Of our programming season for the Academic Year of 2019 and 2020. My name is jason steinhauer. Im director of the Lepage Center at villanova, a relatively new center created in 2016. It opened its doors in 2017. Our mission is to bring history to bear on contemporary issues. That is what we do all yearround. Some of the issues we have examined in the past have been the issue of fake news and historical perspective, stuff on endless war. Last year we did a series on democracy and the history of democracy and credit participation. Democratic process evasion. This year is revisionist history. We will talk about that over six events and through the lens of various topics revising early america. Before i go further i want to make you aware it is being filmed both by the university and by cspans American History tv. This event will be on cspans Video Library and a couple of weeks. We are not going live, dont worry. For the benefit of the cspan viewers in the future, we are glad you were with
It looks like we are complete. We start this segment in the summer of 1921, and in that summer, soviet russia is the scene of a catastrophic famine, as george nash mentioned earlier. Millions are threatened with starvation and disease. Most of them, as you will see in a moment, i will have a map up, were situated in the volga river valley. The soviet government led by Vladimir Lenin is unable to cope with the disaster on its own, so it is forced to allow an appeal to go out for foreign assistance and at that time, on that day, in the summer of 1921, there is only one man on the planet in a position to answer that call, and that of course is the man you see here. That is Herbert Hoover, as chairman of the American Relief administration, the a. R. A. As george nash told us, since 1919 the a. R. A. Is a private relief organization, relief agency. But i would say really, at least for this part of the hoover humanitarian story, we should say it is quasiprivate. Hoover is the secretary of co