and Caribbean communities through the annual Eric Williams Memorial Lecture at Florida International University in Miami. Featured speakers at the Lecture include: John Hope Franklin, one of America’s premier Black historians (1999); Kenneth Kaunda, former President of Zambia, (2000); Hilary Beckles, Principal and Pro Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (2001); Cynthia Pratt, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Bahamas, Mia Mottley, the Attorney General of Barbados, and Beverley Anderson-Manley, former First Lady of Jamaica (2002). Angela Davis, civil and women’s rights activist, was the featured speaker in 2003, and in honour of the Haitian Bicentennial, University of Virginia political scientist Robert Fatton, Jr., and prize-winning author Edwidge Danticat spoke in 2004. In 2005, a Trinidad and Tobago national was welcomed to the podium for the first time - Hollis Liverpool aka Chalkdust, calypsonian and professor at the University of the Virgin Islands, who spoke on Eric Williams and calypso. Related academic initiatives Colin Palmer’s new biography of Williams up to 1970, entitled Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, published by the University of North Carolina Press, is dedicated to the Collection. Three other scholarly biographies of Williams either have been published or are in progress in the eight years since the inception of the EWMC: The Elusive Eric Williams by Ken Boodhoo, of Florida International University (and published by Media and Editorial Projects Limited's Prospect Press and Ian Randle Publishers); an edition by Selwyn Ryan, University of the West Indies; and The Making of a Movement Intellectual by Maurice St. Pierre of Morgan State University. The first-ever Spanish translation of Williams’ History of the Caribbean, From Columbus to Castro (2006); the 2000 republication, after decades, of the same book in Japanese, and its re-issue in the United Kingdom in 2004 after a hiatus of seven years. Also reissued in 2004 was the 1944 book, The Economic Future of the Caribbean – edited by Williams and the respected African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The Economic Future of the Caribbean is a selection of papers presented at a 1943 Howard University conference that Williams organized. The vision articulated in this work remains relevant to 21st-century Caribbean. To date, the new edition of the book has been launched in Trinidad and Tobago; Washington, DC; Toronto, Canada; and London, UK. The New York launch in 2006, sponsored jointly by members of the Caribbean Diplomatic Corps, also celebrated the