Wednesday, February 7, 3 p.m. ET

Teaching the Holocaust Digitally: Challenging Student Assumptions Through Primary Sources

How can we teach about the Holocaust and its complex lessons to students today? Join Leah Wolfson, Luke Ryder, and Mark Alexander of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as they walk participants through Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context, a primary source tool for the college classroom. With more than 350 primary sources, including diaries, letters, interviews, historical film footage, photographs, and more, these diverse materials are curated and contextualized for use in a variety of courses. This event will explore how to use this digital tool as a platform for active student learning and engagement around the teaching of difficult histories. Experiencing History leverages the digital medium in order to show students how complex and messy these sources—and the motivations of the people who created them—can be.

This online event is part of AHA Learn, a webinar series focused on teaching and learning in history. It is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Can’t make it? Register anyway and receive a link to the recording after the event.

 

 

Events listed below are part of the Washington History Seminar Series, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program and the AHA. Each seminar is recorded and posted to the Washington History Seminar’s YouTube channel.

 

Monday, January 29, 4 p.m. ET

“Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust”

Join Mary Fulbrook (Univ. Coll. London) and Natalia Aleksiun (Univ. of Florida, Gainesville) for a discussion on Dr. Fulbrook’s new book Bystander Society. Drawing on personal accounts of experiences in the Third Reich and in wartime Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, Bystander Society explores the conditions for widespread passivity in face of violence against others. Fulbrook reconceives “bystanding” in terms of changing interpersonal relations: indifference, ignorance (or choosing to ignore), and a sense of impotence, are historically produced. Many became increasingly complicit or involved in wartime perpetration; a few sought retreat or resistance; but remaining an ‘innocent bystander’ was largely a postwar myth. More information here.

 

Monday, February 5, 4 p.m. ET

“Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century”

Join Joya Chatterji (Trinity Coll., Cambridge), Durba Ghosh (Cornell Univ.), and Partha Pratim Shil (Stanford Univ.) for a discussion on Dr. Chatterji’s new book Shadows at Noon. Taking the partitions of British India rather than the two world wars as the century’s inflection points, this original and ambitious history of the Indian subcontinent explores the region’s unique twentieth-century history and foregrounds the deep connections, rather than the well-publicized fissures, between the cultures of India and Pakistan. More information here.