Talks from the Hoover Institution

Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Hauck Auditorium | Hoover Institution, Stanford University

The Hoover Institution hosts India's Opportunities in the 2020s on Tuesday, May 17, 2022 from 6:00PM – 7:00PM PT in Hauck Auditorium at the David & Joan Traitel Building at the Hoover Institution.

You are cordially invited to a special event marking the launch of the Hoover Institution's new program on Strengthening US-India Relations India's Opportunities in the 2020s A Dialogue between Condoleezza Rice Tad and Dianne Taube Director, Hoover Institution, and N. Chandrasekaran Chairman, Tata Sons, with questions to follow.

SPEAKERS
Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm. Rice served as the sixty-sixth secretary of state of the United States (2005-2009) and as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser (2001 to 2005).

Natarajan Chandrasekaran is Chairman of the Board at Tata Sons, the holding company and promoter of all Tata Group companies. Chandra joined the Board of Tata Sons in October 2016 and was appointed Chairman in January 2017. He also chairs the Boards of several group operating companies, including Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Power, Air India, Tata Chemicals, Tata Consumer Products, Indian Hotel Company and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – of which he was Chief Executive from 2009-17.

Friday, December 3, 2021 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Michael Douma will be sharing a chapter from his new book on the cultural and economic history of Dutch slavery in New York. There is a long-established view that slavery in New York was neither efficient nor profitable, or perhaps only marginally profitable in its early years. And yet for two hundred years New Yorkers paid to acquire slaves to be put to labor for profit, not just to serve as household decoration. There were some 22,000 slaves in New York across the 18th century who could speak Dutch. Using novel archeological, bills of sale, newspaper, and probate records, the chapter demonstrates that slavery was a long-term investment in New York and that the prices of slaves remained stable over the long run.

Michael Douma is assistant research professor at Georgetown University, where he serves as the Director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. His research focuses on 19th century US history, the Dutch world, and the philosophy and methods of history. He is the author of The Colonization of Freed African Americans in Suriname, Veneklasen Brick: The Liberal Approach to the Past , and Creative Historical Writing.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM
This talk is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

What Winston Churchill’s Relations with Russia Can Teach Us for Today

Thursday, October 29, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

“If only I could dine with Stalin once a week,” Winston Churchill said with unusual naïveté during the Second World War, “then there would be no trouble at all.” When it came to dealing with Russia, Churchill went through five distinct phases of engagement, of which the most dangerous was thinking that Stalin was a normal statesman for whom personal relations mattered, rather than a hardened Russian ideologue and nationalist for whom only Realpolitik mattered. Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts will explore how Churchill’s experience can help the West in its dealings with Vladimir Putin.

Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College. He has written over a dozen books including Salisbury: Victorian Titan, Napoleon the Great, and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which was a New York Times Bestseller and won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and the National Army Museum, and received his PhD from Cambridge University.

ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUP

https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group 

This interview is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

Friday, November 12, 2021 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you give up your part of Germany, NATO will “not shift one inch eastward.” Controversy erupted almost immediately over this 1990 exchange—but more important was the decade to come, when the words took on new meaning. Gorbachev let his Germany go, but Washington rethought the bargain, not least after the Soviet Union’s own collapse in December 1991. Washington realized it could not just win big but win bigger. Their new approach: Not one inch of territory need be off limits to NATO.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, Sarotte uses new evidence and interviews to show how, in the decade that culminated in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, the United States and Russia undermined a potentially lasting partnership. Not One Inchshows what went wrong.

Please click here to read the introduction to Prof. Sarotte's new book.

An expert in the history of international relations, Mary Sarotte is the Kravis Distinguished Professor at Hopkins-SAIS, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and visiting faculty at Harvard’s Center for European Studies. She is the author, among other books, of The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, both of which were selected as Financial Times Books of the Year, among other distinctions and awards. In the past, she has worked as a journalist at The Economist and Die Zeit, served as a White House Fellow, and held fellowships with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.
Norman Naimark is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Robert and Florence McDonnell professor of East European History at Stanford. His current research focuses on Soviet policies and actions in Europe after World War II and on genocide and ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM
This talk is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022 Virtual Meeting

The Hoover Institution Economic Policy Working Group invites you to a panel discussion, California Homelessness: New Policies to Address an Intractable Problem, with Lee Ohanian, Kevin Kiley, and Michael Shellenberger.

This virtual event brings together three experts on California’s homelessness crisis to focus on understanding why this problem continues to worsen, despite spending record amounts every year, and on how alternative policies will reduce homelessness and more broadly improve the quality-of-life for all Californians.

The event will be structured as a panel discussion, moderated by Hoover Senior Fellow Lee E. Ohanian, who writes frequently about California homelessness in his weekly Hoover column, “California on Your Mind”. His columns focus on understanding why the more we spend, the more homeless we have, and how we must change policies, ranging from opioid abuse tolerance to affordable housing business costs, to make progress.

Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R, Rocklin) is one of our panelists, and who is one of the state legislators who created the Republican Legislative Caucus’s plan consisting of 15 new bills to address homelessness. These ideas range from conducting data analytics to understand just who the homeless are, where they live, and how many have mental health and substance abuse problems, to reforming existing state laws to reduce the cost of building new housing, which currently exceeds $1,000 per square foot for cookie-cutter studio apartment units. Kevin is one of the young leaders within the Republican party. He has fought continuously to reverse AB 5, which makes it illegal for some Californians to work as an independent contractor, and he has written several commonsense Assembly bills to reduce living costs in the state, including suspending the State’s gasoline tax to address our extremely high gasoline prices.

Gubernatorial candidate and author Michael Shellenberger is our other panelist. Michael’s recent book San Fransicko: Why Progessives Ruin Cities has been on the bestseller list since its publication last year. The book powerfully and persuasively describes how well-intentioned policies, such as San Francisco’s willingness to tolerate illegal drug use and its refusal to prosecute drug-related crimes is damaging the city beyond recognition.

A review summarized the book’s theme as follows:

Progressives have embraced 'victimology,' a belief system wherein society’s downtrodden are subject to no rules or consequences for their actions. This ideology, cultivated in cities like San Francisco for decades and widely adopted over the past two years, is the key to understanding, and thus solving, our crises of homelessness, drug overdoses and crime.

This unique event will highlight how and why California has gone off track in addressing one of California’s most important issues and will show how California can constructively and humanely address this issue with new ideas. The first hour will be devoted to the panel discussion, followed by 15-20 minutes of Q&A.