Lectures explore how FDR prepared for war and global leadership

Susan Dunn, the Massachusetts Professor of Humanities at Williams College, will give a series of three lectures in November on “FDR’s Third Hundred Days — Preparing for War and Global Leadership November 1940 to March 1941” for the Henry L. Stimson Lectures on World Affairs.

“FDR’s Third Hundred Days” lectures will focus on three themes: “Plan Dog: From Isolation to a Strategy for War,” on Tuesday, Nov. 15; “A Declaration of Interdependence: Lend-Lease,” on Wednesday, Nov. 16; and “Speed — and Speed Now: Mobilizing Industry and Labor for War,’ on Thursday, Nov. 17.

Sponsored by the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Yale University Press, all three lectures begin at 4:30 p.m. in Rm. 203 of Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave. They are free and open to the public.

Dunn is the author of a dozen books, including “Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800”; “Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia”; “Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party,” winner of the Henry Adams Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History; and “1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler — the Election Amid the Storm.” She is co-author, with James MacGregor Burns, of “The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America.” She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

The funding for the lecture series comes from an anonymous donor, in honor of Henry L. Stimson, Yale College 1889, an attorney and statesman whose government service culminated with his tenure as secretary of war during World War II.

Previous Stimson Lectures have included “Political Order in Changing Societies” by Samuel P. Huntington; “Financial Crises in Emerging Markets” by Alexandre Lamfalussy; “Arms and Influence” by Thomas C. Schelling; “The Arab Center, The Promise of Moderation” by Ambassador Marwan Muasher; “Beyond the Democratic Maze” by John Dunn; “What Happened to National Liberation” by Michael Walzer; and “The Imprint of Congress,” by David Mayhew.