"What did Americans know about the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews and when did they know it?" This question has obsessed a generation of historians who write about Americans and the Holocaust. Our seminar will challenge two pervasive misconceptions: (1) that Americans had little information about Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s; (2) that published information about Nazism was buried on the back pages of American newspapers. Participants will read primary sources published in US newspapers and magazines between 1933 to 1945 in order for participants to gain a deeper understanding of how Americans understood the threat of Nazism. This course also will introduce a crowdsourcing project collecting US news coverage from on Nazism, developed by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and intended for use in classrooms.
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