By Cara Williams Anybody who knows me knows how obsessed I am with my niece. At the ripe age of twenty, I have become my mother, talking about her to anyone who will listen. I have shown her picture across three continents this year. My niece is only 1. The only thing she knows is […]
By Sarah Mowrer Oftentimes, the conditions of living as a citizen in a nation with a communist regime under the yolk of the Soviet Union made both the present and the future seem bleak. Rights and liberties were severely restricted; corruption was rampant, and economic crises meant lacking material products and available food. After traveling through […]
By Jack Yoon It is well known that Poland was the ultimate victim of World War II as in 1939, Nazi Germany, along with the Soviet Union, violently invaded, enslaved, and destroyed the Second Polish Republic. The brutality Poland experienced while under German occupation could best be described by Warsaw, Poland’s mighty capital. Whereas before the […]
By Sarah Vallejo On our last day in Berlin, I was passing through an unremarkable area when I overheard a tour guide mention it had once been the site of Hitler’s Chancellor House. I was taken aback, amazed by how the Nazi past persists in Berlin despite its ideological and architectural transformations. The city’s past becomes […]
By Ella Roerden Throughout history, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships have attempted to use many different methods to create an atmosphere of fear, enabling them to consolidate power and control the people they rule over. One such method that has been used frequently in the past century, lasting into the modern day, is the censorship or banning […]
By SY Cheng Throughout the semester, we have studied the history of Central Europe in depth, examining its impact on modern borders and cultural identities. From the travel seminars to my personal initiative to visit sites of interest, the experience has exceeded my expectations. I am not particularly drawn to the program’s long, dark history. […]
By Mason Burley When we talk about resistance against totalitarian and tyrannical rule, it is easy for the idea to feel distant, abstract, or belonging to another era. Many people in the United States, who are far from the landscapes of Warsaw, Gdańsk, or Prague, might assume that the major political struggles against dictatorship took […]
By Mason Burley The global movement to decolonize knowledge has increasingly broadened the scope of historical responsibility, compelling former imperial powers to confront the intellectual, cultural, and material legacies of empire embedded in their universities, museums, and political institutions. Yet even as the conversation has expanded to include subtler forms of epistemic and institutional colonization, […]
By Blake Wilson In 1945, following the liberation of the last operating concentration camp and the capitulation of Germany that ended the war in Europe, the global Jewish population was permanently scarred. The destruction and murder of European Jews was so complete that two of every three Jews in Europe did not see the end […]
By Sarah Vallejo After spending almost three months now studying the history of World War II and the decades that followed in Central Europe, I would say that not much I learn shocks me anymore. I feel like I’ve “seen it all” between our lessons on the rise of the Nazi regime, our visits to three […]