For communities to determine the fate of the hundreds of remaining monuments to the Confederacy they need to understand the context and purpose for which they were built. University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox stresses that these monuments were erected to restore and perpetuate a system of white supre…

As campaign season in the United States kicks into high gear the border has once again become a political football for both the right and left. University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that these uses and abuses of the border typically rely on collective amnesia about the past. In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Am…

Fears of the border are reaching fever pitch in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential elections. Much of the alarm hinges on the forgetting of the US-Mexico War (1846-1848). University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that it was the United States that invaded and annexed half of Mexico. In Remembering Conquest: M…

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…

From the 9/11 to the Salem witch trials memorial, University of Texas at Dallas art historian Erika Doss argues that we are living in an age of memorial mania. In her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss explains how memorials embody and allow for the public expression of emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and ange…

It took nearly fifty years before a single dollar was spent on commemorating Emmett Till in the state of Mississippi where he was brutally murdered in August 1955. Dave Tell, University of Kansas Professor and author of Remembering Emmett Till, argues that we can’t understand the remembering and forgetting of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta wh…

In August 1955 Emmett Till was abducted from his uncle’s home, tortured, shot, bound by barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and sunk in the Tallahatchie River. The outrage triggered by the photo of the mangled remains of the fourteen-year-old boy’s body in the open cassette at the funeral in Till’s native Chicago rallied many to the cause of the nascen…

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 responde…

Dehumanizing narratives of black male bodies drove the lynching epidemic that claimed thousands of African American lives between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Dr. Karlos K. Hill, author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, explains how African American political and cultural actors fought back …

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…

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…

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 Me…

During the Asia-Pacific War the Japanese military forced thousands of women across East and Southeast Asia into a brutal system of organized prostitution. The label of “comfort women” only masks the true reality of this massive human rights crime that went largely unpunished for decades after the war. Most attention to this history has focused on K…

The May 1980 clash between government forces and the people of Gwangju marks a key turning point toward democracy in South Korea. The nation’s sixth largest city, the citizens of Gwangju suffered immeasurably for the uprising. The city lost development support and its citizens were cast as traitors and North Korean sympathizers. The decision to sel…

The April 2014 Sewol ferry disaster is an all too familiar South Korean tragedy. Corruption, deceit, greed, and failed regulations and oversight cost nearly three hundred lives—most of whom were high school students on a trip to Jeju Island, a popular resort destination. Seoul National University Professor HaeRan Shin explains how the Sewol ferry d…

The military regime, which ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, murdered hundreds and tortured thousands more perceived enemies of the state. How is it possible that this period of political repression, censorship, and state sponsored terror is now remembered nostalgically by many Brazilians? How did Jair Bolsonaro harness this nostalgia to win the 2018…

In 1964 the military seized power in Brazil and ruled the country for the next 21 years. During this period the military used censorship, torture, and murder to silence its critics and maintain its grip on power. How did Jair Bolsonaro use the memory of this past to catapult himself to the presidency? How did Bolsonaro’s manipulation of the memory …

In the face of rising nationalism and denialism about crimes committed during the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia, memory activists in Serbia have been struggling to confront the past. For the last two decades Dr. Orli Fridman, from the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK) in Belgrade, has made memory activism in Serbia and the wider region of…

How do memory politics in Serbia shape the memories of the wars in Yugoslavia? What role do memory activists play in this process and what practices and claims do they put forward? Dr. Orli Fridman, a professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK) in Belgrade, has spent the past two decades looking at these questions. Author of Memory A…

Much of the focus on the memory of the partition of British India has been on the region of the Punjab. King’s College London Professor Ananya Kabir is interested in the repercussions of partition for the region of Bengal where she has ancestral ties. How did cultural actors, from archeologists and artists to singers and novelists, use their craft …

In part 2 of my conversation with De Montfort University historian Pippa Virdee we’ll look closer at whether the violence of partition could have been avoided. We’ll consider how the difficulty of labeling the violence complicates efforts to remember what happened. We’ll learn how much of this violence targeted women who were doubly victimized both…

The partition of British India in 1947 displaced over 14 million people and claimed the lives of another 1 million. Some of the worst violence occurred in the Punjab. Pippa Virdee, historian at De Montfort University in the UK and author of From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab, explains how it took decades to include the experiences of those …

The partition of British India is a story of extreme communal violence, mass rape, honor killings, abduction, and forced migration. It is a story where the same individuals, depending on which side of the border they found themselves, could be both victims or perpetrators. Dr. Pippa Virdee, author of From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining the Punjab, …

