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What’s Wrong with the One-State Solution: Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal

In this talk, Hussein Ibish examines the arguments put forward by Palestinian and Arab-American proponents of abandoning the goal of ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state and instead seeking to promote a single, democratic state in all of Mandate Palestine. Dr. Ibish argues that ending the occupation and peace with Israel, while difficult […]

How Southern Backwardness Made Wal-Mart Executives Love High Tech and Low Wages

Sam Walton founded Ozark-based Wal-Mart and made it a distinctively productive corporation in the decades immediately following World War II. The key to success was a rationalization of the firm's chaotic and expensive supply chain and the efficient employment of thousands of poorly-educated refugees from the agricultural revolution then sweeping the old Southwest. Bar codes, […]

The Empire of Cotton: A Global History

This lecture is part of the Colloquium on Work, Labor, and Political Economy series. Sven Beckert is the author of The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie (2001). He organizes the biannual History of Capitalism Conferences hosted by the Department of History at Harvard University. A copy of Beckert's […]

Victory Gardens: Join the Garden Revolution!

With interest in home gardens at the highest it has been in decades (even the White House has one), this event will take us back to another time when national interest was focused on household agriculture—the Victory Gardens of World War II. Our own Rose Hayden-Smith will talk about current national policy and models and […]

Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia

Drawn from Prof. Vladislav Zubok's new book of the same title (Harvard University Press, 2009), this talk examines one of the least-chronicled aspects of post-World War II European intellectual and cultural history: the the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. In pursuing the dream of a civil, democratic, socialist society, Russian intellectuals, writers, and […]