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Obama and the Struggle to Reform U.S. Policy

Skocpol is the author, most recently, of Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn; and The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. hm 4/27/10

The Deep Prehistory of Indian Gaming: The Perspective from Mesoamerica

Although it was not until the early 1980s that high stakes Indian Gaming was permitted in the United States, at the time of the arrival of Europeans in North America high stakes gambling was widespread among indigenous peoples. This is particularly well documented in Mesoamerica where 16th century historians describe a variety of games of […]

Subversion or Citizenship?: Civil Wars, State-making, and National Imaginings in Peru: A Historical and Theoretical Perspective

Unlike other American countries, Peru does not have a memory of its nineteenth-century civil wars. Peru's political confrontations lacked the clear-cut ideological contours that characterized civil strife in, say, the United States, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, or Uruguay, where nineteenth-century struggles created enduring memories that, in turn, shaped much of these countries? political identities and national […]

The Muslim Scare in Europe: Hysteria or Threat?

Award-winning author and journalist Ian Buruma will discuss the debates about Muslim radicalism, immigration, and the challenge from religion in several European countries where anti-immigrant populism is on the rise and Islam is the main focus – from the arguments about multiculturalism in Britain to the proposed burqa ban in France. Is the danger posed […]

The End of the Public University and the Beginning of the Next

History is replete with nations that declined because their leaders gradually undermined their own best institutions. The U.S. now appears to be doing this to its exemplary higher education system, with the University of California serving as Exhibit A. This lecture will look at the contradictions within the American funding model for higher education, and […]

Does it Take More Courage to be a Cybernetician Than to be a Gunman?

Prof. Medina's research deals with the adoption of computer technologies in Latin America, especially cybernetics in Allende's Chile. From 1971 to 1973 Chilean and British engineers, working under the direction of the pioneering British cybernetician Stafford Beer, built a computer network to help make Chile’s socialist revolution a reality. The team called the system Cybersyn. […]

4 Argentina

Presentations by Suzanne Levine, Seth Wulsin, Damian Nemirovsky and Kacey Link. hm 5/19/10