The Holocaust as History and Warning

Regretably, due to weather conditions in the DC area, this Washington History Seminar is cancelled. Please subscribe to our newsletter for word when it is rescheduled.

It was little more than seventy-five years ago that human history witnessed an unprecedented crime—the deliberate mass murder of millions in the aim of removing a whole people from the planet. The Holocaust has defined countless lives and reshaped our world—and yet, when it comes to our understanding of just why and how this genocide took place, we know so little. Renowned historian Timothy Snyder’s latest book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, offers a new and innovative interpretation of the Holocaust—and a frightening warning about our future. Drawing on new archival sources from Eastern Europe and on a vast historiography, Snyder is the first historian to master this hugely diverse collection of source material and to depict the entirety of the Holocaust in accessible terms.

Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of five award-winning works of history, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which received the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Snyder is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and a former contributing editor at the New Republic. He is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, serves as the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and sits on the advisory council of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

The Washington History Seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. See www.wilsoncenter.org/collection/washington-history-seminar for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts and podcasts. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for their support.