Holocaust Memorial Day Public Lectures by Eva Clarke and Tom Lawson

Eva Clarke

On 27 January the History group, in partnership with the Newcastle City Council, will host a Holocaust Memorial Day public lecture with guest speaker Eva Clarke, and our own Professor Tom Lawson.

Eva Clarke was born in Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Austria in 1945, three days prior to the collapse of the Third Reich and liberation of the camp by the American Army. Eva and Anka, her mother, were the only remaining survivors, following the death of fifteen other family members in Auschwitz-Birkenau. This inspirational story of the survival of Eva and her mother will recount their harrowing experiences and tortuous journey to the notorious concentration camp and will show how courage and determination helped them to survive in the camp.

Professor Lawson will be speaking about this year’s Holocaust memorial theme, in a talk entitled “Bystanders and the Holocaust”.

One of the most encouraging things about this event is that it was proposed by one of our 1st Year History students, Michaela Crawley who has a working relationship with the Holocaust Memorial Trust.  Michaela will be introducing Eva, and I hope many of you will turn out to this exciting event.

Registration is required and space is limited so please book your place here.

James McConnell Wins Bid to the AHRC-funded WWI Living Legacies Centre

Congratulations to James McConnell for his successful bid to the AHRC-funded WWI Living Legacies Centre. James describes the project below.

WWI poster, courtesy of the
Library of Congress. London:
Johnson, Riddle & Co., Ltd., 1915.

In mobilising ‘citizen historians’, this project will work with community partners such as the Northumbria First World War Commemoration project (NWW1), a path-breaking, multiple Heritage Lottery Fund-supported group, which has pioneered the use of grassroots-led research methods, combining these with cutting-edge IT, to produce community-led research on the men from the former borough of Tynemouth who fell during the conflict. ‘Citizen history’ is a relatively new concept in which professional historians work alongside volunteers from a range of backgrounds, often online, to collect and analyse data in relation to particular topics. For a well-known example of ‘citizen history’, click here.

In the case of this project, we’ll be looking to recruit volunteers to research the lives and wartime service of ‘Geordies’ in the armies of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada during World War One. By ‘crowdsourcing’ research in this collaborative way, the project will collect information that will help us to understand why ‘Geordies’ emigrated and how these journey relate to their wartime movements and even post-war locations of settlement.

The project will consider not only the complexities of individual ‘migration histories’ but also the way that individuals and communities saw their identities (as ‘Geordies’ and Britons, but also Australians, Canadians, or New Zealanders); how they understood ‘Geordie’ migration more generally, and how people came to see the empire in new ways through this migration. By using the term ‘Geordie’, we’re aware that the name is often used to describe the people of Newcastle, but it has been used by scholars to describe the people of the wider north east region  as well. In seeking to find volunteers across the world who will help the project research the lives of these soldiers, we’re using the term because it’s internationally recognisable.

Professor Tom Lawson to Lecture on "Britain and Genocide: History, Memory and Morality"

Public Lecture by Professor Tom Lawson
Professor of History, Northumbria University
When:  6.30pm, Wednesday, 20 May, 2015
Where: Lecture Theatre 002, Business and Law Building, City Campus East, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Refreshments will be available from 6pm
Free admission
Register here

Synopsis

In twenty-first century Britain, genocide is the ultimate atrocity. In foreign policy the allegation of genocide has been important in recent debates around military action overseas; and in memory culture genocide is represented as a fundamental transgression. Within that culture, it is the spectre of the Holocaust that dominates.

In Britain, mourning and memorialization is often combined with a celebration of ‘our’ role as saviour and liberator. This lecture will explore the view that such a discourse obscures the complex role of genocide in British history and will seek to place racial extermination at the centre of the story of Britain, and particularly its Empire. In doing so the lecture will also call for a more reflective memory culture in the British present as a means of coming to terms with a violent past and for a morally active historiography as the means of achieving it.

