Confronting the Past
Learn how countries address their darkest chapters
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The uproar over Civil War monuments and how history is taught in schools is by no means limited to the United States. Across the globe bitter memories of the past continue to divide and enrage. Realms of Memory is a podcast series which explores how countries confront the past, the benefits they gain by doing do, and the dangers that arise when they fail to take up this challenge.
Episode 49: Forgetting the Victims: The 2003 Heat Wave in Paris
In the age of climate change and global pandemics how do we remember the victims? University of Madison, Wisconsin historian Richard C. Keller examines this question through his study of the 2003 heat wave in Paris. This was the worst natural disaster in French...
Episode 48: The Anne Frank Phenomenon
How can we understand the extraordinary scope and magnitude of global fame and notoriety achieved by Anne Frank? The Anne Frank diary has been translated into scores of languages and sold over twenty million copies. It has inspired countless books, movies and documentaries. The...
Episode 47: Memory, Forgetting and the Planet in Peril
Alan Weisman is a journalist and non fiction writer whose focus over the past twenty five years has been on the crises that now imperil the planet. In The World Without Us (2007), which became a New York Times and International best seller, Alan...
Episode 46: Remembering Intimate Partner Violence
It was on a train to Siberia that Joy Neumeyer decided to write her story. Despite the distance between Russia and her history graduate program at Berkeley, she was still haunted by the memory of her abusive relationship with her boyfriend and classmate. In the...
Episode 45: Joel Waldman on Family Memory & True Crime
Is it possible to understand the suppression of memory as an act of love? In Surviving the Survivor: A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist and My Podcast Co-Host, author Joel Waldman argues that his mother...
Episode 44: The Power of Objects from Sites of Mass Atrocities
Objects recovered from sites of mass atrocities have a special significance today. This is because we live in what University College Dublin Professor Lea David labels as a human rights memorialization culture. Central to this culture is the conviction that we should face difficult...
Show Host
Rick Derderian is the grandson of a survivor of the Armenian genocide–an unresolved past which continues to haunt modern day Turkey. He holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of North Africans in Contemporary France: Becoming Visible and has published numerous articles on immigration and memory in France.
