The international failure regarding humanitarian relief during the 1994 Rwandan genocide has been the topic of many research endeavors. From the lack of response of the United Nations (UN) to the limited media coverage, international actors continually dismissed the genocide in Rwanda as unimportant primarily due to a lack of interest in the country itself. While much of the existing literature focuses on UN documents and humanitarian aid worker testimony, this paper posits that survivor testimony is a source of largely untapped authority regarding the depth and human cost of the failures of the international community to respond to the genocide in Rwanda. Utilizing survivor testimony, this paper explores the extent of the failure of the international community to respond and the broader dehumanization of Rwandan victims during and since the 1994 genocide. The deeply personal perspectives of survivor accounts highlight three distinct failures: 1) the failure to prevent the genocide and subsequent atrocities; 2) the lack of justice brought to the perpetrators; 3) the lack of care and aid given to survivors in the years following the genocide. Survivors are acutely aware of the lack of intervention during the genocide and the enduring lack of aid and attention due to the lack of international interest. Their testimony speaks to the real human cost of the failure to intervene, as well as to ongoing fundamental institutional weaknesses in the international community today. This study thus ultimately suggests that survivor testimony has healing and perhaps even preventative potential.

 In recent decades, scholars of fascism have increasingly studied how concepts of identity enable and constrain violent political movements. Building on that work, this paper outlines how the Nazi propagandist and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg portrayed a rigid conception of German identity in order to justify his fascist political project. By reading several of Rosenberg’s published books, articles, and his diary to explicate his conception of identity, I suggest that creating a “New German Man” was central to Rosenberg’s calls for Nazism. I argue that Rosenberg built a systematic fascist philosophy out of a series of binaries that were designed to avoid intellectual engagement, thereby preventing criticism and allowing him complete control of the definition of “German.” Thus, this presentation argues that Rosenberg’s conception of Nazi identity as well as the philosophical system he built to justify such a conception of identity are key to understanding how logic and propaganda have been used to enable fascist violence, which allows us to better understand and address harmful ideologies. 

This research and public history website explores Jewish immigration experiences and Americanization from the perspectives of young Jewish immigrant women around the turn of the 20th century. I used archival material from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations to highlight these women’s voices, and archives from the Tenement Museum and the Jewish Daily Forward to illustrate Jewish life in this period. Additionally, archives from the New York Times were used to examine how Jewish immigrants were viewed. I searched these archives for primary sources to shed light on how Jewish immigrant women worked and lived, including how life in the Lower East Side’s cramped tenements was photographed and written about by outsiders - White society, and how this propagated the notion of Jewish people as Others. My goal for this research was to tell the stories of these women and listen to their voices. They tell of long hours in crowded and often dangerous garment factories, of unionizing and striking for better labor conditions, and the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. These women were often the main breadwinners for their families, but many saved a little for themselves to spend on ‘American’ activities such as seeing shows, frequenting dance halls, and developing an interest in ‘American’ fashion and buying clothes. White society dubbed these women’s fashion as tacky, outlandish and vulgar. Their dresses were described by White society, as well as their own community, as cheap knockoffs of the dresses they made, with too many bows, too much jewelry, and too much makeup. These immigrant women were often called ‘Ghetto Girls,’ as the Lower East Side was called the Jewish Ghetto at this point. This research also brings the present into focus and examines how immigrants are viewed and often judged. 

Public Perception surrounding the sexual exploitation of adolescent girls in history is marred by the manipulation of social elite classes. Bestselling books on Madame De Pompadour, the royal mistress to King Louis XV, falsely claim Madame De Pompadour facilitated a brothel of adolescent poor girls for her royal lover to sexually exploit. While her true involvement was much less proactive, the shifting of blame from established elitists like Louis XV to outsiders like Madame De Pompadour is a long-standing practice within elite upper-class culture. A study of eighteenth-century court behavior aids in illuminating the reasoning behind modern day cases of sexual exploitation within elite classes including that of Jeffrey Epstein and his sex trafficking ring. These “self-fashioning” outsiders, Pompadour and Epstein, infiltrated high social ranks without elite backgrounds and disrupted the established authority within elite culture. By comparing eighteenth-century to twenty-first century elite culture, this literature review is an attempt to understand how attacking an outsider to upper class culture, instead of high-ranking members, has been historically used to maintain the social elite established order. A review of academic research provides some answers for how members avoid public scrutiny for sexually exploiting adolescent girls and how manipulating public attention has been a historically prevalent tool in diverting responsibility to the “self-fashioning” outsider. With future research, we can expose how “self-fashioning,” in the context of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, carried over into elite culture practices of the eighteenth century and is still prevalent in the twenty-first century. This future research can aid in shedding light on centuries of abuse and recycling of misinformation.