| "New Boundaries for the World:
The Visions of Eight World War II Leaders"
Leaders make plans and then implement
them; they believe what they say and they intend to turn their words
into reality. The central figures of the Second World War each had their
own ideas of how the world “should” look and be administered. In this
lecture Prof. Weinberg will review the proposals about postwar national
boundaries as they were expressed by World War II leaders before and
during the war. He will also show how and why some of these proposals
changed. He will focus on Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Tojo Hideki,
Chiang Kai-shek, Charles de Gaulle, Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, and
Franklin Roosevelt. Weinberg will also detail the differences between
Churchill and Roosevelt, especially on the question of colonies. Then,
as today, the visions of world leaders must be taken seriously.
Dr. Weinberg is Emeritus Professor of
History at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill and one of the
world’s leading experts on the Second World War. He has also held many
important research and teaching positions during his illustrious career.
He has served as a Research Analyst for the War Documentation Project at
Columbia University, as Director of the American Historical Association
Project for Microfilming Captured German Documents, as President of the
German Studies Association. He has been a fellow of the American Council
of Learned Societies, a Fulbright professor at the University of Bonn, a
Guggenheim Fellow, and a Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is a prolific scholar who’s major works
include Guide to Captured German Documents (1952), Germany and
the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 (1954), The Foreign Policy of
Hitler’s Germany (1970; republished 1994), A World at Arms: A
Global History of World War II (1994, Second edition, 2005; winner
of the Herbert Hoover Book Award in 1994), Hitler’s Second Book: The
Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf (2003), and Visions of Victory:
The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders and the second edition of his A
World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (2005). |
