Herman Eberhardt

Ayako Matsushita on her graduation day from Heart Mountain High School. Before the war she attended Marshall High School in Los Angeles.

Frank Hirahara 1944

October 25, 2017.

Herman Eberhardt, Supervisory Curator at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, discusses the Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, and his exhibition: Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II, on view in the Library's William J. vanden Heuvel Gallery through December 31, 2017.

Sally Van Wagenen Keil

September 20, 2017 (SEASON OPENER).

Author and pilot Sally Van Wagenen Keil (VC ' 68) discusses her narrative history of the WASPs (Women's Air Service Pilots) of the Second World War, Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines (Four Directions, 1990).

"Those Wonderful Women in their Flying Machines hones in on World War II to recount the story of the over 1,000 women pilots who flew in the military as part of the Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASP). Over 25,000 women applied and 1,800 were selected to train at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. From 1942 to '44, these pilots flew over 60 million miles in every type of plane the airforce had, and 38 women lost their lives in service. Here, in biography style, the niece of one of these pilots recreates the amazing story of what she calls 'one of the best-kept secrets of World War II.'"

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Dawn Seymour Interview on NPR's The Moth, November 2013. (10:31 minutes.)

Louis Rose

April 19, 2017.

Louis Rose, Executive Director of the Sigmund Freud Archive at the Library of Congress and  Professor of History in the Departments of History and Political Science at Otterbein University talks about his new book,  Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich,, and the Politics of Caricature (Yale 2016), as well as the Sigmund Freud Papers and their newly announced digital archive.

“In 1934, Viennese art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris invited his mentee E. H. Gombrich to collaborate on a project that had implications for psychology and neuroscience, and foreshadowed their contributions to the Allied war effort. Their subject: caricature and its use and abuse in propaganda. Their collaboration was a seminal early effort to integrate science, the humanities, and political awareness. In this fascinating biographical and intellectual study, Louis Rose explores the content of Kris and Gombrich’s project and its legacy."


39:01 minutes.

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Peipei Qiu

February 11, 2015. 

Peipei Qiu, Professor of Chinese and Japanese on the Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair and Director of Asian Studies at Vassar, talks about her book Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves, published this year by Oxford University Press.

"Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive."

39:01 minutes.

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Maria Höhn

April 2, 2014.

Maria Höhn, Professor of History and International Studies on the Marion Musser Lloyd Chair  at Vassar College, talks about her most recent book, co-authored with Martin Klimke, entitled: A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, published by Palgrave in 2010.

"Depicting the African American GI as the unheralded keystone of the civil rights movement in America during the post-WWII era, this book exhilaratingly exposes the two-facedness of America denazifying Germany while practicing Jim Crow segregation in its own military. With a thorough analysis of the African American press’s role in disclosing this hypocrisy, it reveals the many ways in which subsequent civil rights leaders owe their success to the groundwork laid by African American GIs. Together, they forged the space to launch a civil rights revolution in America." -- Calvin Robinson, President, NAACP

58:23 minutes.

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View the new film based on the book.
View the project website.

Werner Pfeiffer

SEASON OPENER
October 3, 2012.

Artist Werner Pfeiffer talks about the exhibition of his work on view in the Thompson Library, Van Ingen Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College through December 14 entitled: “Reexamining Books: Book Objects and Artist Books by Werner Pfeiffer."

59:35 min.

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