We are bringing Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Martin Sherwin to USLA to discuss his recent book, Gambling With Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Professor Sherwin, a historian of the nuclear age, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his political biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, will offer a new view of the Cuban missile crisis based on years of research. At Dr. Sherwin’s request, USLA Chair Peter Winn will be his interlocutor, concluding a conversation that began more than four decades ago with their co-authored article on the United States and Cuba in The Wilson Quarterly.
Martin Sherwin is the University Professor of History at George Mason University. For 27 years prior to coming to GMU in 2006, he was the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University. His book (with Kai Bird) American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography as well as the English Speaking Union Book Award. Dr. Sherwin is also the author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies which won the Bernath Prize awarded by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations as well as the American History Book Prize awarded by the National Historical Society. It was a 1976 finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Professor Sherwin has been on the faculties of U.C. Berkeley, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Cornell universities. He has also held appointments as the Cardozo Fund Visiting Professor of American History at Yale University and as the Barnette-Miller Visiting Professor of International Relations at Wellesley College. Sherwin has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
We will meet via Zoom. Please email Caitlin Liss ([email protected]) to register for the event and receive the Zoom link. At the start of the meeting, all attendees will have to acknowledge the privacy policy by raising their virtual hand and typing their name into the chat. If you are not sure how to raise your virtual hand and type your name into the chat, please review pages 8-10 of the Zoom manual that the University Seminars have prepared for you in advance of the meeting.
