In her Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of the last century of American history, Samantha Power asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Power, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, draws upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, thousands of declassified documents, and her own reporting from modern killing fields to provide the answer. "A Problem from Hell" shows how decent Americans inside and outside government refused to get involved despite chilling warnings, and tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. A modern classic, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide has forever reshaped debates about American foreign policy.

Written by Michigan resident Mae Derdarian, this is the gripping true story of a girl's indomitable will to survive the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government against its Armenian subjects during World War I. Through a first-hand account of Vergeen's recollections, the brutalities endured by two million Armenians come to life and are mirrored a generation later by Hitler's attack on Jews.

Based on the experiences of the author's great-uncle during the Armenian Genocide, Forgotten Fire is the story of one boy's search for the survivor inside himself. It is the story of a lost nation — a powerful celebration of the resilience of the human spirit during the darkest of times.

In this national bestseller, the critically acclaimed author Peter Balakian brings us a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history.

The book represents an earthquake in genocide studies, particularly in the field of Armenian Genocide research. A unique feature of the Armenian Genocide has been the long-standing efforts of successive Turkish governments to deny its historicity and to hide the documentary evidence surrounding it. This book provides a major clarification of the often blurred lines between facts and truth in regard to these events. The authenticity of the killing orders signed by Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha and the memoirs of the Ottoman bureaucrat Naim Efendi have been two of the most contested topics in this regard. The denialist school has long argued that these documents and memoirs were all forgeries, produced by Armenians to further their claims. Taner Akçam provides the evidence to refute the basis of these claims and demonstrates clearly why the documents can be trusted as authentic, revealing the genocidal intent of the Ottoman-Turkish government towards its Armenian population. As such, this work removes a cornerstone from the denialist edifice, and further establishes the historicity of the Armenian Genocide.

According to Scott Straus, a social scientist and former journalist in East Africa for several years (who received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his reporting for the Houston Chronicle), many of the widely held beliefs about the causes and course of genocide in Rwanda are incomplete. They focus largely on the actions of the ruling elite or the inaction of the international community. Considerably less is known about how and why elite decisions became widespread exterminatory violence.

Challenging the prevailing wisdom, Straus provides substantial new evidence about local patterns of violence, using original research―including the most comprehensive surveys yet undertaken among convicted perpetrators―to assess competing theories about the causes and dynamics of the genocide.

Why did Carl Wilkens decide to remain in Rwanda in 1994, with a genocide swirling around him? How did he and his wife Teresa maintain communication during the one-hundred days of terror when Tutsis were being hounded to death by Hutu militia extremists? How does the only American who chose to stay-in order to protect two Tutsi household workers-look back on that fearful time? Working from tapes made for his family, which chronicle daily events from the sublime to the horrific, Carl reconstructs in fascinating detail both personal and political events triggered by the April 6 plane crash assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. He takes us through the poignant good-bye to his family, as they join the mass exodus of expatriates leaving this dangerous situation. He affirms his presence in the neighborhood he has known for four years, by standing barefoot in the middle of the dusty road, waving farewell.

For the first time in the United States comes the tragic and profoundly important story of the legendary Canadian general who "watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect." When Roméo Dallaire was called on to serve as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, he believed that his assignment was to help two warring parties achieve the peace they both wanted. Instead, he was exposed to the most barbarous and chaotic display of civil war and genocide in the past decade, observing in just one hundred days the killings of more than eight hundred thousand Rwandans. With only a few troops, his own ingenuity and courage to direct his efforts, Dallaire rescued thousands, but his call for more support from the world body fell on deaf ears. In Shake Hands with the Devil, General Dallaire recreates the awful history the world community chose to ignore. He also chronicles his own progression from confident Cold Warrior to devastated UN commander, and finally to retired general struggling painfully, and publicly, to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder—the highest-ranking officer ever to share such experiences with readers.

This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Philip Gourevitch his title.

Through powerful stories that are at once memorable, disturbing, and informative, readers gain a critical sense of the tensions and violence that preceded the genocide, how it erupted and was carried out, and what these people faced in the first sixteen years following the genocide.

Documents the compelling human stories of the Holocaust as told in the renowned permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. This book serves as a reminder of the moral obligations of societies and individuals. It includes photographs, charts, a section on the Holocaust in Greece, and more. The book is a comprehensive introduction to Holocaust history for anyone new or experienced with that history, and is particularly helpful for teachers looking to increase their knowledge of Holocaust history.

Why? explores one of the most tragic events in human history by addressing eight of the most commonly asked questions about the Holocaust: Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why murder? Why this swift and sweeping? Why didn’t more Jews fight back more often? Why did survival rates diverge? Why such limited help from outside? What legacies, what lessons?

An internationally acclaimed scholar, Peter Hayes brings a wealth of research and experience to bear on conventional views of the Holocaust, dispelling many misconceptions and challenging some of the most prominent recent interpretations.

Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.”

Snyder’s comprehensive history of the region includes the area between Germany and Russia (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region and Belarus), and how the Ukrainian Holodomor and Great Terror under Stalin were critical antecedents to conditions for in the region during the Holocaust.

In Bloodlands, Snyder concentrates on the area between Germany and Russia (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region and Belarus).

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

A comprehensive guide for pre- and in-service educators preparing to teach about this watershed event in human history. An original collection of essays by Holocaust scholars, teacher educators, and classroom teachers, it covers a full range of issues relating to Holocaust education, with the goal of helping teachers to help students gain a deep and thorough understanding of why and how the Holocaust was perpetrated. Both conceptual and pragmatic, it delineates key rationales for teaching the Holocaust, provides useful historical background information for teachers, and offers a wide array of practical approaches for teaching about the Holocaust. Various chapters address teaching with film and literature, incorporating the use of primary accounts into a study of the Holocaust, using technology to teach the Holocaust, and gearing the content and instructional approaches and strategies to age-appropriate audiences. A ground-breaking and highly original book that will help teachers engage students in a study of the Holocaust that is compelling, thought-provoking, and reflective.

Starting with the assumption that all teaching carries with it moral orientations, this book examines which lessons are conveyed implicitly and explicitly in teaching and learning about the Holocaust. Through three, very readable case studies, the author reflects on what lessons the Holocaust ought to be used to express, illuminating important implications for the teaching of other historical episodes.

Secondary level teachers and professors from various disciplines present their best advice and insights into teaching about various facets of genocide and/or delineate actual lessons they have taught that have been particularly successful with their students.

This book presents the insights, advice and suggestions of secondary level teachers and professors in relation to teaching about various facets of genocide. The contributions are extremely eclectic, ranging from the basic concerns when teaching about genocide to a discussion as to why it is critical to teach students about more general human rights violations during a course on genocide, and from a focus on specific cases of genocide to various pedagogical strategies ideal for teaching about genocide.

The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932-33, edited by Alexander J. Motyl and Bohdan Klid (CIUS 2012) contains a variety of primary sources in translation that could be useful in the classroom. The book also features a few historical essays that offer an excellent introduction to the topic. The book contains a wide-ranging collection of key texts and source materials, many of which have never before appeared in English, on the genocidal famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine. The Reader is an indispensable guide for all those interested in the Holodomor, genocide, or Stalinism.