Message to Friends of FPRI from Board Chairman Robert Freedman

December 2008

Dear Friends of FPRI,

In 2008, in addition to publishing 80 bulletins and four quarterly issues of Orbis, FPRI sponsored 51 lectures, conferences, and seminars; consulted on a 10-volume series of books for high school students on The Making of the Middle East; produced a volume of the Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs, 1996-2007; and facilitated the publication of Walter McDougall’s Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-77 (HarperCollins, 2008), the essay collection The War on Terrorism The War on Terrorism: 21st-century Perspectives (Transaction, 2008), Michael Radu’s Europe’s Ghost: Tolerance, Jihadism, and Their Consequences (Encounter Books, forthcoming 2009), and Harvey Sicherman’s Cheap Hawks, Cheap Doves, and the Pursuit of American Strategy (Prentice Hall, forthcoming 2009).

Our 2008 programs included four weekend-long History Institutes for high school teachers (held in Missouri, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Illinois); six sessions of our inter-university study groups; six named lectures; two pairs of webcasts for students, each reaching over 1000 students and teachers; three summer school sessions (all teleconferenced); three partnership events, five booktalks; 13 briefings; one roundtable conference involving 20 journal editors from the US and Europe dealing with terrorism and other transatlantic concerns, and two trilateral conferences (involving think tanks from China and Japan, in one instance, and from Spain and Israel, in the other).

In the education area, we launched our project on Teaching Innovation while deepening our work in the area of Teaching Military History, Teaching the Middle East and 9/11, and Teaching Asia—all important subjects not as well covered in the classroom as they should be.

Much of our material in 2008 was picked up by news media, including  The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the New York Times, the Atlantic Magazine, The Straits Times (Singapore) and the Daily News (Sri Lanka). Visits to our website doubled, reaching an average of 100,000 visits per month. Our Orbis editor, Mac Owens, is regularly published in the Christian Science Monitor, National Review Online and the Wall Street Journal.     

Thanks to all of you for supporting and participating in our programs throughout the year.

We hope to continue to make a strong contribution on matters involving foreign policy and homeland and national security in 2009. We hope you will make your 2008 contribution by year end, if you haven't already done so, or, if you have already made a contribution, add to it if possible.

I hope you will join us for the final lecture in the Fox Lecture Series on the Middle East, FPRI president Dr. Harvey Sicherman on “New Policies and Old Realities in the Middle East.” That lecture will be held December 11 at the Union League of Philadelphia (4:00 reception, 4:30 lecture).

To contribute online, go to www.fpri.org/contribute.html

To view our archive of video and audio files, visit www.fpri.org/multimedia.

Thanks for all you support, and best wishes for the holidays.

Robert L. Freedman
Chairman of the Board
Foreign Policy Research Institute