Might expect to help them. But then the side effects of the radiation will be the side effects of the cancer, and the department of defense wasnt particularly interested in the effects of radiation on people with metastatic cancer, they wanted to know what the effects of radiation were on a healthy 23yearold pilot. And that could be best studied by irradiating people whose karch cancers were not going to respond to the radiation. Most of the patients who were irradiated were poor. Most of the patients who were irradiated were africanamerican. All of them had cancer. Some of them werent all that sick. Some of them were still ambulatory, some of them were still going to work. The radiation had some pretty serious effects. Out of the 90 people who were irradiated, 21 of them were dead within a month. And heres whats there are many things bothersome about this. We know that when you irradiate people, they have side effects. You can get nauseated, you can get very nauseated. But the departm
Four decades or even more, its a little short of remarkable that were marking 25 years since the fall of the berlin wall. Its remarkable because on the one hand we can recall that event so vividly, but on the other hand, it sometimes seems like it took place a lifetime ago. Its also remarkable because for those of us who pursued our degrees and published our first books during the preceding decades, in some cases before the construction of the wall [ laughter ] its collapse seemed so unimaginable. In fact, if i can indulge you for a second, the year before the collapse, i organized a conference on john foster dulles. No one was more associated with the cold war. Some of you were there. There was lots of talk about the integration of europe. The soviets new thinking. Glasnost. Perestroika but no one was talking about the reunification this was the time john gaddes began their conferences on soviet and american relations. First time soviet and American Scholars got together. And Scott Ar
Will, within the communist world would react to remove those like gorbachev who tried to push the world forward through with reform. And ultimately, we see this fear coming true in august of 1991 when there was a conservative coup, at that point without very likelihood of success. But nonetheless, the great fear that that could generate into civil war, Ethnic Violence and the like. So i argue that there are really two moments, therefore, when president bush essentially took off the hypocratic gloves, if you will. The first was with reunification of germany. He believed in a nato context it was necessary to keep future sta bill nit europe because having nato in europe allowed the americans to also stay in europe and he believed firmly the only thing that kept the peace since 1945 in europe was the american presence. Therefore he pushed hard for reunification an the terms he needed which was keeping germany in nato. And the second moment was the gulf war. When this strikes me as really t
Scholarship about the causes for the fall of the wall but the proximate causes, the short term events are not wellknown in the nongerman speaking world and so i decided for the anniversary to try to put together that story as best i could and then of course as always happens when you start researching something it becomes more complicated than you expected. It ended up being a fascinating rg 31 so let me just gallop through some of the ideas in my book and then if we have questions we can talk more about them. I want to talk a little bit about the precursor to the night of november 9, 1989, when the wall opens. And then a tiny bit about how we think about these events, memory and legacy, themes that my colleagues will emphasize as well. So its important to say that the first unexpected event actually happened not in berlin but in moscow which is to say there were a rapid series of deaths. In 2 1 2 years there were four leaders of the soviet union, of course, after brezhnev died. Then a
Stag field. The university of chicago is an interesting institution. I had the opportunity to spend some time there. The stadium fell into disrepair, and here you see a chart which shows the joseph regin stein library. Imagine this if you can. They tore down their football stadium to build a library. True story. They also left the big ten in 1946. And it left room for another member to join the big ten to make up the full complement of ten. Of course, in 1949, Michigan State university was admitted to the big ten. So the university of chicago left, Michigan State came in. They had a president who was known to observe, when i feel like exercising, i lie down until the feeling goes away. So they were not big into the intracollegiate sports scene. However, in 1942, they still were in the big ten and stag field still existed. It had squash courts under the stadium. And it was on those squash courts that an event transpired that truly changed the course of history. December 2nd, 1942. They