Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons^™

Unsettling Home: Traces Of An Unrepaired Settler-Colonial Past In "Redding, California," 1846-1924, Celeste Hegy

University Honors Theses

This thesis critically reads primary documents from the settler-colonial past of "Redding, California," my hometown. In this paper, I sketch out a series of moments of historical trauma which continue to cry out for repair. Through a series of episodes from the mid-nineteenth through the early-twentieth centuries, I examine how original settler thirst for land wrought a contested hegemony in principally genocidal flows of power between the settler-state and its settler inhabitants and the pre-existing local Indigenous nations and peoples. In the first chapter, I argue for an understanding of the dispossession of the northern valley as genocidal. In the …

Displaced: An Ethnography Of Language And Identity Loss, Ariel Caroline Wilsey-Gopp

Dissertations and Theses

Through ethnography and personal narrative, I explore the language and identity loss of one person, my father, in order to understand the complex issues surrounding the effects of symbolic and structural violence on language and identity development. Through personal narrative, fieldwork, and interviews, I tell the story of one person, born in wartime during Nazi occupied Serbia, and follow the guiding questions: how does language get lost and what are the effects? Drawing on methodology set forth by empirical ethnographical work as well as more recent theory around epigenetics and trauma, my research synthesizes into focus three pillars of understanding …

Methods Of Memorialization: Holocaust Commemoration In The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kylee Bolinger

University Honors Theses

Memorials, both formal and informal, both private and public, have long participated in the pursuit to honor the victims of tragedy, disaster, or genocide. Memorial museums serve both to memorialize victims and to foster an environment conducive to reflection and education about these stories. Such memorial museums have especially made their mark after one of the most notable and devastating genocide events in history: the Holocaust in twentieth-century Europe. This thesis examines how memorialization methods utilized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) make up the American interpretation of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the concept typically applied to how Germans deal …

Vestiges Of Propaganda: Postage Stamps Issued By The Third Reich In Poland And The Netherlands During The Second World War, Olivia Phillips

University Honors Theses

This thesis hopes to bridge the gap between philately and history and examines how postage stamps issued by the Third Reich during the Second World War portrayed their colonial and racial policy in the Netherlands and Poland. Through my research where I examine Nazi primary source documents and rely on an expansive discourse community whose focus is communications theory, postal history, and colonial history, I focus on how these stamps were an extension of the Reich’s Ministry for Propaganda. Dutch stamps closely align with German-issued stamps from the same period, through the depiction of hypermasculine men in a rural setting …

Examining The U.S. Wars On Vietnam, Laos, And Cambodia As The Production Of Neo-Colonialism, Aiden Gregg

University Honors Theses

I interrogate the colonial and neo-colonial histories of the U.S. wars on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos within the context of racialized and gendered labor accumulation, the production of difference through violence as a legitimation of colonial extraction, and ongoing neoliberal economic coercion. I examine genocide and ecocide as interdependent processes in the production of dependency and underdevelopment. I reject a common narrative of temporal and spatial disconnection which separates the wars from current economics and examine the violences which both produce and result from an economy based on growth.

Oregonian Holocaust Memory: Creating A Portal To The Past For Oregonians, Max Blust

University Honors Theses

Since the end of the Second World War, Holocaust Memorials have spread beyond Europe and become established in the United States. The genocide of European Jews and other ethnic minorities was an international event, spreading from Western Europe all the way into the Soviet Union. The international coalition which invaded Germany and ended the Second World War, resulted in Holocaust survivors resettling all across the globe. In the United States, where thousands of survivors joined existing Jewish communities, there arose interest for memorializing the victims of genocide and the trauma endured. The Oregon Holocaust Memorial (OHM) is a product of …

Is Anne Frank At Last Taken Seriously As A Writer?, Laureen Nussbaum

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1998, the emergence of five unknown pages written by Anne Frank once again focused attention on her diary. Despite the fact that the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation had unravelled the history of Anne's diary in "The Critical Edition" (Dutch 1986, 2001; English 1989, 2003) and had printed all available texts in parallel, readers were confused. This was partly due to Mirjam Pressler’s so-called ‘Definitive Edition’ of 1995 in which the strands, that had been so carefully separated in the Critical Edition, were once again tangled. A brief review of the different versions of Anne Frank's journal may be …

The Universal Nature Of Hatred: Keith Stimely And The Culture Of Holocaust Denial, Linda Maizels

Dissertations and Theses

A partial accounting of the discord beneath the seeming conformity of opinion within the insular community of the proponents of Holocaust denial was documented and preserved by Keith Stimely, a Holocaust denier who donated his personal papers to the University of Oregon Special Collections Library in 1991. The thesis uses the Stimely Collection to emphasize the universal nature of the hatred and animosity inherent in the denial movement.

Chapter One surveys revisionist historiography concerning both world wars and the manner in which the deniers appropriated the trappings of revisionism in their attempt to rewrite the history of the Nazi genocide …

Anne Frank: From Shared Experiences To A Posthumous Literary Bond, Laureen Nussbaum

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Anne Frank is the best known victim of the Nazis, the representative of all the Jewish children murdered by them. She has become an icon, the heroine of a romanticized play and a subsequent film that made her name a household word all over the world and, at least in this country, the object of heated debates about her putative Jewishness or the lack thereof. While she has risen to fame as a symbol, her talent and her aspirations as a writer have generally not been taken seriously. However, the editor of a recent anthology, Women Writing in Dutch, published …