As a graduate student, I spent quite a bit of time explaining to people how we needed to pay much more attention to the history of World War One in the East.  What I didn’t realize is that we needed to see the war as it appeared from Istanbul just...

I first assigned Joshua Oppenheimer’s film “The Act of Killing” for my course in Comparative Genocide at Newman.  The movie is a documentary about the mass violence in Indonesia beginning in 1965.  My students and I found it chilling:  emotionally movi...

How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke,

What was Italy’s role in the Holocaust? Why is it that Italy is known as the Axis power that was benevolent to Jews, despite a scholarly consensus that many Italians actively participated in anti-Jewish persecution?

It seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters.  And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis. But it’s really hard to go beyond these platitudes to determine exactly how this feed...

Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking me about studying Poland. It was an engaging chat with a young woman very interested in exploring Poland ...

In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead,

Today we are joined by Kevin Simpson, the author of Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016). In Soccer under the Swastika,

Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 2017), Thomas Weber highlights the years between 1918 and ...

How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich relied on terror to survive in his new book Hitler’s C...

How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted how scholars and the public engage with the past?

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the Uni...

In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University,

What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve the wartime suffering of your family with their moral cul...

One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small tow...

This podcast is usually devoted to book written about the past. The authors may be historians, or political scientists, or anthropologists, or even a member of the human rights community. But we’re almost always talking about a mass atrocity that took ...

In his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that is familiar to many within and without the academy—fro...

In his recent book, Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944 (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wolfgang Seibel explores the factors that shaped the Holocaust in wartime France.

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wondered how humans could do such things to each other.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perp...

Thanks to Scott Straus, Leanne Fujii and others, we know quite a bit about how men behaved during the genocide in Rwanda. But we know surprisingly little about women’s actions during that crisis. Sara Brown begins to remedy this in her excellent new st...

In his new book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press 2016), Lawrence R. Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College examines t...

One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge, 2017),

In less than thirty years, California’s Indian population fell from 150,000 to 30,000. In An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Benjamin Madley,

How did a generation of Germany’s best and brightest become radicalized? What convinced young intellectuals to join the SS and perpetrate genocide in pursuit of a racial utopia? Find out in our conversation with Christian Ingrao about his book Believe ...