Prisoners of war

We are pleased to announce the opening of our online symposium titled “Prisoners of the Asia-Pacific War: History, Memory, and Forgetting” to registered audience members. The symposium will be held across two days between 16:00-19:30 on Tuesday, February 7 and 9:00-17:00 on Wednesday, February 8, Japan time. This symposium brings together scholars researching the histories, memorialization and forgetting of prisoners and prison camps of the Asia Pacific War. See the schedule below.

Dear All,

Dear Daniel,

Sometime ago in the 90s (the 1990s) I developed materials for a discussion of the generational components at work in the election of 1860.  Thinking that this was a subject about which a good book could get me that inevitable offer from Yale, I spent a good deal of time with the extant literature on aging, political generations, and generations as a research concept.

Dear Dan,

Thank you for this interesting post, and thanks also to Lois for those thoughtful comments. Let me offer some assorted musing for consideration.  

Lois,

Thanks for the interesting response, especially about how we might study and consider intellectual disabilities historically. Admittedly, I did not consider if Samuel Freeland’s son genuinely suffered from what we might understand today as a developmental disability (broadly, that would include disorders such as down syndrome, autism, etc.). Considering I already felt that analyzing my subject matter through the lens of age and maturity was likely a tangent to begin with, this is a new (albeit interesting) rabbit hole far outside the scope of my research.

Dan's opening example made me think (once again) of the different perspectives one brings if one approaches Civil War-era documents with training in other historical fields. Recent years have seen the emergence, for example, of “girlhood studies” and especially of “Black girlhood” in ways that deeply inform my project. Scholarship on both free Black childhood in the nineteenth-century US and enslaved Black childhood in the nineteenth-century are deeply important to my interpretation of a range of documents.