Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll talk with Carrie Booth Walling.

If you want to know how to bring future mass atrocities to an end, the best place to start is to examine how past mass atrocities have ended. This simple piece of logic is at the heart of Bridget Conley-Zilkic’s new edited collection titled How Mass At...

I teach at a Catholic university and last semester co-taught (with a theologian) a class titled The Holocaust and its Legacies. Once my students became comfortable with me, they began to pepper me with questions about the role of the Catholic church du...

This podcast is the first of a new occasional series of interviews addressing the question of responding to mass atrocities and genocide. Later in the summer I’ll interview Bridget Conley-Zilkic, James Waller and Carrie Booth Walling. First up,

I remember working on my master’s thesis while at Ohio State. Hour after hour after hour I labored-writing, rewriting, formatting. Then the day of the defense arrived. Ninety minutes later, I exited the room with my degree assured.

At least twice in past interview descriptions I’ve used the famous phrase attributed to Hitler: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” To be honest, I couldn’t have told you much more about the extent of German knowledge o...

I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas,

What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person’s fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg‘s new book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography (MacLehose Press, 2016). A diplomatic envoy in Hungary,

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellent new book Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: ...

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject.

In her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels.” Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman’s M...

In his book, In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama’s Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust (University of Alabama Press, 2014), Dan J. Puckett, Associate Professor of History at Troy University, traces how Alabama’s Jews overcame community divisions...

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015).

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are allowed to pass in silence.

For a couple of decades, scholars have moved toward a broad consensus that context, rather than ideology, is most important in pushing ordinary men and women to participate in mass murder. The “situationist paradigm,” as Abram de Swaan labels this,

In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex,

In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fight...

An interview with Vicken Cheterian

Today’s podcast marks the beginning of what I hope might become a regular feature on the podcast. The session was recorded live on the campus of Bryant University at the end of weekend conference with the title Genocide in World History,

Do dead bodies have human rights? This is one of many fascinating questions Adam Rosenblatt asks in his compelling new book Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015) Rosenblatt,

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany,

Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi ...

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm...

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later,

Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand. When I tell them that...