Nation & World

All Nation & World

  • The ripples of Brown v. Board

    Panelists say Brown v. Board of Education is still a banner for racial equality, but its inspiration may not be matched by its actual legal impact.

  • Heading for Congress

    Twenty-four incoming members of Congress visited the Harvard Kennedy School this week for a four-day conference to help prepare them for their new jobs.

  • The hard way

    Four people who risked their careers and even their lives to stand on principle shared their stories in an event sponsored by the Carr Center for Human Rights.

  • Nuclear weapons, primal fears

    With 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world, analysts gathered at Harvard with a message: Just say none — but prepare for the worst.

  • Echoes of Tiananmen Square

    In her freshman seminar, lecturer Rowena He sheds light on the Chinese government’s 1989 crackdown on dissent by melding the personal with the academic.

  • Italy and Africa, entwined

    Students in Giuliana Minghelli’s new course on cultural migrations between Italy and Africa get an up-close view of the colonial era, witnessing a performance by one of the assigned authors and developing their own creative responses.

  • Giant steps

    Scholars and editors debate and celebrate the legacy of their late mentor, Samuel P. Huntington.

  • Innovative education

    In a speech, Arizona State president presents new ideas that could fuel higher educational innovation over the next 40 years.

  • The outlook for Africa

    Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued that the United States’ continued involvement in African affairs is good for international stability and for the American idea in “The National Interest, Africa, and the African Diaspora: Does U.S. Foreign Policy Connect the Dots?” — the first of three W.E.B. Du Bois lectures on the black experience in American foreign policy.

  • A friend in the Middle East

    If American leaders want help disentangling — and possibly even solving — complex problems in the Middle East, they should look to Saudi Arabia for leadership, said Prince Turki Al Faisal, former ambassador to the United States, in a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics on Friday (Nov. 19).

  • Like-minded

    Former Washington, D.C., chancellor of schools Michelle Rhee, former Florida governor and current visiting fellow Jeb Bush, and the Center for American Progress’ John Podesta tackled the politics of education reform at an Institute of Politics forum moderated by former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

  • Attention!

    War is an unpredictable, nonlinear interplay of policy and strategy, Adm. Mike Mullen said in a Harvard talk, and “sense and adjust” is the way to proceed.

  • Divided they stand

    What to expect in 2011 and beyond? After this month’s midterm elections, Harvard’s resident analysts look ahead to Congress’ upcoming agenda, from tax reform to foreign policy to the 2012 political calculus.

  • Moot points

    Harvard Law School students and United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts participated in the final round of the annual HLS Ames Moot Court Competition on Nov. 16.

  • Protecting justice

    Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court warned of troubled courts and politicized judiciaries while delivering the Paul Tillich Lecture at the Memorial Church at Harvard.

  • Giving children ‘Room to Read’

    Building on the library model developed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in the late 1800s, philanthropist John Wood and his nonprofit, Room to Read, are aiding education in the developing world.

  • Setting the stage for Roe v. Wade

    Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter and now the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale University, and Reva Siegel, the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale, provided new perspectives on interpreting Roe v. Wade during the 2010-11 Maurine and Robert Rothschild Lecture at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

  • Alumni go to Washington

    Harvard alumni elected to Washington offices, governorships.

  • The rights of women

    UNESCO director-general cites progress on international rights, but says gender equality lags in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, where as many as 12 million girls never attend school.

  • Trading places

    Economist Marc Melitz improves models of international trade by viewing broad trends in tandem with the behavior of individual corporations.

  • The danger of us against them

    Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and former congressman Joe Scarborough, now the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” identified big problems with the U.S. political system and traded ideas on how to address them during a discussion at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

  • To the heart of a movement

    Professor Jill Lepore, a contributor to The New Yorker, examines the movement behind the tea party in “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History.”

  • Pushing back

    Deborah Bial, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D.’04, founder of the Posse Foundation, spoke to a Harvard audience about her organization’s efforts to help economically disadvantaged kids prepare for and then succeed in college.

  • The bad news on Afghanistan

    In a talk at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh said he was disappointed in the Obama administration’s approach to Afghanistan and criticized U.S. journalists for not being aggressive enough in their coverage of American foreign policy.

  • Where men have more than one wife

    Radcliffe researcher explores the connection between cultures where men have more than one wife and increased violence.

  • American banks: On the mend

    Financial reforms just enacted, said FDIC chair Sheila Bair, will put risk where it belongs, and usher in a new era of stability, efficiency, and consumer protection.

  • Peering into the crystal ball

    Students at Harvard Kennedy School try their hands at political forecasting for the upcoming midterm elections.

  • Tough love between U.S., Pakistan

    Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi of Pakistan sketched a blueprint for strengthening U.S.-Pakistan ties during a talk at the Kennedy School on Oct. 18.

  • Food for thought

    Harvard authorities on Southeast Asia see trouble on the horizon for rice production and consumption by billions of people dependent on the grain. The threats come from water shortages, salinization, and bad resource management.

  • Seeking a finer balance

    In a two-day conference a group of Harvard scholars joined leaders in the private and public sectors to explore gender gaps in societal, political, and economic realms, as well as the means of developing policy, corporate practices, and leadership strategies to foster gender diversity.