Nottingham Trent University historian Jenny Wüstenberg, author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, argues that Germany experienced a dramatic transformation of its memorial culture during the 1980s. It was in the course of this decade that Germany pivoted from commemorating the German victims of World War II to the victims of Nazi crime…

German memory culture underwent a dramatic transformation in decades after World War II. In the immediate aftermath of the war the memories of veterans, Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the victims of allied bombings dominated the remembrance of the Nazi era. By the 1980s the focus had almost completely…

The beginnings of many nations are marred by traumatic memories. This is certainly true for Turkey. The modern Republic of Turkey began with the dispossession and even eradication of many of the ethnic and religious minorities who had lived for centuries within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian genocide is one of the most prominent ex…

The Armenian genocide would not have been possible without the active participation of local populations. Kurds, who often coexisted in the same towns and cities with Armenians, undoubtedly played a part in the genocide. Eren Yetkin, a sociologist at Koblenz University in Germany, explores the memories of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. Author of …

After fleecing billions of dollars from the Philippines, torturing and murdering thousands during the period of martial law, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was removed from power through a popular uprising in 1986. How was it possible that his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected as president in 2022? Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, arg…

How can we understand the nostalgia for the Marcos past that inspired many Filipinos to vote for Ferdinand Marcos Jr.? How was a possible to forget the billions of dollars stolen from the state or the thousands of Filipinos who were tortured or murdered during the period of martial law? Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues tha…

Just as Israeli-Palestinian relations reached a new low in the early 2000s, memory activists in Israel embraced a strategy of confronting the past to resolve the crisis in the present. Dr. Yifat Gutman, author of Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine, discusses how memory activists tackled the taboo subject of 194…

A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past. In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of th…

Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule. Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cul…

In October 1967 Nigerian federal troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians in the town of Asaba. Elizabeth Bird, anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of South Florida, argues that the Asaba Massacre wasn’t just one of the many atrocities committed during the Nigerian Civil War. It was a pivotal event that prolonged a confl…

In Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda,Tim Longman argues that the memory of the genocide has been instrumentalized by the long-ruling Rwandan Patriot Front or RPF. By casting itself as the selfless liberator of the Tusti minority, the RPF has used the genocide to mask its own crimes, abuses of power, and political ambitions. Showcasing the …

The bones of the tens of thousands of victims of the Franco regime buried in mass graves throughout Spain are now telling their stories. Nicole Iturriaga, author of Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past, chronicles the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and how it is helping to shatter the …

Over a decade of civil war tore apart the tiny Central American nation of El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s the United States poured billions of dollars into the conflict to stop the spread of communism in Central America. Beyond the massive loss of life and even greater human displacement, deathsquads and special military units massacred, tortured…

In Part 2 of Remembering Stalin’s Victims, Georgetown University Professor Kathleen Smith explains how a conservative backlash swept Khrushchev from power and ended the first attempt to confront the Stalinist past. While destalinization persisted in the form of the dissident movement, the nearly twenty year Brezhnev era that followed was one of off…

The early decades of the Soviet Union were marred by massive human dislocation, terror, and loss of life known collectively as the repressions. With antecedents in the Lenin years but more closely associated with Stalin, Soviet leaders struggled on two occasions to confront the memory of the repressions. Kathleen Smith, author of Remembering Stalin…

The militarism we see in Russia today has much to do with the rehabilitation of the memory of Stalin. The Stalin of the Great Terror, mass famine, and deportations has been recast as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriot War. In Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useab…

With the Communist victory in China in 1949 nearly one million civil war refugees flooded into Taiwan—the largest out migration from China in the modern era. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, author of The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, helps us understand the relationship between trauma and memory in new ways. He re…

How has the slave trade been remembered in Liverpool—the world’s leading slave-trading port city in the eighteenth century? Jessica Moody, author of The Persistence of Memory: Remembering Slavery in Liverpool, ‘slaving capital of the world,’ explains how the slave trade has never been forgotten in Liverpool. It has lived on through public debates a…

Why has Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine become such a lightning rod for the memory wars in Japan about the Asia-Pacific War? Akiko Takenaka, author of Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, helps us understand how the meaning of Yasukuni has changed over time and why it has become the nation’s most controversial memory site.…

How did Germany go from being an international pariah at the end of World War II to a leader of the European Union and one of the most trusted nations on the planet? In Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman argues that having the courage to confront the past did much to transform Germany’s image at home and abroad.…

Realms of Memory is a podcast that looks at how countries confront their darkest chapters, what they gain by doing so, and what happens when they fail to take up this challenge. We feature the insights of leading experts on a wide range of difficult national memories.By Rick Derderian