This past Sunday, June 10, the right-wing Corporation 11 de Septiembre held an homage to the dead dictator Augusto Pinochet under the auspices of a documentary screening at the iconic Teatro Caupolican in Santiago Centro. That day it was answered and challenged in sometimes violent ways by diverse sectors of society and weeks before when many of Santiago’s notably non-violent human rights organizations and sites of memory maneuvered to use legal and political recourse to prevent a ceremony that celebrated a leader infamous for overseeing an era of human rights violations. Read More
This is a personal letter. It is personal because I came to Chile to write and participate in the history of the museum project “National Stadium, National Memory,” whose aim is “the material establishment of national memory in respect… to the Concentration Camp… in 1973.” Read More
Since my September arrival in Chile, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights has become a common ground for my historical work, with handfuls of visits to its Center of Documentation for conversations and conferences, and the permanent exhibit. Although not a physical or recovered site connected to human rights violations, it sits squarely in the memory landscape of Chile, a barely-born institution that has made waves since its 2010 inauguration under then-President Michele Bachalet. Read More
The Southern landscape and many other parts of the United States remain pockmarked with state historical markers that demand reinterpretation or removal. One state historical marker noting the failure of New Orleans’ 17th Street Canal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that Louisiana has landed on the right side of this history. Read More
The NCPH/OAH conference brought to light a subject near to my heart this afternoon – history in the NPS. The panel consisted of Marla Miller, Gary Nash, David Thelen and Anne Mitchell Whisnant. On the docket was the discussion of their report on how the NPS stacks up in the history department. Read More
Historians, preservationists, government officials, and elected representatives stand at a frontier of possibility and hope, or anguish and betrayal as the nation enters the sesquicentennial years of the Civil War. This proposed roundtable, in cooperation with audience members, dares to imagine how our Civil War battlefields should be managed for the next 150 years. Read More
The U.S. Senate Historical Office presents a new online feature: States in the Senate. Each state has its own unique place in Senate history. Reminders that we are a union of states surround us as we walk the halls of the Senate office buildings and the U.S Read More
The Smithsonian is, of course, not the only institution associated with the federal government that maintains an archive about its own history. The National Park Service, for example, has made a substantial investment in documenting the histories of its parks. Read More
I have been traveling to and from Chile for various reasons at various times since 2005, acquiring a deep appreciation for the country and its cultural subtleties and social mores—to say nothing of a Spanish accent steeped in Chilean slang. But if I have learned anything since my initial days, it is that one must exercise sensitivity when approaching the dictatorial past. Read More
Canadian governments on both sides of the political spectrum since the Second World War have been much less willing to invest in the country’s military (the world’s fourth-largest in 1945, but only the 56th today) than in the image of Canada as peace keeper (most notably through the invention of the UN Peacekeepers by Canadian diplomat and later Prime Minister Lester Pearson). Read More
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