The last time President of the Deutsche Bundesbank Jens Weidmann spoke at Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), the economic landscape was fundamentally different. Returning almost seven years later, he addressed the consequences of a global pandemic, a joint shock to demand and supply, and the short-term as well as possibly longer run ramifications.
On a cloud-spackled Sunday last June, protesters in Bristol, England, gathered at a statue of Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century slave trader on whose watch more than eighty thousand Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic. “Pull it down!” the crowd chanted, as people yanked on a rope around the statue’s neck. A few tugs, and the figure clanged off its pedestal. A panel of its coat skirt cracked off to expose a hollow buttock as the demonstrators rolled the statue toward the harbor, a few hundred yards away, and then tipped it headlong into the water.
On Wednesday, Ana Lucia Araujo, professor of history at Howard University, and Mame-Fatou iang, associate professor of French and francophone studies at Carnegie Mellon University, discussed both the history and the way forward during “Race and Remembrance in Contemporary Europe,” presented by the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES).
The Trump presidency has brought American democracy to the breaking point. The president has encouraged violent extremists; deployed law enforcement and other public institutions as weapons against rivals; and undermined the integrity of elections through false claims of fraud, attacks on mail-in voting and an apparent unwillingness to accept defeat.
Howard University history professor Ana Lucia Araujo and Carnegie Mellon French professor Mame-Fatou Niang discussed recent debates regarding the removal of statues that depict slave traders and owners in Europe at an event Wednesday afternoon.
Hans-Helmut Kotz comments on the German Wirecard scandal.
Between 1814 and 1831, French slave traders trafficked approximately 200,000 individuals. Among those, a small but still surprising number stopped over in Haiti on their return voyage after selling captives elsewhere in the Americas.
Would anything about this strange moment have surprised H.G. Wells? He was called “the man who invented tomorrow” because he seemed to have the future figured out.
Maya Jasanoff Reviews, Sarah Cole's new book: Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century
They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.
