Speakers: Daniel Bessner, University of Washington and Prof. Andrew Preston, University of Cambridge 

Abstract:

Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual explores the interwar origins of the US national security state. The book argues that the experience of the Weimar Republic's collapse compelled a transatlantic generation of German and US intellectuals to adopt a jaundiced view of public opinion that they eventually institutionalized in the national security organizations of the early Cold War.

Professor Andrew Preston of the University of Cambridge will be commenting on the talk. 

Biographies:

Dr. Daniel Bessner (Ph.D., Duke University) is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

Daniel works on intellectual and cultural history, U.S. foreign relations, the history of democratic thought, and the history of the social sciences. He is the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, which is part of the United States in the World series at Cornell University Press

Professor Andrew Preston specializes in the history of American foreign relations. More specifically, his teaching and research interests lie in the intersections between the national and the international, the foreign and the domestic, including the influence that domestic politics and culture—particularly religion—have had on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

He is currently working on three major projects: a book on the idea of “national security” in American history, which will be published by Harvard University Press; co-editing (with Lien-Hang Nguyen) Vol. 2 of the forthcoming 3-volume Cambridge History of the Vietnam War; and co-editing (with Brooke Blower) Vol. 3 of the forthcoming 4-volume Cambridge History of America and the World