About the Speaker

Tom Lawson is Professor of History and Associate Dean (Academic) in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences. He joined Northumbria in October 2013 from the University of Winchester where he’d been Professor of Holocaust Studies and Head of Research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Tom is the author and editor of several books including: The Church of England and the Holocaust (2006); Debates on the Holocaust (2010); and with James Jordan The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia (2008), with Thomas Kuhne The Holocaust and Local History (2010) and with Stephen Parker, God and War (2012). His most recent book was published in 2014 as The Last Man: a British genocide in Tasmania. He is also the co-editor of Holocaust Studies: a journal of culture and history and was previously a mid-career fellow of the British Academy. Tom is currently writing a history of genocide in the British Empire entitled Empire of Extermination: Genocide in the British World.

Play Remembers Oklahoma Bombing

From the Northumbria University news page.

Oklahoma City bombing project

An academic from Northumbria University, Newcastle, has written a new play to mark the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma Bombing.

The play, written by Northumbria’s Director of Performing Arts, Steve Gilroy, will be performed by Oklahoma City University (OCU) students this month as part of its anniversary project to remember the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

OCU commissioned Steve, an award-winning playwright, due to his expertise in verbatim theatre – a form of documentary for the stage based on personal interviews and transcripts. Steve then worked with OCU students and staff to conduct more than 35 interviews with family members of victims, survivors, local officials and first responders.

Steve said: “Often, during the verbatim process, interviewers have to work quite hard to coax stories from people. For this project, however, there was an incredible honesty that I haven’t seen before in any other project that I have done.

“People talked openly about their experience of the bombing; however, they also shared all sorts of different stories that say a lot about peoples’ ability to recover. They find themselves 20 years later when they are no longer defined by what’s happened and are able to open new chapters in their lives.” 

“The overwhelming message that comes from everybody interviewed for this project is the regeneration of the city as the background, but I think in the end, it is going to be about these very powerful individual stories that, when woven together, are going to create a much bigger human story about recovery.” read on>>>

The Shadow of Selma: Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2015

The programme for the upcoming conference on Selma and the Voting Rights Act is now available. See the panels and plenary session below, or download the full programme here. The Northumbria University website notes that the American Studies programme will host "its own 'Shadow of Selma' initiative with a major international conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma protests and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The conference runs on April 8 and 9 and culminates with a public lecture by celebrated journalist and author Gary Younge at The Sage, Gateshead. Younge’s lecture will also launch the 60th Anniversary Conference of the British Association for American Studies, which is coming to Northumbria for the first time."*

The Shadow of Selma: 

Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2015

Northumbria University American Studies International Conference

April 8-9 2015
Sponsorship: Northumbria University and the US Embassy, London

WED. 8TH APRIL
City Campus East 1 Room 007

9.00-9.20 Coffee & Tea

9.20-9.30 Introduction from Professor Brian Ward

9.30-11.00: PANEL A: Selma and Grassroots Organisation

Chair: Dr. Ashley Riley Sousa (Middle Tennessee State University)

Dr. Ben Houston (Newcastle University)
“Before the Bridge: Grassroots Activism in Selma”

Professor Alma Billingslea-Brown (Spelman College)
“Selma: Bridge, Boundary and Beyond”

11.00-11.30 Coffee & Tea

11.30–1.00 PANEL B: Selma and Media Coverage

Chair: Dr. Joe Street (Northumbria University)

Mark Walmsley (Leeds University)
“‘They Couldn’t Just Write it the Way it Wasn’t Anymore’: Examining Mainstream Coverage of the 1965 Selma Campaign”

Professor Aniko Bodroghkozy (University of Virginia)
“Mediating Selma: 1965, 2015”

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-4.00 PANEL C: Responses to Selma and the Voting Rights Act

Chair: Dr. Randall Stephens (Northumbria University)

Professor Tony Badger (Northumbria University)
“Backlash or Adjustment? The White South responds to Selma”

