Working Draft 9/20/2010
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES
Spring 2011
LIS 3100
War, Memory, and Archives
Instructor:
Richard J. Cox, Professor
Office Number and Telephone:
SIS 614; 412 624-3245
Office Hours:
By appointment or anytime by e-mail
E-mail:
rjcox111@comcast.net
Homepage:
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~rcox
Class Sessions:
Mondays, 9 AM-12 PM
Course Objectives
“The fighting had been like work, only a lot of people got killed and a lot of things got
destroyed. It was not work that made much of anything. You and your people
intended to go your way, if you could. And you wanted to stop the other people
from going their way, if you could. And whatever interfered you destroyed. You had
a thing on your mind that you wanted, or wanted to get to, and anything at all that
stood in your way, you had the right to destroy. If what was in the way were women
and little children, you would not even know it, and it was all the same. When your
power is in a big gun, you don’t have any small intentions. Whatever you want to
hit, you want to make dust out of it. Farms, houses, whole towns – things that
people had made well and cared for a long time – you make nothing of.” Wendell
Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), p. 86.
War is a strange, compelling, and common human activity. It destroys individuals
and community memory, but also compels us to discover new ways of remembering
people and preserving societal memory. Our initial sense is to accept that war and
its destruction is bad for cultural institutions such as archives, museums, and
libraries. After all, these institutions are prominent symbols of particular
communities and cultures and are often targeted for destruction by the enemies of
these groups. Yet, war also generates the creation of archives, museums, libraries,
monuments, and historic sites. In this contradiction may be found the critical
elements for understanding why the archival impulse, the effort to save evidence
and information documenting the past, is both so important to society and often
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difficult to understand. This seminar explores the rich scholarly and other literature
grapping with the meaning and impact of war and considers what war suggests
about archives and society. We consider the meaning of war, the archival mission,
war memorials and commemoration as archives, the preservation of personal
papers and artifacts and the meaning of the fragility of war documentation,
government and the making of official war archives, cemeteries as archives,
terrorism and new challenges to remembering war, the future of archives in war
and memory, and the sometimes strange relationship between technology, war, and
memory.
This seminar is part of the new focus on “Working Memory” in the LIS doctoral
studies program approved by the faculty last fall. In the original proposal for this
(authored by Geoffrey Bowker, Bernadette Callery, Richard J. Cox, and the late Leigh
Star), we state, “For nearly half a century scholars, social pundits, and corporate
ventures in the information technology arena have discussed, debated, and
dissected the notion of an Information Age. As digital technologies have expanded
both in their power and ubiquity, other dimensions of information become fragile–
evidence, partly due to legal and accountability issues, knowledge, as the potential
loss of human expertise and culture is threatened, and records, due to habitat
erosions such as lost languages and lands – and have become the topic of
interdisciplinary inquiry. Memory has become one of the most important and
engaging topics, one that knits together technology, people, community, and culture.
The fundamental issue is that libraries, archives, data repositories and the social
study of science and technology – once four separate specialties – are beginning to
speak to each other in new and exciting ways. We intend to strengthen
this convergence by providing cross-disciplinary training for a new cohort of PhD
students.” For more about the “Working Memory” focus, visit
http://www.ischool.pitt.edu/memory/working-memory.php.
This is also an exploratory seminar. It builds on the instructor’s interest in archives
and memory, dating back more than two decades, and reflects the instructor’s
growing interest in the impact of war as the scholarship has shifted to focus in
various ways on the intersection of these three topics. He is working on a brief
monograph intending to explore the rich scholarly and other literature grapping
with the meaning and impact of war and to consider what war suggests about
archives and society. There will be discussion about the meaning of war and the
archival mission, building off of the themes outlined below. These themes are not
exhaustive, but they represent where scholarship has clustered or how the
instructor perceives the research can be organized. In this sense, this course is, as
most doctoral seminars should be, collaboration between the instructor and
students carving out new, useful, and provocative research themes and agendas. As
the themes should suggest, many are not only relevant to the field of archival
studies but to the array of disciplines and research reflected in the notion of ISchools.
