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...

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe...

Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?”  Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There’s nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes.  But,

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the n...

Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.  We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.

Adolf Hitler famously (and probably) said in a speech to his military leaders “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This remark is generally taken to suggest that future generations won’t remember current atrocities,

I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and castles, they’ll visit Auschwitz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a variety of other Holocau...

So I should start out with a confession. I don’t know much about the history of Argentina (I said something similar about Guatemala a year or so ago on the program). And I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do a comparative study Argentina and...

Genocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and the book he has edited, Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity a...