Professor Clive Webb (University of Sussex)
“‘We cannot escape the same challenge’: Britain, France and the US Voting Rights Act”

Dr. George Lewis (Leicester University)
“Sidelining Selma’s Segregationists: Memory, Strategy, Ideology and Agency”

7.00 Conference Dinner at Blackfriars Restaurant

THU. 9TH APRIL

9.00-9.30 Coffee & Tea

09.30-11.00 PANEL D: The Supreme Court, Voting Rights, and Economic Citizenship

Chair: Kristine McCusker (Middle Tennessee State University)

J. Douglas Smith (Colburn Music Conservatory)
“The Dirksen Amendment and the Effective Repeal of the Voting Rights Act”

Dr. Lynn Itagaki (Ohio State University)
“Shareholder, Debtor, Voter: Economic Citizenship in the Roberts Court Deregulation of Campaign Finance Reform and The Voting Rights Act”

11.00-11.30 Coffee & Tea

11.30-1.00 PANEL E: Race, Voting, and Wealth in the South Since 1965

Chair: Professor Brian Ward (Northumbria University)

Dr. Devin Fergus (Ohio State University)
"The Third Reconstruction: The Racial Wealth Gap and the Post-Civil Rights US South"

Dr. George Derek Musgrove (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) (co-author with Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ohio State University)
“The decline of ‘freedom politics’ in the midst of the Second Redemption: black voter mobilization and white voter suppression in the Alabama Black Belt, 1965-2010”

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.30 PANEL F: Shelby County vs. Holder (2013) and the South Today

Chair: Dr. Nick Hayward (Northumbria University)

Dr. Barbara Combs (University of Mississippi)
“Purpose Nor Effect: How the Rise of Colorblind Racism Opened the Door For the Supreme Court Decision in Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder”

Dr. James Hall (Rochester Institute of Technology)
“A Newer New South:  Reading Shelby County v. Holder in Post Racial America”
 
5.00-6.30 Keynote (at the Baltic, with the British Association of American Studies Conference): Gary Younge (The Guardian)

The Newcastle YMCA First World War Memorial at Northumbria University

James McConnel

The Newcastle YMCA war memorial.

In late 2014, the Estates Office at Northumbria University contacted me about an interesting discovery they had made in a storage area in the University’s Wynne Jones building. Following my research into the war-related features of Trinity Building (formerly Trinity Presbyterian church), they knew I was interested in information about any war memorials on campus. It turned out that staff from Estates had discovered in Wynne Jones a hitherto unknown First World War memorial. The memorial was accompanied by a brass plaque commemorating the opening of the Newcastle YMCA building on Blackett Street in 1900. This building was knocked down in the 1970s to make way for the Eldon Square shopping centre. Various architectural features of the Victorian building were salvaged when it was demolished. These included stone carvings and door surrounds, which were mounted onto one of the exterior walls on Prudhoe Chare in 1976 (the alley by the side of Marks and Spenercs). But it appears that the YMCA’s war memorial was also rescued from the old building, which was then transferred to the Association’s new premises on Ellison Place. The University acquired this building twenty years later in the 1990s and – seemingly without realising it – also inherited the YMCA’s war memorial.

The memorial is made of wood and includes the names of about 100 men who ‘Gave Their All’ in the First World War. Three Northumbria history students are now researching the names of the men as part of a work placement module all students undertake in their second year. With the help of a
Masters student who is undertaking a project on war memorials in Newcastle schools, they have been introduced to the use of digitised local newspapers, the 1911 census, CWGC records, and military archives, in order to research the lives of those named on the memorial. We have also made contact with the modern-day YMCA in Newcastle and it is interested in collaborating with Northumbria on this project, with some of the young people from the Association helping with elements of the research . Ultimately, the hope is that the biographical information collected will contribute to a permanent online resource about Newcastle YMCA’s role in the First World War.