Facing Today

Facing Today helps educators connect the study of history to issues in our world today. We select current websites, articles, films and blogs that reflect universal themes, such as identity, membership and participation, represented in our scope and sequence. Each media resource is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos and lessons.

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  • April Is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month
    April 12, 2012

    In several states, April is designated Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. In honor of this, we have compiled a collection of resources relevant to each of the genocides that have commemorative dates this month.

    Explore:
    Genocide Resource Collection


    Early April 1945: Buchenwald

    As US forces approached Buchenwald concentration camp, thousands of prisoners were forced to join the evacuation marches. Approximately one third of these prisoners died from exhaustion en route or shortly after arrival, or were shot by the SS.

    April 11, 1945

    In expectation of liberation, organized prisoners seized control of the camp. Later that afternoon, US forces entered Buchenwald. By April 12, 1945, journalists, including Edward R Morrow arrived at the camp.

    Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald.

    Explore:
    Leon Bass remembers when he, a nineteen-year-old African-American sergeant, arrived at Buchenwild
    Edward R. Murrow's report from Buchenwald


    April 5, 1992: Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina

    As Yugoslavia began to unravel in the late 1980s, ethnic tensions and nationalist attitudes grew. The Serb leader Slobodan Milošević went on an offensive in an attempt to keep its republics together and to unite Serb communities in the region.

    When Bosnia and Herzegovina defied Milošević and declared independence on April 5, 1992 Bosnian Serb leaders began a military campaign to clear all the Muslim communities that stood in the way of this vision of a “Greater Serbia.” The violence reached its tragic peak in the summer of 1995 in Srebrenica, where Serbs massacred over 8,000 Muslim men. After three years of indecisive actions, NATO forces finally began an aerial bombing campaign that halted the violence. All told, the Serbs were responsible for the deaths of as many as 100,000 Bosnians.

    Explore:
    Worse Than War: Genocide and Eliminationism
    Larisa Kasumagic on the Culture of Silence

    April 7, 1994: Rwanda

    In the 1980s a group of Tutsi (and some Hutu) formed an army—the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)—which invaded Rwanda in 1990 with the hope of repatriating refugees who escaped the Hutu dominant regime to nearby countries. This led to a civil war and then to a power-sharing agreement in 1993. The next year, the plane of the Hutu president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down. Hutu extremists seized control of the government and use this opportunity launch a genocidal campaign against the Tutsi. Between April and July 1994, Hutu extremists brutally murdered as many as 800,000 of their fellow Rwandans.

    Explore:
    Worse Than War: Genocide and Eliminationism
     

    April 17, 1975: Cambodia

    The Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and immediately began to expel to the countryside hundreds of thousands of people suspected of connections with the former government or with the West. As many as 1.7 million of them died in agrarian camps (commonly known as the “killing fields”) and in prisons and interrogation centers. The genocide ended in 1979 after Vietnam invaded Cambodia.

    Explore:
    Biography: Arn Chorn Pond
    Everybody has a Story
    Worse Than War: Genocide and Eliminationism

     
    April 19, 2012: Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day 

    Facing History observes Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, by encouraging schools and communities to engage in conversations about the importance of memory and the legacy of difficult histories in today's society. In the words of Facing History executive director Margot Stern Strom, “The stories of our survivors are not lost in their passing...We hear their voices and we will honor them as we look to future generations take up her mantle. We need young people to be interested in their community and to not be bystanders in a world that needs the strong voices of upstanders.” Learn more about Yom HaShoah and Facing History in your community.


    April 19, 1943:     Warsaw Ghetto uprising begins.

    Explore:
    The Jews of Poland: The Warsaw Uprising
    History, Memory and Memorials: Willy Brandt’s Silent Apology

     

    April 24, 1915 - Armenia

    Armenian Genocide begins. On this one day, Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. By 1923, more than one million ethnic Armenians had been killed.

    Explore:
    Crimes against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians
    Armenian Genocide Resource Collection
    Taner Akçam: Why is the Armenian Genocide Important?

     
    April 2003 – Darfur

    In 2003 violence broke out in Darfur, a region in western Sudan, between local tribes and government-backed militia. In April, Sudanese refugees begin arriving in eastern Chad to escape the fighting in the Darfur region of western Sudan.

    April 25, 2003 - Rebels, later becoming the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), attack a Sudanese government airfield, destroying multiple Antonov bombers and helicopter gunships, and seizing a large amount of ammunition and heavy weapons. In retaliation, the Sudanese government began a systematic campaign to destroy the people of the western region of Sudan and their livelihood. It is estimated that by 2005, the Sudanese government and its forces had contributed to the death of more than 300,000 Darfuris and to the rape, torture, and displacement of more than 2.5 million people.

    Explore:
    Darfur Resource Collection
    Worse Than War: Genocide and Eliminationism


    April 29, 1945: American forces liberate the Dachau concentration camp

    Explore:
    Holocaust Resource Collection
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Dachau

     

     

  • Remembering 9/11 Ten Years Later
    August 29, 2011

    911 MemorialIn the coming weeks, the world will mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people in and around the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and on flight 93 over Shanksville, PA.

    Schools, houses of worship, and communities are exploring their own ways to remember the attacks and consider their legacy. How will your community remember? A critical part of the Facing History and Ourselves program considers how we choose to remember the past, and what those choices say about who we are.

