WorldBoston’s Chat & Chowder features key authors on international affairs in an engaging setting. Even virtually, the spirit of Chat & Chowder persists! We encourage everyone to BYOCB (Bring Your Own Chow(der) & Beverages), and also to join us for the informal post-Chat Chat with WorldBoston members and other friends (separate Zoom link provided in registration confirmation). Longtime and first-time chatters alike are welcome!
The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity.
Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?
Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves.
Margaret MacMillan is the visiting distinguished historian at the Council on Foreign Relations. She specializes in British imperial history and the international history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is an emeritus professor of international history at Oxford and a professor of history at the University of Toronto. She was provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto from 2002 to 2007 and warden of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford from 2007 to 2017. She has taught modern history and international relations at Ryerson University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford. Visiting appointments include the Humanitas Professor of War, Cambridge University, the Xerox Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. She is also an honorary fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Her publications include Women of the Raj (1988), Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2002), Nixon and Mao: the Week that Changed the World (2007), Dangerous Games: the Uses and Abuses of History (2009), The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (2013), and History’s People: Personalities and the Past (2015). She has a BA in history from the University of Toronto and a BPhil in politics and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
Read more about Margaret MacMillan here.
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