When French President Jacques Chirac stepped up to the podium on July 16, 1995 he spoke words that none of his Fifth Republic predecessors ever dared utter. It was the commemoration of Vel d’Hiv, the 1942 mass round up by French police of Paris-area Jews.  Some seven thousand, over half of whom were children, were…

The story of internal violence and its aftermath in Peru is typically lumped together with the rest of Latin America.  It is true that Peru, much like its neighbors, was riven by years of conflict as the military sought to suppress the forces of leftist insurgency.  The murdered and disappeared, victims of torture and gendered…

Germany stands apart from most nations in its efforts to confront its darkest past.  Remembering and atoning for the Holocaust has become the centerpiece of German national memory culture.  From strict protections of citizenship rights to the decision to admit over a million Syrian refugees fleeing civil war, lessons learned from the Nazi past have…

Jeffrey Olick has long been one of the leading lights in the burgeoning field of memory studies.  Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, his books on Germany offer invaluable insights into the long struggle to master the Nazi and Holocaust past.  The Politics of Regret has become a standard reference…

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened in 1993, is part of a new global trend in how we remember the past.  From Rwanda to Cambodia, memorial museums are rooted in a “never again” post-Holocaust conviction that memories of the past crimes should be harnessed to safeguard and promote human rights in the present and…

The official number of homeless in the United States reached nearly 800,000 in 2024.  This was an 18% increase over the previous year and the highest number since the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began tracking homelessness in 2007.   But HUD’s numbers are far from perfect.  They represent a snapshot in time,…

The challenge of any documentary director with a mission is to make the viewer care. What makes the 2026 Oscar award winning documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin resonate so powerfully is the love and honesty that inspires it.  This is a production that showcases the unvarnished horrors of Putin’s militarization of Russia following the start…

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…