August 2017

Documentary highlights pioneers who paved the way for equality in baseball

Seventy years ago Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier when he was signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson’s entrance into the big leagues signaled the beginning of the desegregation of baseball, but the story didn’t end there. The men who followed Robinson into the sport — playing for minor league teams in rural areas across the country while facing relentless discrimination, ridicule, and even violence — were a vital part of making America’s pastime open to all.

NYT Opinion: "The Test of Nazism That Trump Failed" by Timothy Snyder

“No. 1, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. No. 2, racism, the least racist person.” So the president said at a news conference in February. These words left me uneasy. A moment ago, as I was looking at photographs of young men in Charlottesville, Va., who were from my home state, Ohio, and thinking about the message “Heil Hitler” on the T-shirt that one wore, it dawned on me why.

History Shopping Party

Join the DUS and fellow students for an information session about History at Yale. Learn about tracks and pathways, seminar pre-registration, library resources, planning for the senior essay, Phi Alpha Theta, the History Undergraduate Advisory Committee and much more.   

Valerie Hansen's The Silk Road makes a cameo in story by Mark Haddon

Summer is nearly over, but you still have time to add one more title to your list before the leaves start to change.  In a short story collection by award-winning author Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), a character is reading our very own Valerie Hansen’s work The Silk Road: A New History.  

Professor Hansen is delighted to find herself in the work of fiction, however brief and shall we say, sinister.

Obituary: Piotr S. Wandycz

Piotr S. Wandycz died peacefully at the Connecticut Hospice on Saturday morning, July 28, 2017. Born in Kraków in 1923 during the Second Polish Republic and raised in Lwow, Piotr S. Wandycz left the country during World War II in 1939. He and his family crossed into Romania, and in 1940 went to France. Graduating from the Polish Lycee in Villard de Lans, he studied at the University of Grenoble. In late 1942 he reached the United Kingdom where he served in the Polish army until 1945 as a second lieutenant. After the war he studied at the University of Cambridge where he received B.A.