Where I Go: The Nature Preserve of Memory

Torrey Pines—A Mythic Hike in My Childhood Imagination—Feels Fragile Now

Like a giant’s sandy belly rising up from the gentle chill of the ocean, Torrey Pines Natural Reserve was a mythic force in my childhood imagination. Yet during a recent visit, over 30 years later, I became freshly aware of the ways that memory can dilate and stretch, and how places that seemed enormous from the wide eyes and small stature of youth can feel so different in an adult body.

Torrey Pines Natural Reserve is located in what is now called San Diego, the traditional and unceded lands of …

by Melody Jue | June 30, 2021

Don’t Tear Down L.A.’s Notorious Men’s Central Jail

Transforming the Facility Into a Museum and Democracy Center Would Allow California to Remember Its Carceral Cruelty—And Create a Different Future

by Joe Mathews | January 12, 2021

One of California’s most notorious jails could close in 2021. But if the state truly wants to leave its carceral history in the past and create a more open and …

The Writer as Witness

Why We Need Literature to Document Atrocities—at Home and Abroad

by Daisy Hernández | January 11, 2021

For a long time, I cringed whenever I heard someone talk about a novel or a poem bearing witness. The word “witness” bothered me. It felt hollow and privileged. It …

A College Founded on an Antebellum Plantation Digs Into the Darkness of Its Past | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

A College Founded on an Antebellum Plantation Digs Into the Pain of Its Past

How Sweet Briar Is Finally Remembering the Enslaved People Who Built—And Were Buried Beneath—Its Campus

by Lynn Rainville | January 11, 2021

Twenty years ago, an equestrian instructor at Sweet Briar College in rural Virginia stumbled over a stone in one of the horseback riding rings. It turned out to be a …

It Takes a Village to Create a Nation’s Memory

Returning Jews and Local Communities Worked Together to Lead Germany Toward Historical Reckoning

by Helmut Walser Smith | January 11, 2021

In the early postwar years in the German town of Warendorf, no one contributed as much to facing the difficult past as Hugo Spiegel. He was not a learned man. …

Coming Home to the Holocaust

My Mother Barely Escaped Nazi Germany. I Returned to Remember Those Who Didn't and to Reclaim Them as My Own

by Kim Fellner | October 1, 2020

In the town hall of Fischach, a village in southern Germany with a population of 2,500, I am staring at a glass display case holding the detritus of the Jews …

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