Smelser, Ronald M.
Ronald Smelser (born 1942) is an American historian, author, and former professor of history at the University of Utah. He specializes in modern European history, including the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and has written several books on these topics. Smelser is the author, together with fellow historian Edward J. Davies, of the 2008 book '' The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture''. Education and career Smelser was born in 1942 in Pennsylvania, United States. He obtained his Ph.D. in history in 1970 at the University of Wisconsin and was appointed as an assistant professor at Alma College (Michigan). In 1978, Smelser joined the history department at the University of Utah; he became a full professor in 1983. He also taught classes at the Free University of Berlin during the summer. He retired from the University of Utah in the 2010s, and, as of 2016, is Professor Emeritus at the school. Historian of Nazi Germany Smelse ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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University Of Utah
The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret () by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest institution of higher education. It received its current name in 1892, four years before Utah attained statehood, and moved to its current location in 1900. As of Fall 2019, there were 24,485 undergraduate students and 8,333 graduate students, for an enrollment total of 32,818, making it the second largest public university in the state after Utah Valley University. Graduate studies include the S.J. Quinney College of Law and the School of Medicine, Utah's first medical school. It is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". According to the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Prosopography
Prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of a group of people, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable. Research subjects are analysed by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis.Stone 1971. The discipline is considered to be one of the auxiliary sciences of history. History British historian Lawrence Stone (1919–1999) brought the term to general attention in an explanatory article in 1971, although it had been used as early as 1897 with the publication of the ''Prosopographia Imperii Romani'' by German scholars. The word is drawn from the figure of prosopopeia in classical rhetoric, introduced by Quintilian, in which an absent or imagined person is figured forth—the "face created" as the Greek suggests—in words, as if present. Stone noted two uses of prosopography as an historian's tool: first, in uncovering deeper interests and connections beneath the superficial rhetoric of politics, in order to ex ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jonathan House
Jonathan M. House (born June 22, 1950) is an American military historian and author. He is a professor emeritus of military history at the United States Army Command and General Staff College. House is a leading authority on Soviet military history, with an emphasis upon World War II and the Soviet influence upon modern operational doctrine. Together with David Glantz, he wrote multiple books on the Red Army operations on the Eastern Front, most notably ''When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler''. Education and career A 1971 graduate of Hamilton College, in 1975 House completed his history doctorate and was commissioned out of Army ROTC at the University of Michigan. After numerous courses at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School (1978, 1979–80), he completed master's degrees in strategy (Command and General Staff College, 1984) and intelligence (King's College London, 2017). As a junior officer, he taught at the army's Armor School, Intelligence Center ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Foreign Affairs
''Foreign Affairs'' is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. Founded on 15 September 1922, the print magazine is currently published every two months, while the website publishes articles daily and anthologies every other month. ''Foreign Affairs'' is considered one of the United States' most influential foreign policy magazines. Over its long history, the magazine has published a number of seminal articles including George Kennan's "X Article", published in 1947, and Samuel P. Huntington's " The Clash of Civilizations," published in 1993. Important academics, public officials, and policy leaders regularly appear in the magazine's pages. Recent ''Foreign Affairs'' authors include Robert O. Keohane, Hillary Clinton, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Ashton Carter, Colin L. Powell, Franci ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Popular Culture
Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving force behind popular culture is the mass appeal, and it is produced by what cultural analyst Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry". Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of people in a given society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain topics. However, there are various ways to define pop culture. Because of this, popular culture is something that can be defined in a variety of conflicting ways by different people across diff ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Waffen-SS
The (, "Armed SS") was the combat branch of the Nazi Party's ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) organisation. Its formations included men from Nazi Germany, along with Waffen-SS foreign volunteers and conscripts, volunteers and conscripts from both occupied and unoccupied lands. The grew from three regiments to over 38 division (military), divisions during World War II, and served alongside the German Army (Wehrmacht), German Army (''Heer''), ''Ordnungspolizei'' (uniformed police) and other security units. Originally, it was under the control of the (SS operational command office) beneath Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. With the start of World War II, tactical control was exercised by the (OKW, "High Command of the Armed Forces"), with some units being subordinated to (Command Staff Reichsführer-SS) directly under Himmler's control. Initially, in keeping with the racial policy of Nazi Germany, membership was open only to people of Germanic origin (so-called "Nazi racial theor ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Clean Wehrmacht
