How can we work toward a greater degree of freedom and justice for all if our memories of the past are fundamentally different?  How can we pursue the general welfare and wellbeing of the people without common reference points?  This is the dilemma raised by the Make America Great Again slogan.  In Trump and the…

Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. the 1960s civil rights movement achieved far reaching legal and political changes.  University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha points out that not surprisingly a myriad of other disenfranchised and marginalized groups looked to the example and framed themselves as an extension of the work of King…

Despite the removal of scores of prominent monuments to the Confederacy the vast majority remain firmly in place.  For communities to make informed decisions about the future of these monuments they need to have a clear understanding of their past.  It was with this objective in mind that University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian…

With the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the US-Mexico War, Mexican Americans became the first non-white population to become US citizens.  University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that most Mexican American never enjoyed full citizenship rights.  In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez reveals how Mexican…

Americans are living in an age of frenzied memorial making, argues University of Texas at Dallas art and cultural historian Erika Doss.  We saturate the public landscape with memorials to every conceivable cause, aggrieved group, or unsung hero.  What do memorials tell us about Americans and America today? In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America,…

Staring down at the distorted and barely recognizable remains of her fourteen-year-old son is Mamie Till supported by her financé Gene Mobley who gazes directly at the camera.  This September 1955 black and white photo of Emmett Till and his family was named by Time Magazine in 2016 as one of the 100 most influential…

Beginning in 1880s Africans Americans became the targets of a lynching craze that claimed thousands of lives.  In Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lyching on Black Culture and Memory, University of Oklahoma historian Karlos K. Hill argues that narratives are key to understanding not just what drove the lynching craze but how African Americans…

Cambodia has often been cast as a broken, amnesiac nation, unable to confront the memory of the horrors it experienced during the Khmer Rouge era.  How did these assumptions justify the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms such as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)?  In what ways were the therapeutic claims of…

The system of enforced prostitution by the Japanese military went unpunished and unexamined for decades after the Asia-Pacific War.  International recognition only began in 1991 when Korean survivor Kim Hak-sun spoke out in graphic detail about her dark past.  In Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia, University of Melbourne historian Kate McGregor…

In May 1980 the city of Gwangju in South Korea erupted in violence.  Shocked by the brutal suppression of student protests against the threat of renewed dictatorship, the citizens of Gwangju, South Korea’s six largest city, seized weapons, formed their own army, and liberated the city from government control. The euphoria created by this victory…