The purposes of this course are threefold. First, students will be immersed into the
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research literature concerning war, memory, and archives, with a particular focus on how
these intersect. Each week students will be responsible for reading a small set of required
reading or readings in common, selecting a book of their choice from the recommended
readings and participating in class discussion about the book, and participating in the
CourseWeb discussion board, supporting continuing discussion of the various themes of
the course as outlined in the syllabus. Second, students will learn about multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research approaches and their
relevance in archival studies and other aspects of the information professions. Third, the
course will contribute to a framework for enabling doctoral students to consider
their own interests in and aspirations for academic teaching and research careers.
A fourth potential purpose is to build a conceptual model for understanding how
archives and recordkeeping in general are affected by war and how war is
remembered with or without such records. The instructor is presently focused on
the contradictions posed by warfare’s simultaneous destruction and creation of
records and recordkeeping systems. However, there are many other ways of
examining the relationship between war, memory, and archives.
Course Requirements
Doctoral students taking this course are required to attend all class sessions, do the
assigned readings, participate in class discussions, and prepare a 25 to 35 page paper on
some aspect of the course’s theme. The paper can be a critical literature review, a case
study, or a research paper based on archival materials (we will discuss these various
approaches early in the course). The topic can be of the student’s choosing as long as it
fits into the course theme of war, memory, and archives. The paper is due on the last day
of class. Each student will present (fifteen minutes) about their paper on the last class
session. The Instructor will post the papers (submitted as a Word document attachment
to email to the Instructor) on CourseWeb for everyone’s review. The paper should
conform to the recent, 16th edition, of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Each week will feature some readings to be done in common by all students. Apart from
these common readings, each student will be expected to select one book from each
week’s bibliography and to be prepared to discuss it in class. These readings do not
constitute a comprehensive bibliography on war, memory, and archives; instead, these
readings reflect a representative range of research studies about these topics selected by
the seminar instructor. If a doctoral student has an alternative monograph or publication
he or she wants to read and discuss, the student can make such a request for the
instructor’s approval.
Each student discussing a book will be expected to highlight aspects of the readings
relevant to the understanding of the education of information professionals. In
preparation for leading the class, the student is expected to do literature searches related
to the publication’s topic and to comment on other relevant readings (especially
identifying sources available on the World Wide Web). The student should post to the
discussion board a list of other sources a day or two before the class session for the use of
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all the other students in the course (along with at least one discussion question related to
their reading).
Attendance at seminar class sessions is mandatory. Absences will necessitate
documentation produced by the student or prior consultation with the instructor. Two
unexcused absences will result in the lowering of the grade by one letter grade; more than
two unexcused absences will result in a failing grade.
The course grade will be based on a 50/50 weighting for the papers and the class
discussions of the readings and commentary on the discussion board. Due dates for
various assignments are listed in the syllabus below and can be found on CourseWeb (the
only significant due date, beyond weekly assignments, is the last class session and the
handing in of the final paper). No incompletes will be given (except for personal
emergencies) and a final due date will be negotiated.
Academic Integrity: Students in this course will be expected to comply with the
University of Pittsburgh's Policy on Academic Integrity Any student suspected of
violating this obligation for any reason during the semester will be required to participate
in the procedural process, initiated at the instructor level, as outlined in the University
Guidelines on Academic Integrity. This may include, but is not limited to, the
confiscation of the examination of any individual suspected of violating University
Policy. Furthermore, no student may bring any unauthorized materials to an exam,
including dictionaries and programmable calculators.
Disabilities: If you have a disability that requires special testing accommodations or other
classroom modifications, you need to notify both the instructor and the Disability
Resources and Services no later than the 2nd week of the term. You may be asked to
provide documentation of your disability to determine the appropriateness of
accommodations. To notify Disability Resources and Services, call 648-7890 (Voice or
TTD) to schedule an appointment. The Office is located in 216 William Pitt
Union. Students who must miss an exam or class due to religious observance must notify
the instructor ahead of time and make alternative arrangements.
