Rutgers' Experts Offer Broad Perspective on World War II
The university's scholarship emphasizes personal histories
September 06, 2007
EDITOR’S NOTE: Reporters may contact a World War II expert at Rutgers directly or through Ken Branson, Office of Media Relations, 732-932-7084, ext. 633, kbranson@ur.rutgers.edu or Patricia Lamiell, 732-932-7084, ext. 615, plamiell@ur.rutgers.edu.
ATTENTION RADIO/WEB REPORTERS: Audio excerpts from several interviews in the Rutgers Oral History Archives are available.
“Oral history, by weaving personal experiences into the fabric of time, has turned history's rough cloth into a richly textured tapestry.” – Tom Kindre, Rutgers Class of 1942, and the first president of the Rutgers Living History Society
Ken Burns’ highly anticipated documentary film about World War II, premiering Sept. 23 on the Public Broadcasting System, highlights the value of preserving the personal stories of eyewitnesses to one of the most important events in the modern world. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a center of original scholarship and a significant archive of oral histories about the war.
In many ways World War II was a citizen’s war, and first-person accounts from people who fought in the war and their loved ones who contributed to the war effort are essential to understanding the conflict. As the WWII generation ages, Rutgers’ historians are capturing their personal histories using a variety of traditional and emerging methods of historical research.
Rutgers faculty members from numerous disciplines analyze, write and teach about the World War II era. Much of their work is based on first-person, eyewitness accounts from a wide range of men and women directly affected by the war.
THE RUTGERS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES <(http://oralhistory.rutgers.edu) is a collection of more than 700 oral histories, nearly all of them gathered from American men and women who lived through the World War II era, either living and working on the home front or serving in the military. The program began in 1993 and went online in 1996 as one of the first to post full-text oral histories on the World Wide Web. The award-winning Web site features 444 first-person interviews; all but 11 discuss the World War II era. Beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor, these testimonies describe in detail the impact of war on society; the disruption of individual lives; the chaos of combat; and, on the home front, the loss of family members, neighbors and friends; rationing; scrap drives; war bond drives; and civil defense drills.
The Web site also contains digitized and transcribed diaries, letters, memoirs and photographs, many of them accessible online or on compact discs. Audio excerpts from several interviews are available.
Even Rutgers undergraduate students, many of whom are now the same age as their grandparents during WWII, are avidly interested in personal histories of the war. Students who take an undergraduate seminar, “Oral History and the American Experience in WWII,” help produce primary resource materials for the Rutgers Oral History Archives and interact with individuals who changed history. Students assist in conducting research, interviewing new participants, and analyzing and editing interview transcripts. Taught in both the fall and spring semesters each academic year by Professor John Chambers, this popular class is capped at 15 students per semester and is always oversubscribed. To observe Chambers’ Oral History class, contact the Office of Media Relations at 732-932-7084. To watch an oral history being recorded, contact Sandra Stewart Holyoak, director, 732-932-8190, or at holyoak@history.rutgers.edu.
For information about the Rutgers Oral History Archives or to reach participants in the archives, contact Sandra Stewart Holyoak, director, at 732-932-8190 or holyoak@history.rutgers.edu.
WORLD WAR II HISTORY
WILLIAM O’NEILL is professor emeritus of history. He specializes in the history of 20th-century America, particularly America’s role in the century’s two world wars. He is the author of A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (The Free Press, 1993), in which he made extensive use of oral histories and other first-person accounts. He also wrote World War II: A Student Companion (Oxford University Press, 1999) and many other books and essays about 20th-century America. He continues to teach a class at Rutgers in U.S. History from 1914-1945.
Contact O’Neill at 732-246-8312, or wlohp@aol.com.
JOCHEN HELLBECK is an associate professor of history and a historian of Russia. He is working on a cultural history of the battle of Stalingrad using diaries, letters and interviews with German and Russian soldiers, to understand the meaning of that epic battle for the people who survived it and their descendants. The discovery in the early 1990s of one such diary in an obscure Russian archive changed Hellbeck’s life and work because, he says, it gave him a new way to understand how people make, and are made by, history. His most recent book, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin, (Harvard University Press, 2006) uses the diaries of four Soviet citizens to understand life in the first two decades of the Soviet experiment.
Contact Hellbeck at 732-932-1086 (office) or hellbeck@history.rutgers.edu.
PAUL SCHALOW, associate professor of Asian language and cultures, teaches an undergraduate course, “Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb,” which uses Japanese literature written by survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima archived in Rutgers’ East Asian Library. The Japanese, so far, are the only people who can speak as eyewitnesses of a nuclear attack. For that reason, Japan’s atomic bomb literature, with all its horrors, is a valuable subject of study. The course introduces students to English translations of fiction and poetry by survivors addressing the atomic aftermath; documentary videos describing the development and deployment of nuclear weapons as well as eyewitness accounts of the attacks (including Steven Okazaki's White Light, Black Rain, HBO, 2007); and three feature-length films about the bombings.
Contact Schalow at 732-932-5591 or schalow@rci.rutgers.edu.
JOHN W. CHAMBERS III, professor of history, serves as the chair of the Rutgers Oral History Archives’ advisory committee and draws from the archives in his scholarly work about World War II. Chambers has explored the way feature and documentary films from the 1890s to the present have represented and interpreted the past. He is the author of To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (Free Press/Macmillan, 1987) and The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Rutgers University Press, 2000). He is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to War, Peace, and Society.
Contact Chambers at 732-932-3613 (office) or chamber@rci.rutgers.edu.
THE HOLOCAUST
PAUL HANEBRINK, associate professor of history, teaches a popular undergraduate course in the history of the Holocaust. Hanebrink’s research interests include modern East Central Europe, with a particular focus on Hungary; the history of nationalism and anti-Semitism as modern political ideologies; and the place of religion in the modern nation-state.
Contact Hanebrink at 732-932-6695 or hanebrin@history.rutgers.edu.
JEFFREY SHANDLER, associate professor of Jewish studies, is an expert in Holocaust literature and how the Holocaust is remembered, especially in the United States, in broadcast media, film, museums, tourist productions, literature and other forms of culture. His publications include a translation, forward and afterward of Emil and Karl, by Yankev Glatschteyn. Originally written in Yiddish for American Jewish children, it is one of the first books written for young adult readers describing the early days of the events that have come to be known as the Holocaust.
Contact Shandler at 732-932-3572 or shandler@rci.rutgers.edu.
JUDITH GERSON co-edited “Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas,” (Duke University Press, 2007). This volume includes essays on the Holocaust and its aftermath, integrating primary research of the Shoah, and commentaries on how that research contributes to ongoing inquiries in the social sciences. The book underscores the importance of understanding the Holocaust as genocide, and also in terms of collective action, collective guilt and collective memory as well as immigration and transnationalism. Gerson’s current research focuses on German Jewish refugees who resettled in the U.S. during World War II. Gerson is associate professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies, and a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Contact Gerson at 732-429-9744 or gerson@rci.rutgers.edu.
Contact: Patricia Lamiell
732-932-7084, Ext. 615
E-mail: plamiell@ur.rutgers.edu