Location

The Library of Congress.

The overlapping timelines of post-World-War-II decolonization and the Cold War create a fascinating interrelationship, according to historian Jason Parker.
A professor at Texas A&M University, Parker will present “The Empires Who Came in From the Cold: Decolonization and the Cold War” at the Library of Congress at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, July 21, in Room 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The lecture is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are needed.
According to Parker, decolonization entailed not just the transfer of political and juridical sovereignty but also an intellectual and cultural process that dethroned European assertions and affirmed nationalist self-rule. The ultimate dimensions of the decolonization process make it a larger and longer-running 20th-century story than that of the superpower conflict of the Cold War.
Parker’s research as a historian centers on the interplay of the Cold War and decolonization in U.S. relations with the Third World. He is the author of “Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962” (2008), which received the 2009 Bernath Book Award from the Society of Historians for American Foreign Relations. He has published articles in the Journal of American History, Diplomatic History and the Journal of African American History, among others. His current projects are a history of U.S. Cold War public diplomacy in the Third World and a comparative study of postwar federations in the decolonizing European empires.