Americans don’t do ambiguity well is my main takeaway from John Garrison Mark’s, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.   We like to remember our past in terms of heroes and villains, which is why we’ve fought over George Washington’s legacy of slavery since the nation’s…

The Holocaust eradicated Poland’s Jewish community, the largest in the world outside the United States.  Of the some three million Polish Jews who perished during the war, only one percent, or thirty thousand survived.  University of Ottawa historian Jan Grabowski argues that without the active and willing participation of Polish gentiles, a far greater number…

Spain’s Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) was once regarded as the gold standard for how to achieve a bloodless transition from dictatorship to democracy.  There were no prosecutions for the crimes committed during the civil war and the nearly four decades of Franco’s rule.  This was the agreement reached after the death of dictator…

In the age of climate change and global pandemics how do we remember the victims?  University of Madison, Wisconsin historian Richard C. Keller examines this question through his study of the 2003 heat wave in Paris.  This was the worst natural disaster in French history, claiming some 15,000 lives.  In his book, Fatal Isolation: The…

How can we understand the extraordinary scope and magnitude of global fame and notoriety achieved by Anne Frank? The Anne Frank diary has been translated into scores of languages and sold over twenty million copies.  It has inspired countless books, movies and documentaries.  The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has become a major tourist destination…

Alan Weisman is a journalist and non fiction writer whose focus over the past twenty five years has been on the crises that now imperil the planet.  In The World Without Us (2007), which became a New York Times and International best seller, Alan tries to engage readers by helping them to imagine a world…

It was on a train to Siberia that Joy Neumeyer decided to write her story.  Despite the distance between Russia and her history graduate program at Berkeley, she was still haunted by the memory of her abusive relationship with her boyfriend and classmate.  In the early morning hours between Moscow and the Ural Mountains, she recalled…

Is it possible to understand the suppression of memory as an act of love? In Surviving the Survivor: A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist and My Podcast Co-Host, author Joel Waldman argues that his mother Karmela was determined to protect her family from the past.  Karm,…

Objects recovered from sites of mass atrocities have a special significance today.  This is because we live in what University College Dublin Professor Lea David labels as a human rights memorialization culture.  Central to this culture is the conviction that we should face difficult histories, we should remember human rights abuses, and victims should be…

Sociocultural trauma experienced by nations isn’t just the result of unimaginable crimes and horrors.  It is the repeated betrayals that make it impossible to mourn, to find meaning in the past, and to move forward.  According to Tony Robben, Utrecht University professor emeritus of anthropology, this is what happened in Argentina.  The military dictatorship that…