Who: David Allen
Date: April 27, 2023
Time: 5:30pm Reception | 6:00pm Presentation | 7:30pm Member Dinner
Cost: Members are Free | $20 non-member zoom or in-person access
Location: First Congregational Church of Old Lyme
Professor David Allen,
David Allen is a historian of U.S. foreign relations, and was most recently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and from Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in 2019. He has held fellowships at MIT as well as Harvard and has taught international affairs at Yale. He writes frequently on classical music in the New York Times. Every Citizen a Statesman is his first book.
Where did World Affairs Councils like SECWAC come from? When? Why? Drawing on Every Citizen a Statesman, a new book on Harvard University Press, historian David Allen will show that the World Affairs Council movement has been one of the main ways in which Americans have tried to reconcile global power with democracy at home. This presentation will chart the Councils’ origins in the 1930s, show how the Council ideal was pursued nationwide in the 1950s, and offer thoughts as to the fate of the Councils — and the dilemma of public opinion and foreign policy that they respond to — thereafter.