The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, commonly known as the MacMillan Center, is a research and educational center for international affairs and area studies at Yale University. It is named after Whitney MacMillan and his wife Betty.
As of 2021, the Macmillan Center currently offers degrees for both undergraduate and graduate levels. Undergraduate degrees include African Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Modern Middle East Studies, Russian and East European Studies, and South Asian Studies. Graduate degrees offered at the center include African Studies, East Asian Studies, and European and Russian Studies. [1]
Similarly, it is possible for graduating students to partake in a joint-degree program, where they can receive a master's. and an equivalent professional degree from one of four partnered Yale professional schools, with those being the Law School, the School of Management, the School of Public Health, and the School of the Environment. [2]
It is also possible for those to pursue a graduate certificate of concentration through the Councils on African, European, Latin American and Iberian, or Middle East Studies in conjunction with graduate-degree programs at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences or the professional schools. [3]
The MacMillan Center was created in the 1960s as the Concilium on International and Area Studies and later renamed in the 1980s as the Yale Center for International and Area Studies (YCIAS). [4] In April 2006, YCIAS was renamed as The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. [5] [6]
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition was founded in November 1998 by David Brion Davis and funded by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, founders of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. [7] Davis served as director till June 2004, [8] when historian David. W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, succeeded him as current director as of 2021. [9]
The center's mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery and its legacy, with focus on the chattel slave system and its destruction. The center seeks to foster an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the Western world by promoting interaction and exchange between scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications, educational outreach, and other programs and events. [10] In addition, the center offers postdoctoral and faculty fellowships and summer graduate research fellowships, and also sponsors the Frederick Douglass Book prize, an award for most outstanding non-fiction book in English on the subject of slavery, resistance, and/or abolition for the year it is given. [11] [12]
The Center for Historical Enquiry & the Social Sciences provides insight on the interplay between history and the present, focusing on large-scale social transformations and solutions to difficult social crises and problems. The center serves as a bridge between the humanities and social sciences in order to "better understand the world we live in." [13]
The Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions serves as an interdisciplinary pilot program with the intention of developing the study of the theory and practice of representative government in the Anglo-American tradition. It is supported by the Thomas W. Smith fund and the Jack Miller Center's Commercial Republic Initiative, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. [14]
The following alumni received either a B.A., M.A. or a Ph.D. in international relations. It is to note that the degree has been phased out and replaced by the master's degree in global affairs in 2013, which is also now provided by the Jackson Institute. [15]
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History was founded in New York City by businessmen-philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman in 1994 to promote the study and interest in American history.
Lewis E. "Lew" Lehrman is an American investment banker, businessman, politician, economist, and historian who supports the ongoing study of American history based on original source documents. He was presented the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2005 for his contributions to American history, the study of President Abraham Lincoln, and monetary policy. In 1982, Lehrman ran for Governor of New York against Democratic candidate Mario Cuomo, ultimately losing the election by two percentage points.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The George Washington Book Prize was instituted in 2005 and is awarded annually to the best book on the founding era of the United States; especially ones that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. It is administered by Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience; it is sponsored by Washington College in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington's Mount Vernon. At $50,000, the George Washington Book Prize is one of the largest book awards in the United States.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Richard Gilder Jr., was an American stockbroker and philanthropist. He was a co-founder of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He also headed the brokerage firm Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co., whose specialty is trading leveraged stocks and shortselling. Gilder joined forces with George Soros in revitalizing Central Park, which galvanized the creation of the Central Park Conservancy, of which he was a trustee.
The Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs is a professional school of Yale University that specializes in global affairs. It should not be confused with the older Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.
James G. Basker is an American scholar, writer, and educational leader. He is president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Robert Pierce Forbes is an American historian specializing in the politics and culture of the early American Republic, and the impact of slavery on the development of American institutions and modern society.
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize is awarded annually by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the intersection of African American and Black Atlantic visual representation, racial justice, and representational democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present.
Lehrman is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing is a 2013 historical book and analysis of a collection of writings by American slaves and befreed slaves. It was written by Christopher Hager and published by Harvard University Press.
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory is a 2001 book by the American historian David W. Blight. The book was awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book on slavery of 2001.
Laurent Dubois is the John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History & Principles of Democracy. A specialist on the history and culture of the Atlantic world who studies the Caribbean, North America, and France, Dubois joined the University of Virginia in January 2021, and will also serve as the Democracy Initiative’s Director for Academic Affairs. In this role, Dubois will spearhead the Democracy Initiative’s research and pedagogical missions and will serve as the director and lead research convener of the John L. Nau III History and Principles of Democracy Lab—the permanent core lab of the Initiative which will operate as the connecting hub for the entire project. His studies have focused on Haiti.
Thavolia Glymph is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Duke University. She specializes in nineteenth-century US history, African-American history and women’s history, authoring Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). Elected the 140th president of the American Historical Association, she is the first Black woman to serve in that office.
The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution is a 2018 book by Julius S. Scott, based on his influential but previously unpublished 1986 Duke University doctoral dissertation. The book traces the circulation of news in African diasporic communities in the Caribbean around the time of the Haitian Revolution, and links the "common wind" of shared information to political developments leading to the abolition of slavery in the British and French Caribbean.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women's and gender history.
The American Anti-Slavery Almanac was published yearly from 1836 to 1843 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, as one of the society's efforts to raise awareness of the realities of slavery in nineteenth-century America. The yearly almanac compiled calendars and astronomical data with anti-slavery literature, art, and advertisements in a small, neat pamphlet. The 1843 edition included works from authors such as William Lloyd Garrison and Thomas Moore, as well as accounts of recent slave rebellions and quotes from political speeches supporting the abolition of slavery. The almanac did not call for uprising or violence, but rather served as a means to spread the word about the anti-slavery cause.
Holly Lynton is an American photographer based in Massachusetts. Her portraits of modern rural communities and agrarian laborers in America have been exhibited both nationally and abroad.