Confronting the Past
Learn how countries address their darkest chapters
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The uproar over Civil War monuments and how history is taught in schools is by no means limited to the United States. Across the globe bitter memories of the past continue to divide and enrage. Realms of Memory is a podcast series which explores how countries confront the past, the benefits they gain by doing do, and the dangers that arise when they fail to take up this challenge.
Episode 29: Mexican Americans and the Memory of the US-Mexico War
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...
Episode 28: Memorials and Public Feeling in America
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...
Episode 27: Remembering Emmett Till
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...
Episode 26: Lynching, Black Culture and Memory
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...
Episode 25: Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia
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...
Episode 24: Remembering the System: Enforced Prostitution by the Japanese Military in Indonesia
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,...
Show Host
Rick Derderian is the grandson of a survivor of the Armenian genocide–an unresolved past which continues to haunt modern day Turkey. He holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of North Africans in Contemporary France: Becoming Visible and has published numerous articles on immigration and memory in France.
