A compelling way to renew the study of our collective past. In the spring of 1979, in my second semester of college teaching (as a visiting assistant professor of history at Oberlin), an absolutely brilliant undergraduate wrote a scathing critique of dependency theory. That theory, associated with the German American economic historian Andre Gunder Frank, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney and the Argentine and Brazilian economists Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado, among others, emphasized the historical role of colonialism and imperialism in creating unequal economic relations between countries.