    Will your community have a public commemoration? How is the anniversary being talked about in the various media that you follow? Does your community have a monument or memorial to remember the attacks? If not, are there any monuments or memorials in your community? What story do they tell?

    Below are links to several different websites that explore attempts to remember 9/11. As you view the sites consider:

    • Who is telling the story?
    • What story do they hope to tell?
    • Who is the audience?
    • What choices were made by those choosing to remember?
    • How do those choices impact the story they tell?
    • Compare the different choices individuals or groups made in their attempt to remember?
    • What is the message that you take away?

    Memory, History, and Memorials: 9/11 Case Study

    This link to the Facing History and Ourselves website Memory, History, and Memorials discusses the spontaneous memorials that people created after 9/11, alongside links to several resources about the challenges of memory in the first few months after the attacks.

    9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center

    Website for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center, which will open on September 11, 2011 on the site of the former towers. The memorial site contains extensive resources on the new memorial and museum, on those who died as well as survivors and rescuers, on the history of the Twin Towers, and on responses, memorials, and tributes from many communities and schools.

    Tribute Center WTC

    Tribute WTC Visitor Center offers visitors to the World Trade Center site a place where they can connect with people from the September 11th community. Through walking tours, exhibits and programs, the Tribute WTC Visitor Center offers "Person to Person History," linking visitors who want to understand and appreciate these historic events with those who experienced them.

    Pentagon 9/11 Memorial

    The Pentagon Memorial is designed so that the nation may remember and reflect on the events that occurred on September 11, 2001. The Memorial will be free and open to the public seven days a week. Groups and individuals are welcome in the Memorial each day, but guided tours are not offered; the Memorial is meant to be experienced on a more personal level.

    Flight 93 National Memorial

    Flight 93 National Memorial has a place on the nation's honor roll of iconic places which includes Gettysburg and Pearl Harbor. Why is this ground so special? Why is this story so important? What began as an ordinary morning ended as a historic day when a common field in Pennsylvania was forever changed. Discover a story of courage, action, and honor.


    Lesson Idea: Creating Your Own Memorial to the September 11 Attacks

    For years, Facing History and Ourselves has helped teachers design memorials projects. After establishing an understanding of the potential power of memorials and monuments, teachers and students construct their own personal monuments or memorials. In many cases, these projects are guided by a series of questions including:

    • What would you like people to feel or think about when they visit the monument that you are designing?
    • Who is it built for? Where would you want it to be constructed? Who will be the audience?
    • What message will it convey? What point of view will it assume?
    • How can your monument be most effective in connecting the public to the point in the past that you have chosen to remember?


    Facing History’s Educator Workshop: How to Talk with Students about 9/11, Ten Years Later

    This summer, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, Facing History offered a special workshop to New York City area educators. Facing History Senior Program Associate Tracy Garrison-Feinberg told an interviewer: “This event shaped the 21st century, and is to continuing to shape it. It’s is a crucial part of who we have become.”

    Additional Resources

    From Newsday: Teachers: 9/11 'our history, generation'

  • Pope Warns Against Antisemitism in New Book
    March 29, 2011

    Pope Benedict XVI, the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, has taken an important step in recent months to combat antisemitism. He is publishing a new book in which he devotes extensive theological argument to making the case that there is no basis in Christian scripture for blaming the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ, defusing a long-held source of religious bitterness.

    For centuries, some Christians used parts of the New Testament to blame all Jews for the death of Christ, and to justify the persecution of Jews. Beginning in the 1960s, the Catholic Church officially abandoned this belief.

    But now, a reporter writes, Benedict goes further in an effort to correct this wrong:

    The Catholic Church issued its most authoritative teaching on the issue in its 1965 Second Vatican Council document “Nostra Aetate,” which revolutionized the church’s relations with Jews by saying Christ’s death could not be attributed to Jews as a whole at the time or today.

    Benedict comes to the same conclusion, but he explains how with a thorough, Gospel-by-Gospel analysis that leaves little doubt that he deeply and personally believes it to be the case.

    The book, Jesus of Nazareth II, is the second installment to Benedict’s 2007 Jesus of Nazareth, which described the early years of Christ’s life and teachings. The new book, set to be released in March, concerns the final part of Christ’s life, his death, and resurrection.

    “Holocaust survivors know only too well how the centuries-long charge of ’Christ killer’ against the Jews created a poisonous climate of hate that was the foundation of anti-Semitic persecution whose ultimate expression was realized in the Holocaust,” said Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants. The pope’s book, he said, not only confirms church teaching refuting the deicide charge “but seals it for a new generation of Catholics.”


    Discussion Questions:

    • Who is responsible for speaking out against antisemitism and other forms of racism? What are the consequences of a strong stand? What are the consequences of silence? What might the consequences be of the Pope’s stand?
    • What power do words have to turn neighbor against neighbor? When hateful words have been spoken, what can individuals, groups, and leaders do to mitigate their effects?

    Related Facing History Resources

    Theme - Antisemitism

    Video: Father Robert Bullock
    Father Robert W. Bullock, a founding leader of Facing History and Ourselves, was dedicated to building bridges between the Catholic and Jewish communities. As a scholar, he delved into the Holocaust and the roots of Christian antisemitism.

    External Link

    Pope exonerates Jews for Jesus’ death in new book, The Patriot Ledger, March 2, 2011