A Passion to Understand

Most online accounts of Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Albert Speer mention that they were convicted at the Nuremberg trials but few accounts mention the testimony and evidence provided by Francisco Boix that enabled those convictions. Nor do they mention t...

More than one in three Turkish women have been domestically abused in their lifetime. Femicides are rising and in 2020, 409 women in Turkey died as a result of domestic violence. It is rare that a woman will survive a case of extreme violence, rarer...

I'm reading Ann Petrila and Hasan Hasanović's Voices from Srebrenica: Survivor Narratives of the Bosnian Genocide. The book is a series of oral histories from survivors of the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995; I've only made it through the section o...

If you've ever contemplated how people 'get over' war and genocide, Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura has the answer in her debut novel Letters from Diaspora: Stories of War and its Aftermath: they don't. The war follows them everywhere, their trauma never...

Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma was once home to a thriving African American community. On May 31st and June 1st 1921, a mob of armed white Tulsans attacked the community, killing as many as 300 African Americans and displacing 8,000 more. 2021 w...

I know very little about American civil rights history from the late 19th to early 20th century. This is not surprising; my focus has primarily been on Africa (especially South Africa) and on genocides in the 20th century. It has been interesting to...

I’ve previously covered the suppressed history of Dutch atrocities in post-war Indonesia on this blog in 2012 and I was very interested to hear about Alfred Birney’s novel about a man named Alan Nolan who discovers his father’s memoirs about th...