Amplifying the Past

Our guest today is the historian Alexis Peri, who tells a radically new story about the Cold War, one in which American women write letters to Soviet women - who respond in kind. This correspondence, which she describes as copious, warm, and often personal, reveals experiences of joy, of loss, of small satisfactions, and deep grief.

Professor Rui Hua looks in his work at small people caught up in big legal systems. His setting is the borderland region of Manchuria, in Northeast Asia, at the turn of the twentieth century, as at least three imperial powers – China, Japan, and Russia – made monumental claims about sovereignty, law, and even the whole of the international order. Before this region erupted into war and revolution, individuals within it sought to make claims about what was right and just – claims that were cosmopolitan, drawing liberally and creatively upon great concepts from three legal systems. Professor Hua, in part, is looking at some of those claims and what they tell us about law and its development in the twentieth century.

Rachel Nolan, an assistant professor of history at Boston University’s Pardee School of International Relations, is the author of Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, due out in 2024 from Harvard University Press. Professor Nolan unravels the complex and harrowing history of how Guatemala became such a large “sender” of children to the United States, Canada, and Europe, until the end of the private adoption trade in 2007. She draws on a trove of innovative archival sources to show how the roots of Guatemala’s adoption system lie in the particulars of the country’s forty-year armed conflict, and genocide against its Indigenous Maya population.