- Music Monday – Tiananmen Square Anniversary Edition In protest of China's Tiananmen Square anniversary blackout, this week’s playlist salutes the activists inside China who continue the fight for human rights and undoubtedly were/are influenced by the events of Tiananmen Square 25 years ago.
- Oral History as Storytelling: Sharing the Fabric of American Life WITNESS and StoryCorps both recognize the value of personal stories in tackling larger issues. People are at the heart of each organization, anchoring the abstract in the human experience.
- New Tactics Dialogue follow-up Earlier this month New Tactics in Human Rights hosted an online dialogue Documenting Human Rights Violations: Choosing the Right Approach featuring practitioners from a variety of fields. Although a bit hard to navigate, there's a wealth of interesting commentary. Here are a few highlights:
- Re-Stalinization and revisionism in Russia Last week Russian historian Mikhail Suprun was arrested by Russia's FSB security service for - as Truthdig put it - daring to study Russian history; more specifically, Stalin's gulags. Suprun's archives were confiscated; a police official who provided access to archive documents about gulag victims was also arrested. Suprun faces up to four years in jail if convicted.
- New Media History and Research on Rights, War, and Memory From researcher and guest blogger Karl Arthur Baumann, currently doing research and interviews here at WITNESS, about his project: The recent events in Iran have proven once again the potency and conscience raising capabilities of current communications technologies, vis a vis Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. But to what extent have they created active responses? The […]
- Archives as Medium I recently stumbled upon Essays: Archives as Medium , on the web site Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan (in turn part of Library and Archives Canada online.) From Lance Strate's essay The Medium is the Memory:
- Garbage bag of history There's a wonderful quote in a Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker. The piece covers the opening of an exhibit of work by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War photographer Eddie Adams; many of the images have never been displayed before, having been not long ago discovered in plastic garbage bags in the garage of Adams' first wife.
- "Treatment of History a Bellwether of Human Rights" The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience has distributed this statement pertaining to the recent raid and seizure of Human Rights Center Memorial's archive (thanks Bryan and Sam for forwarding):
- Free To Speak (on BBC World Service) [Slight changes below, after a second look at the project…] For me, the 2002 series I Have A Right To… still represents a good benchmark for how the BBC’s World Service can knit together human rights resources of real and lasting value – and that others can use and build on. Now, the World Service […]
