History

On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, age four, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, New York. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her. At one point, someone suggested that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by Jews, and as the search continued, policemen and townspeople alike gave credence to the quickly spreading rumors. The allegation of ritual murder, known to Jews as "blood libel," took hold.

In 1900, in a small Prussian town, a young boy was found murdered, his body dismembered, the blood drained from his limbs. The Christians of the town quickly rose up in violent riots to accuse the Jews of ritual murder--the infamous blood-libel charge that has haunted Jews for centuries. In an absorbing narrative, Helmut Walser Smith reconstructs the murder and the ensuing storm of anti-Semitism that engulfed this otherwise peaceful town.

It seems at first commonplace: a group photograph of peasants at harvest time, after hard work well done, resting contentedly with their tools behind the fruits of their labor. But when one finally notices the "crops" scattered in front of the group, what seemed innocent on first view become horrific skulls and bones. Where are we? Who are the people in the photograph, and what are they doing?

Immigrants in the United States send more than $20 billion every year back to Mexico--one of the largest flows of such remittances in the world. With The Remittance Landscape, Sarah Lynn Lopez offers the first extended look at what is done with that money, and in particular how the building boom that it has generated has changed Mexican towns and villages.

This article examines the troubling status of poor migrant women political actors in the denationalized space of Ciudad Juárez. Subaltern women's labors have served the state as a stabilizing force amidst the economic and political crises of the neo-liberal regime in ways that both promote and delimit new forms of female agency in the border region.

How did a young Bundist activist fall so in love with France in the 1930s that she was willing to sacrifice her vocation as a painter, a student of Gromaire and familiar with Montparnasse, to share the life of her husband, a Russian emigrant who became a poultry farmer in the North? How, only just having been naturalized French, did she come to enlist at the start of the Second World War as a military nurse for the Red Cross to end up in the Camp d'Agde as an enemy alien?

An Uncertain Hour recounts the history of the German occupation of France and the Vichy government, concentrating on events in Lyon. Morgan outlines Vichy policies toward the Jews and describes the cooperation between Vichy officers and Germans in the Final Solution. He dwells on the personalities of leading members of the government in charge of Jewish affairs (Vallat, Darquier de Pellepoix, Bousquet) as well as German war criminals (Dannecker, and especially Klaus Barbie).

Despite some pioneering work by scholars, historians still find it hard to listen to the voices of women in the Holocaust.

Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp--a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime.

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany.