Utah Public Radio is partnering for the Bringing War Home Project with the USU College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, the USU History Department and the USU Museum of Anthropology. This project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Dialogues on the Experience of War program. Broadcasts of Bringing War Home on Utah Public Radio are supported by Utah Humanities.
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. The book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement.
The editors of Objects of War join us today:
Leora Auslander is Professor of European Social History and Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Cultural Revolutions and Taste and Power.
Tara Zahra is Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Kidnapped Souls, The Lost Children, and The Great Departure.
