Allen Wells, an expert on Latin America, will discuss “Lives in the Balance: FDR, General Trujillo and the Jewish Refugees in the Dominican Republic,” Tuesday, May 18 at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
The talk is free and open to the public.
The lecture will focus on the U.S. government’s initial support of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s offer to accept 100,000 Central European Jews at the Evian Conference in July 1938, and FDR’s subsequent refusal to take any Jewish refugees from German-occupied territory.
Wells, the Roger Howell Jr. Professor of History at Bowdoin College, is the author of “Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR and the Jews of Sosúa” and “Yucatán's Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860-1915.”
He is the co-author of “Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Rebellion in Yucatán, 1876-1915” and a co-editor of “The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Latin American Export Boom.”
The talk is sponsored by Hillel, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Africana Studies, History, Economics and Political Science departments, and Circulo Estudiantil Latino Americano.