Name: A Book Discussion on "Foundations of the American Century"
Start: 2012-05-31T08:00:00-04:00
End: 2012-05-31T10:00:00-04:00
Location: Hudson Institute

May 2012

Past Event

A Book Discussion on "Foundations of the American Century"

Past Event

Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters

May 31, 2012

May 2012

Past Event

1015 15th Street, N.W., 6th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

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Speakers:

William Schambra

Hudson Senior Fellow and Director, Bradley Center for Philanthropy & Civic Renewal

Thomas Asher

Program Director at the Social Science Research Council

Kathleen McCarthy

Professor of American History at The Graduate Center of CUNY

Inderjeet Parmar

Author and Professor of Government at The University of Manchester

Patricia Rosenfield

Carnegie Scholar at the Rockefeller Archives Center

"Although they do contribute to society in positive ways, my research over the past decade and a half, revealed in Foundations of the American Century, shows that the big U.S. foundations—Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie—made fundamental contributions to America?s rise to global leadership, a global imperium sometimes more benignly promoted as the 'American century.'

This includes some of the darkest chapters in American foreign policy: hubristically guiding economic development policies that exacerbated problems in the newly independent Nigeria and played a role in its slide into civil war; sponsoring and guiding opponents of the leftist Sukharno administration in Indonesia and contributing to the bloodshed that accompanied the rise of the right-wing militarist Suharto regime; and funding and training right wing economists as well as their centrist and even leftist opponents in Chile as it careened into the bloody military coup of 1973."

This excerpt is from Inderjeet Parmar's new book __Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations and the Rise of American Power__. The Bradley Center hosted an event on May 31st to discuss the questions raised by this new work.

Required Reading

Inderjeet Parmar, Not So Cuddly, berfrois, April 4, 2012.

Inderjeet Parmar, Foundation Networks and American Hegemony, European Journal of American Studies, February 2012.

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