Materials used in the course may be protected by copyright. United States copyright law,
17 USC section 101, et seq., in addition to University policy and procedures, prohibit
unauthorized duplication or retransmission of course materials. See Library of Congress
Copyright Office and the University Copyright Policy.
The Course
Week One. January 10, 2011 Introduction to the Course and Course
Requirements
January 17, 2011 is a holiday, and there is no class.
Week Two. January 24, 2011 The Meaning of Memory
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“We use memory in a double sense: to refer to what people remember – or more
accurately, what they think they remember – and to describe efforts by individuals,
groups, and states to foster or impose memory in the form of interpretations and
commemorations of their country’s wartime role and experience.” Richard Ned Lebow,
in Lebow, Kansteiner, and Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, p. 7.
Required Readings
Brien Brothman, “The Past that Archives Keep: Memory, History, and the
Preservation of Archival Records,” Archivaria 51 (1996): 49-80.
Peter Fritzsche, “The Archive,” History and Memory 17, 1/2 (2005): 15-44.
Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives and Collective Memory: More than a Metaphor, Less
than an Analogy,” in: Eastwood and MacNeil, editors, Currents of Archival Thinking
(Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2010).
Henry L. Roediger, III, and James V. Wertsch, “Creating a New Discipline of Memory
Studies,” Memory Studies 1 (2008): 9-22.
Joanna Sassoon, “Phantoms of Remembrance: Libraries and Archives as the
Collective Memory,” Public History Review 10 (2003), 40-60.
Recommended Readings
Jeannette Bastian, Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives
and Found Its History (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2000).
Francis X. Blouin, Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation, and
Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2006).
John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in
the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
Peter F. Cannavò, The Working Landscape: Founding, Preservation, and the Politics of
Place (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, eds., Memory and History in TwentiethCentury Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994)
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Claudio Fogu and Wulf Kansteiner, “The Politics of Memory and the Poetics of
Memory,” in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds., The
Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early
Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia
Saleh, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).
Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).
Carolyn Kitch, Pages from the Past: History and Memory from American Magazines
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory
in Postwar Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
David Lowenthal, The Past Is A Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002).
Week Three. January 31, 2011. War, Memory, and Its Meaning
While “war dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects
everything around it,” war also provides meaning to our lives and society. “Even
with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life,” Hedges
suggests. “It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.” Hedges even
believes, “war fills our spiritual void.” Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning,
pp. 3, 158.
“Moral witnesses speak to us from the other side of a veil. They have seen radical
evil and have returned to tell the tale. They embody memory of a certain kind, and
remind us that remembering the cruelties of the past is not a choice but a necessity.
They are part of the archive. They demand that we face them. Their plea for
recognition, for active knowledge, or acknowledgement, is at the heart of the
memory boom.” Jay Winter, Remembering War, p. 271.
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Required Readings
Deborah D. Buffton, “Memorialization and the Selling of War,” Peace Review 17
(2005): 25-31.
Robert McIntosh, “The Great War, Archives, and Modern Memory,” Archivaria 46
(Fall 1998): 1-31.
Recommended Meanings
Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending
Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York:
Meridian Books, 1994).
Martin van Creveld, The Culture of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008).
David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
Martin Evans and Ken Lunn, eds., War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (New
York: Berg, 1997).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press,
1977).
Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books,
2002).
Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York:
Collier Books, 1990).
Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen
Lane, The Penguin Press, 1997).
Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Picador USA, 2000).
Michael Keren and Holger H. Herwig (eds.), War Memory and Popular Culture
(Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co, 2009).
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Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the
Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New
York: Random Houces, 1996).
Bernard-henri Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History, trans. Charlotte Mandrell
(Hoboken, N. J.: Melville House Publishing, 2004).
John Lukacs, The Legacy of the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010).
A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001).
G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Books, 1995).
Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Harvard University Asia Center,
2006).
Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
Wojciech Tochman, Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia, translated by
Antonio Lloyd-Jones (New York: Atlas and Co., 2008).
Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, trans.
David Bellos (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Sarah E. Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for
Srebrenica’s Missing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, translated by Jared Stark (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006).
Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the
Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
Alfred E. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American
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Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
Week 4. February 7, 2011. The American Civil War: A Case Study in Memory
“History – what trained historians do – is a reasoned reconstruction of the past
rooted in research; it tends to be critical and skeptical of human motive and action,
and therefore more secular than what people commonly refer to as memory.
History can be read by or belong to everyone; it assesses change and progress over
time, and is therefore more relative, more contingent upon place, chronology, and
scale. Memory, however, is often treated as a sacred set of potentially absolute
meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community.
Memory is often owned; history, interpreted. Memory is passed down through
generations; history is revised. Memory often coalesces in objects, sacred sites, and
monuments; history seeks to understand contexts and the complexity of cause and
effect. History asserts the authority of academic training and recognized canons of
evidence; memory carries the often more powerful authority of community
membership and experience. David Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, pp. 1-2.
Required Readings
“The Civil War and American Memory:
Examining the Many Facets of the Conflict,”
a report of a 2002 symposium held at the Library of Congress, available at
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0212/civilwar.html
Recommended Readings
William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South,
1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Love, Memory, and the American Civil War
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002)
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001).
John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
Thomas A. Desjardin, These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped
American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003).
Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Gary W. Gallagher, Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1998).
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Lesley J. Gordon, General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1998).
John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of
Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
Timothy B. Smith, This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the
Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 2004).
Robert Brent Toplin, Ken Burns's the Civil War: The Historian's Response (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
Joan M. Zenzen, Battling for Manassas: The Fifty-Year Preservation Struggle at
Manassas National Battlefield Park (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1998)
Week 5. February 14, 2011. 9/11 and Memory: Another Case Study
“And as the smoke cleared in those very early days, those sixteen acres downtown
were being asked to do the impossible: to make sense of the senseless; to extol the
dead even as they were being exhumed; to transform victims into heroes and heroes
into gods; to find meaning in the squalor of real-time mass murder.” Phillip Nobel,
Sixteen Acres, p. 22.
“In almost every imaginable way, 9-11 shocked, mesmerized, and electrified the
world – abetted by technologies of mass communication that were undreamed of in
1941. Apart from a few photographs of dark clouds of smoke billowing from
crippled warships, no one outside Pearl Harbor itself really ‘saw’ the attack. Even
later ‘documentary’ film footage, such as in John Ford’s 1943 Academy Awardwinning December 7ty, was mostly contrived. By contrast, almost everyone in the
developed world was able to bear eyewitness – over and over and over again – to
September 11.” (Dower, Cultures of War, p. 53).
Required Reading
Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp and Lori A. Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief:
The Construction of Shrines at the Sites of Public Tragedy,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 84 (May 1998): 150-170.
Recommended Readings
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Richard J. Cox, Flowers After the Funeral: Reflections on the Post 9/11 Digital Age
(Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 2003).
John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (New York:
W.W. Norton/The New Press, 2010).
Phillip Nobel, Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future
of Ground Zero (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005).
Daniel Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006).
Robert Brett Toplin, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How One Film Divided a
Nation (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
Week 6. February 21, 2011. Targeting Culture, Looting the Past (and Memory)
“The book is the double of the man, and burning it is the equivalent of killing him.”
Lucien X. Polastron, Books on Fire, p. x.
Required Readings
Linda Barnickel, “Spoils of War: The Fate of European Records During World War
II,” Archival Issues 24, no. 1 (1999): 7-20.
Michele V. Cloonan, “The Moral Imperative to Preserve,” Library Trends 55, no. 3
(Winter 2007): 746-755.
Marek Sroka, “The Destruction of Jewish Libraries and Archives in Cracow during
World War II,” Libraries and Culture 38 (Spring 2003): 147-165.
Recommended Readings
Konstantin Akinsha and Grigoril Kozlov, with Sylvia Hochfield, Beautiful Loot: The
Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures (New York: Random House, 1995).
Michael J. Bazyler and Roger P. Alford, eds., Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the
Litigation and Its Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion
Books, 2006).
Craig Childs. Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaelogical Plunder and Obsession (New
York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2010).
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James Cuno, ed., Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over
Antiquities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest
Works of Art (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third
Reich and the Second World War ((New York: Vintage, 1995).
Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996).
Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Lucien X. Polastron, Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History,
translated by Jon E. Graham (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2007).
Elizabeth Simpson, ed., The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath; The Loss,
Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in
association with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 1997).
John Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
Lawrence Rothfield, ed., Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After
the Iraq War (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008).
Lawrence Rothfield, The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq
Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Edmund De Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
Week 7. February 28, 2011. Collecting, Documenting, and Remembering War
“Archives are not just the bare bones of history for future generations; they are part
of the history-making process. Archives are not neutral, nor are their creation
impartial.” Tim Cook, Clio’s Warriors, p. 38.
Required Readings
Anne-Marie Conde, “Capturing the Records of War: Collecting at the Mitchell Library
and the Australian War Memorial,” Australian Historical Studies 37, 125 (April
2005), 134-152.
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Michael E. Stevens, “Voices From Vietnam: Building a Collection from a
Controversial War,” American Archivist 64 (Spring/Summer 2001): 115-120.
Recommended Readings
Tim Cook, Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006).
Michael A. Elliott, Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George
Armstrong Custer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, eds., Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the
Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,
2006)
Peter Krauss, Portrait of War: The U.S. Army’s First Combat Artists and the
Doughboy’s Experience in WWI (New York: John Wiley & Sons., Inc., 2007).
Louis P. Masur, The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked
America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2006).
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His
Private Letters (New York: Viking, 2007).
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second
World War (New York: Random House, 2005).
Alistair Thomson, ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend ((Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
SPRING BREAK. March 7-11, 2011. Have a nice break!
Week 8. March 14, 2011. Recreating War (and Sustaining Its Memory)
“’Look at these buttons,’ one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. ‘I soaked
them overnight in a saucer filled with urine.’ Uric acid oxidized the brass, giving it
the patina of buttons from the 1860s. ‘My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air
and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again.’” Tony Horwitz,
Confederates in the Attic, p. 7.
Required Reading
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Peruse Cathy Stanton, (1999-11-01). "Reenactors in the Parks: A Study of External
Revolutionary War Reenactment Activity at National Parks" (PDF). National Park
Service.
Recommended Readings
Benjamin G. Cloyd, Haunted By Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
Gary R. Edgerton, Ken Burns’s America (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Andrew Ferguson, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 2007).
Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).
Christopher R. Leahey, Whitewashing War: Historical Myth, Corporate Textbooks, and
Possibilities for Democratic Education (New York: Teachers College/ Columbia
University, 2010).
Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and
Memory (New York: Free Press, 2001).
Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson
Longman, 2006).
Lorett Treese, Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)
Jenny Thompson, War Games: Inside the World of Twentieth-Century War Reenactors
(Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004).
Week 9. March 21, 2011. War, Information, and Recordkeeping
The “most lasting legacy of the [Holocaust-era declassification] effort [he] led was
simply the emergence of the truth. . . . Historical facts can be suppressed, but eventually
they bubble to the surface. What started as a tiny trickle from long-buried U.S. archives
became a torrent of information that helps provide a final accounting for World War II.”
Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice, p. 346.
Required Reading
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Janina Struk, “I Will Never Forget These Scenes,” The Guardian, 20 January 2005,
available at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/20/secondworldwar.warcrimes
Recommended Readings
Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow (Stony Creek, Conn.: The
Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998).
Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany
and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001).
Tom Bower, Nazi Gold: The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal
Billions from Europe’s Jews and Holocaust Survivors (New York: HarperCollins,
1997).