The myth of the clean ''Wehrmacht'' is the negationist notion that the regular German armed forces (the ''Wehrmacht'') were not involved in the Holocaust or other war crimes during World War II. The myth, heavily promoted by German authors and military personnel after World War II, completely denies the culpability of the German military command in the planning and perpetration of war crimes. Even where the perpetration of war crimes and the waging of an extermination campaign, particularly in the Soviet Unionwhere the Nazis viewed the population as " sub-humans" ruled by " Jewish Bolshevik" conspiratorshas been acknowledged, they are ascribed to the "Party soldiers corps", the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS), but not the regular German military. The myth began at the Nuremberg trials held between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946. Franz Halder and other ''Wehrmacht'' leaders signed the Generals' memorandum entitled "The German Army from 1920 to 1945", which laid out its key eleme ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Historical Revisionism (negationism)
Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with ''historical revisionism'', a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history."The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians Deborah Lipstadt (1993) and Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about an historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a re-examination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a 'certain body of irrefutable evidence' or a 'convergence of evidence' that suggest that an event – like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust – did in fact o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Eastern Front (World War II)
The Eastern Front of World War II was a Theater (warfare), theatre of conflict between the European Axis powers against the Soviet Union (USSR), Polish Armed Forces in the East, Poland and other Allies of World War II, Allies, which encompassed Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Northeast Europe (Baltic states, Baltics), and Southeast Europe (Balkans) from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945. It was known as the Great Patriotic War (term), Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union – and still is in some of its successor states, while almost everywhere else it has been called the ''Eastern Front''. In present-day German and Ukrainian historiography the name German-Soviet War is typically used. The battles on the Eastern Front of the Second World War constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterised by unprecedented ferocity and brutality, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, expos ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Myth Of The Eastern Front
''The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi–Soviet War in American Popular Culture'' (2008) by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, is a historical analysis of the post-war myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht", the negative impact of the ''Wehrmacht'' and the ''Waffen-SS'' mythologies in popular culture, and the effects of historical negationism upon cultural perceptions of the Eastern Front of the Second World War. The book garnered largely positive reviews. It was commended for its thorough analysis of the creation of the myth by German ex-participants and its entry into American culture, as well as its compelling analysis of contemporary war-romancing trends. One reviewer described the book as a "tour de force of cultural historiography", and another observed that it "presents a discomforting portrait of the American views of the Eastern Front". Background At the time of the publication of ''The Myth of the Eastern Front'', the authors were colleagues in the history department at ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Encyclopedia Of The Holocaust
The ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'' (1990) has been called "the most recognized reference book on the Holocaust". It was published in an English-language translated edition by Macmillan in tandem with the Hebrew language original edition published by Yad Vashem (יד ושם), the Holocaust Remembrance Authority in Israel. All its contributors are reputable Holocaust scholars and academics. Although the encyclopedia is easy to read and use and contains no disturbing pictures, it is not recommended for users younger than high school age. The ''Encyclopedia'' was the winner of the 1991 American Library Association’s Dartmouth Medal. Features * Basic introductory overview of the Holocaust written by Elie Wiesel. * Glossary * Chronology * Maps, illustrations, photographs * Persons of interest * Places of interest (including concentration camps, ghettos, murder sites) * Political movements and resistance movements. * Major Jewish organizations in Germany 1893-1943 * Structure of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Holocaust Educational Foundation
The Holocaust Educational Foundation (HEF) is a nonprofit organization founded by Theodore Zev Weiss in 1976 and dedicated to the support of teaching and research about the Holocaust at the university level. A part of Northwestern University since 2013, HEF has helped create curriculum materials about the Holocaust in use at more than 400 colleges. History A survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Weiss founded HEF in 1976 to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. In 1988, HEF provided funding to establish a course at Northwestern University called The History of the Holocaust, and thereafter HEF's mission evolved into the development of Holocaust-related teaching materials. Weiss perceived that, while many states, like Illinois, mandate instruction in the Holocaust, "the state doesn't prepare teachers to teach. This is a very difficult subject, and not having the tools, the teachers are sort of at a loss." On July 9, 2013, the HEF was integrated into Northwester ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |