University Place 1532  Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in WWII  Professor Jerry Podair:  Professor Reynolds is considered our most eminent historian of the World War II era. And, of course, this is a very crowded field. Now, my use of the word "era" is deliberate because David Reynolds' books all give us more than military history, more than political history, more than diplomatic history, although, of course, they give us these as well. They offer an understanding of the World War II years as an era, one that uprooted cultures and perceptions and ideologies and boundaries, states, people, lives and made a world anew with a new political, geographic, and moral landscape that continues to shape and challenge the world that we inhabit today. David Reynolds is also the model of the publicly engaged historian. He does what I think every historian should do, and that is to bring history, which is the best subject of all--  [laughter]  Out of the academy and into the broader public dialog. I'd also like to acknowledge Dr. Monroe Trout for his assistance in making Professor Reynolds' possible. Here to speak to us on Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, the big three in World War II, is Professor David Reynolds.  [applause]  Professor David Reynolds:  Thank you, Jerry, for that very gracious introduction. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to see such a large crowd of people. It's also a pleasure to come to heartland parts of the United States. My wife is American. She grew up in southern Illinois, and over the years I have particularly enjoyed traveling in the Midwest, the Plains states that are often neglected by foreign visitors. But I always say to my students: "If you want to understand America, you have to come to towns and cities like these." And my sense of Appleton from a very brief visit is it's a very powerful civic culture and a very strong sense of community, and it's a pleasure to be here. It's a particular pleasure to be the guests of Monroe and Sandy Trout. I'm very grateful to them for their generous hospitality. So, on to the business at hand. Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. I come from Cambridge, England, as Jerry said. The original Cambridge, as I like to say to my friends from Harvard.  [laughter]  They don't like that, but anyway.  [laughter]  And one of the things that is very special about Cambridge is that, in a sense, it is at the heart of studies about Winston Churchill because we have, at Churchill College, the archive of Winston Churchill and his papers. We also have other prime ministers' papers, Margaret Thatcher for example, but the heart of it is Churchill himself. And we think of that, in a sense, as the center of a hub. And here's a picture I think is a very wonderful picture. Sarah Lewery, who is one of the conservators at the archive, right in the middle of those boxes, and, in a sense, because of the way that the lenses worked, you have a sense of something radiating out from that center. History is in those boxes. And what I want to do and what we want to do in Cambridge is to communicate those treasures to a wider audience, to link them up with scholarship within our history department. Here is the archive center, and there's the history department, a wonderful modernist building. I say wonderful with an element of incredulity about it.  [laughter]  Having been chairman of the building and trying to work out how the glass can ever be insulated and prevented from letting the rain in. But anyway, we'll leave that aside.  [audience laughter]  A wonderful modernist building. This is the center of the hub. And the idea of the communication between those archives and the communicating and scholarly skills of historians is part of what we mean by the Churchill hub and what we want to promote. But it's also, of course, a center of Churchill studies in other parts of the world, particularly in the United States where there is an incredible interest in Winston Churchill. And here are two other eminent centers of Churchill studies. The National Churchill Museum at Fulton, Missouri, and also t