Stuart E. Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished
Business of World War II (New York: Public Affairs, 2003).
Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a
Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq (New York: Rodale, 2007).
Eric Enrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final
Solution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
Ohn B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the attle for Global
Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).
Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era
Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
Itamar Levin, The Last Deposit: Swiss Banks and Holocaust Victims’ Accounts,
translated by Natasha Dornberg (New York: Praeger, 1999).
Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial
(New York: Avon Books, 1995).
Elizabeth Losh, Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a
Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009)
John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
15
Kristie Macrakis. Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Michael Palumbo, The Waldheim Files (London: Faber and Faber, 1988).
Researching Japanese War Crimes Records: Introductory Essays (Washington, D.C.:
National Archives and Records Administration for the Nazi War Crimes and
Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2006).
Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London:
I. B. Taurus in association with European Jewish Publications Society, 2004)
Isabel Vincent, Hitler’s Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of
Justice (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1997).
Gregory L. Ulmer, Electronic Monuments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005).
Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, trans.
Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Week 10. March 28, 2011. The Holocaust as Memory Industry; Yet Another
Case Study
“From a position of relative ignorance about the Holocaust on the part of nonsurvivors and relative silence about the Holocaust on the part of survivors, the
Holocaust has emerged – in the Western World – as probably the most talked about
and oft-represented event of the twentieth century.” Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust,
p. 190.
“The annihilation of Jewish communities was accompanied by the destruction of
photographs, letters, and diaries . . . . This asymmetry in historical records persisted
in accounts written after the war . . . . Historical research into the Holocaust lagged
behind scholarly investigation into the military history of World War II. Even today
it is hard to imagine what a full account of the Shoah might be, since the destruction
of the accounts of the victims is so vast. The exceptional fact of the murder of the
majority of Jews in Europe created silences that are difficult to gauge. The disparity
in the ability to bear witness – this, too, was part of the German empire” (Peter
Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, pp. 153-154).
Required Reading
Astrid M. Eckart, “Managing Their Own Past: German Archivists Between National
Socialism and Democracy,” Archival Science 7 (2007): 223-244.
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Recommended Readings
Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History Is Bought,
Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999).
Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2008).
Raul Hilberg, The Politics of a Holocaust Historian: The Journey of a Holocaust
Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996).
Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the
Holocaust (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004).
Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
(New York: Free Press, 1993).
Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (New York:
ECC, 2005).
Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National
Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Judith Miller, One by One by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Touchstone,
1990).
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999).
Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never
Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Week 11. April 4, 2011. Reparations and Justice
The reports on the looted assets of Holocaust victims “could not have been written
by mobilized federal historians and researchers without the enthusiastic support
and full resources of the National Archives, which became the headquarters of the
international research in Holocaust-era assets” (William Slany in Bazyler and Alford,
eds., Holocaust Restitution, p. 35).
“The war ended without an accounting or acknowledgment of the war crimes they
witnessed. Their retelling comes at an equally important time when, having failed
to address the past, we’re destined to repeat it” (Deborah Nelson, The War Behind
Me, p. 5).
17
Required Readings
Tom A. Adami, “’Who Will Be Left to Tell the Tale?’ Recordkeeping and International
Criminal Jurisprudence,” Archival Science 7 (2007): 213-221.
Kate Doyle, “The Atrocity Files: Deciphering the Archives of Guatemala’s Dirty War,”
Harper’s 315 (December 2007): 52-62.
David Wallace, “Historical and Contemporary Justice and the Role of Archivists,” in
Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority, Arkiv, Demokrati og Rettferd,
RBM no. 28 (Oslo, Norway, 2006), pp. 14-27.
Recommended Readings
Michael J. Bazyler and Roger P. Alford, eds., Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the
Litigation and Its Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Ray L. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Greg Grandin and Thomas Miller Klubock, eds., Truth Commissions: State Terror,
History, and Memory, issue 97 of the Radical History Review (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007
Horton, James Oliver and Lois E., eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of
American Memory (New York: The New Press, 2006).
Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S.
War Crimes (New York: Basic Books, 2008)
Week 12. April 11, 2011. The Citizen, the Soldier, and the Experience of War
“Throughout our country, old war letters are regularly being destroyed, misplaced,
lost to fire and water damage, or thrown away. These letters are the first, unfiltered
drafts of history. They are eyewitness accounts that record not only the minute
details of war but the personal insight and perspective no photograph or film reel
can replicate. And each one represents another page in our national autobiography.
Millions of these letters – maybe more – remain tucked away in attics, basements,
and closets in every community in America. It is exhilarating to think of what is yet
to be uncovered. But it is equally as discouraging to consider, if these letters are
neglected, what may be lost forever.” Andrew Carroll, War Letters, p. 36.
Required Reading
18
Pursue the Legacy Project website: “Founded in 1998, the Legacy Project is a
national, all-volunteer initiative that encourages Americans to seek out and
preserve the personal correspondence of our nation’s veterans, active-duty troops,
and their loved ones. No one can tell the stories of these men and women better
than they can, and we believe that their sacrifices, humanity, and experiences are
best recorded in their own words—the letters and e-mails they have written in
times of war.” The website is available at http://warletters.com/.
Recommended Readings
Veterans History Project, About the Project, http://www.loc.gov/vets/about.html
Götz Aly, Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943 (New York:
Metropolitan Books, published in association with the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, 2007).
Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the
American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).
Robert E. Bonner, The Soldier’s Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
Andrew Carroll, ed., War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars
(New York: Washington Square Press, 2002).
Jane E. Dusselier, Artifacts of Loss: Crafting Survival in Japanese American
Concentration Camps (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage
Books, 2002)
Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger, Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries,
From World War I to Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006).
Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw
Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
Donald Keene, So Lovely A Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese
Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
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Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York:
HarperCollins, 2006).
Mark Roseman, A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany (New York:
Picador USA, 2000).
Louise Steinman, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War (Chapel Hill:
Alonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2001).
Thomas Wiener, ed., Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the
Front Lines (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2004).
Thomas Wiener, ed., Forever a Soldier: Unforgettable Stories of Wartime Service
(Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2005).
Week 13. April 18, 2011. Monuments, Memorials, Cemeteries, Museums, and
the War Archive
“The rhetoric of Civil War mortality statistics provided the language for a meditation
on the deeper human meaning of the conflict and its unprecedented destructiveness,
as well as for the exploration of the place of the individual in a world of mass – and
increasingly mechanized – slaughter. It was about what counted in a world
transformed.” Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, p. 265.
Required Readings
Erika Doss, “Memorial Mania: Fear, Anxiety, and Public Culture,” Museum 87, no. 2
(March-April 2008): 36, 38-43, 72-73, 75.
Erika Doss, “War, Memory, and the Public Mediation of Affect: The National World
War II Memorial and American Imperialism,” Memory Studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 227250.
Maya Lin, “Making the Memorial,” New York Review of Books (November 2, 2000),
pp. 53-55.
Elizabeth Yakel, “Museums, Management, Media, and Memory: Lessons from the
Enola Gay Exhibition,” Libraries & Culture 35 (Spring 2000): 278-310.
Recommended Readings
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
Thomas J. Craughwell, Stealing Lincoln’s Body (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2007).
20
Holly Everett, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture (Denton, Texas:
University of North Texas Press, 2002).
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
Victor Gondos, Jr. J. Franklin Jameson and the Birth of the National Archives, 19061926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003).
Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay (New York:
Copernicus, 1996).
Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields, 2nd ed.
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other
Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996)
Nicolaus Mills, Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial
(New York: Basic Books, 2004).
Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe and Co., 1995).
Robert M. Pole, On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery (New
York: Walker & Co., 2009).
Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in
Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., The National Mall, and the
Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009).
Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military
Fallen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the
Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 1997).
21
Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma
City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (New
York: Berg, 2007).
Week 14. April 25, 2011. Presentation and Discussion of Student Papers.
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