History and Foreign Affairs Roundtable Discussion &Book Club

A multifaceted history of the First Indochina War from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Ho Chi Minh's guerrilla fighters' defeat of French colonial might foreshadowed America’s later experience in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese fight for decolonization was a victory undreamed of by many other national liberation movements of the time, but at a cost of a million lives, mostly civilians.

A searing exploration of authoritarianism in the Middle East through the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s years in power in Cold War–era Egypt. We Are Your Soldiers examines seven countries—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya—and Nasser’s impact on each of them.

The larger-than-life Egyptian president ruled for eighteen years between the coup d’état he led in 1952 and his death in 1970, during which he wrested control of the Suez Canal from the British and French empires.

Award-winning history writer and journalist Clay Risen tells the story of McCarthyism and the Red Scare—the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in political hysteria during the decade following WW II. McCarthyism arose amid the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the onset of the Cold War.

An urgent, accessible, and important history, Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment.