Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University
On Teaching Unimaginable Experiences
Note: Any comments that accompanied resource suggestions are included in brackets below.
Readings:
Wilhelmus Petrus Du Preez, Genocide: The Psychology of Mass Murder (London: Boyars/ Bowerdean, 1994). [Simple, short, readable intro and overview book]
Alexander Hinton, Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, University of California Press, 2005
Alexander Hinton, Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, University of California Press, 2002
Alexander Hinton, Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, Blackwell, 2002
Films:
Night and Fog (31 mins) [Both poetic and graphic documentary of the Holocaust. The length makes it usable for a class, but I would strongly recommend that anyone considering showing it actually watches it first. Some of it is quite disturbing.]
Obedience (45 mins) [Movie of a famous psychology experiment by Dr. Stanley Milgram showing
how readily everyday people submit to the orders of an authority to harm another person.]
Web:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
[Summarizes the life work of PJ Rummel, a political scientist who has been trying to document every mass killing in history. This section focuses on the 20th century. He gets a staggering total of 262 million people killed by mass murder and genocide in the 20th century.]
Slavery & the Making of America http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/ [Website for PBS documentary that contains a number of useful classroom resources, including slave testimonies, photos, and timelines]
