the Cold War exhaust the region leaving it unable to develop new relationships between governor and governed? As Americans, how much should we criticize our role or...

Pablo Picasso did not speak often about abstraction, but when he did, it was either to dismiss it as complacent decoration or to declare its very notion an oxymoron. The root of this hostility is to be found in the impasse that the artist reached in...

In this public lecture, Michael Pettis will explore China’s tumultuous stock market and its impact on the global economy. A Wall Street veteran at Bear Stearns and Credit Suisse First Boston, Pettis has the unique distinction of having been right...

Patricia Crone, Professor Emerita in the School of Historical Studies, helped to establish the Institute as a recognized center for the pursuit of Islamic culture and history. Crone’s insightful work shed important new light on the critical...

We should not assume that making sense of post-Soviet Russia was ever going to be easy. Great Powers that lose empires bear grudges and the speed with which an empire is lost can exacerbate the problem. No one can expect that a powerful country run...

In this lecture, Krause explores the methods used to investigate European population history about the time of agricultural transition. Using genome data, Krause explains how at least three ancestral groups, the Hunter-Gathers, the Early Farmers and...

Joan Breton Connelly, Hetty Goldman Member (2010­–11) in the School of Historical Studies, explores how the Parthenon sculptures conveyed genealogical myths that answered for the Athenians the basic human question: Where do I come from? She shows...

The Qurʾān defines itself as the last, perfect link in a chain of progressive divine revelations. This determines the ambivalent attitude of the Qurʾān and the Muslim tradition towards the two earlier monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity...

In this lecture, Joshua A. Fogel, Professor at York University, discusses how in 1862, the Japanese government, seeing the writing on the wall of international relations and recognizing that it would be impossible to continue keeping itself from...