In this excerpt from their November 2007 dialogue, Dr. Franklin discussed the role and responsibility of the historian in the contemporary world with Dr. Romila Thapar, one of the world's leading authorities on early Indian history. Both Profs. Franklin and Thapar are winners of the United States Library of Congress's Kluge Prize in Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity. See Dr. Franklin's remarks at the 2006 Kluge Prize Ceremony here.

One of Dr. Franklin's inspirations as a young scholar was George Washington Williams (1849-1891), a pioneering African American historian. In this September 2008 public conversation with Prof. Lea Fridman of the City University of New York, Dr. Franklin discussed his long scholarly quest to reconstruct the life of Williams who, in addition to his path-breaking scholarship on African American history, was one of the early critics of Belgian atrocities in the Congo under King Leopold II and the first to use the term "crimes against humanity," now a key human rights concept.