Taking Action Together: “Nazi Germany and Jim Crow Racism in the U.S. South” with Dr. Jonathan Wiesen
In the last few years, writers have drawn connections between crimes against Jews in Nazi Germany and anti-Black racism in the US. Indeed, in conversations, popular books, and even in films like Origin (2022) one hears that the “Nazis got their ideas from the American South.”
During this discussion, Dr. Jonathan Wiesen from the UAB Department of History will explore this claim by considering the similarities and difference between these two twentieth-century experiences of segregation and persecution. By discussing Nazi crimes and Jim Crown racism together—and by pointing out how Nazis interacted with Southern racists– this session will help viewers to recognize common features of discrimination across historical time periods. Through this discussion, we hope to become attuned to common red flags and warning signs when societies segregate and persecute minorities.
You will also get the chance to ask Jonathan questions, and he will answer them live during the Q&A portion. This Zoom event is free but requires registration in advance. Click the button below to save your spot and receive the webinar link!
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About Our Speaker:
Dr. Jonathan Wiesen is a Professor of History and former department chair at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He did his undergraduate work in history at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Sussex, and he received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 1998. Before coming to UAB, he was visiting assistant professor at Colgate University and Distinguished professor and chair at Southern Illinois University.
He is the author of West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill, 2001), which won a book prize from the Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference. He is also co-editor with Pamela Swett and Jonathan Zatlin of Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany (Durham, 2007) and author of Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2011) and Nazi Germany: Society Culture, and Politics (Bloomsbury, 2024). His work has appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including Central European History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, and the German Studies Review, and he has received research fellowships from the German Academic Exchange, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, among others.
He is currently writing a book on U.S. anti-Black racism in the German imagination from 1918-1968 and is most recently the author of “American Lynching in the Nazi Imagination: Race and Extra-Legal Violence in 1930s Germany,” which won the 2020 Hans Rosenberg article prize.
Buy His New Book
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