Amber N Nickell - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Amber N Nickell

Radical History Review , 2025

The terrain of the past remains a battleground in Ukraine, where policymakers, interest groups, a... more The terrain of the past remains a battleground in Ukraine, where policymakers, interest groups, and individuals continue to use and abuse history for contemporary gains. The recent escalation of Russian violence has only exacerbated these processes. Apart from discussions of Ukraine and Russia’s historical relations and the Holodomor, nothing looms larger than the Holocaust in Ukraine’s ongoing memory wars, whether in discussions and denials of local collaboration and complicity in anti-Jewish violence or exercises in comparative and/or competitive suffering. This article examines the Holocaust as it played out in Ukraine and the evolving memoryscapes that emerged in its wake, homing in on two major massacres, Babyn Yar and Bohdanivka, and their memorial afterlives in Soviet Ukraine (ca. 1945–91) and independent Ukraine (1991–today). While this project briefly engages the well-trod topics of local collaboration and competitive suffering, as evidenced in competing monuments on the site of Babyn Yar itself and the larger commemorative landscape of Kyiv, it draws attention to understudied sites like Bohdanivka, which fell within the Romanian occupation zone during the war.

“A Deep Dive into the Postcard, ‘The Price of Tolerance’”

Shofar, 2023

Like many of my colleagues in Holocaust and genocide studies, I came to this field with a familia... more Like many of my colleagues in Holocaust and genocide studies, I came to this field with a familiar set of questions. How could the Holocaust have happened? Could the world have seen it coming? Could they have prevented it? Historians of the Holocaust have, collectively, been trying to answer these questions for decades, seeking the roots of the Nazis' virulent antisemitism and the Shoah. Jeffrey Veidlinger takes up these same questions in In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. Locating the origins of a particular historical event is always complicated, even more so with events like the Holocaust. Jewish studies scholars have drawn threads from the destruction of the temple to Nazism. Some start with medieval ghettos while others point to Martin Luther. However, these attempts to root the Holocaust in historical anti-Jewishness and antisemitism are always marred by telos. Certainly, historical iterations of antisemitism influenced the Nazis' extreme and racialized variant; however, there was no clear path from the Judenhut or any other medieval practice to the Holocaust, just as German historians have concluded that there was no Sonderweg. The Holocaust, like all historical events, was contingent. As Doris Bergen illustrates with her well-known wildfire analogy, wildfires require timber, spark, and favorable conditions. The same can be said for genocide. For example, the conditions may be favorable, but without the spark, the wildfire never starts. In the case of the Holocaust in the East, the spark was undoubtedly the Nazi invasion and occupation. 1 In the 1980s and 1990s, historians began to shift away from the teleological claims of their predecessors, looking for the turning points-the moments of contingency that mattered. Those who approach the Holocaust from the German history perspective look to the rise of the NDASP, Adolf Hitler, and racial antisemitism. For

Through Hell to the Midwest: A Holocaust Mapping Project

Bringing history, technology, and testimony together in a powerful format, The team at "Through H... more Bringing history, technology, and testimony together in a powerful format, The team at "Through Hell to the Midwest" maps Holocaust survivors' oral testimonies using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). These maps tell the stories of individual survivors from Central and Eastern Europe, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, and then rebuilt their lives in the American Midwest

ROAR Alumni Magazine, 2022

Yearbook of Transnational History , 2018

Hardly definitional, conceptions of diaspora changed dramatically over the course of the 20th cen... more Hardly definitional, conceptions of diaspora changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century, continually expanding and evolving as diasporic groups became increasingly deteritorrialized, homelands were reclaimed and lost, and diasporic members grappled with two or more – often competing – national identifications. Triggered by historical forces in their new homes and the homeland, diasporic groups formed mutual aid societies and ethnic organizations to assist with the diasporization process. Using The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR) as a case study, this article examines the Society’s many uses of historical memory and preexisting networks in constructing a diasporic identification and space, which transcended geographical borders.

Book Reviews by Amber N Nickell

Central European Review, 2025

This edited collection brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences-so... more This edited collection brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences-sociology, history, psychology, and languages-to address the experiences of Russian Germans, mainly in West Germany and later unified Germany. The volume homes in on experiences of dictatorship and exile, the role of violence, conceptions of homeland, and the development of transgenerational memory as they developed against the backdrop of displacement, deportation, and extreme dictatorial regimes. Collectively, these contributions are a much-needed addition to the historiography of Russian Germans, which is still dominated by studies of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Only recently has this scholarship moved beyond World War II, focusing on Russian German experiences in the United States and Canada. However, scholarship addressing their experiences in Germany (FDR and GDR) and the Soviet Union after 1948 remains comparatively sparse. This collection only begins the process of delving into the complexities of the Russian German experience in Germany. The contributions address topics like the psychological impacts of intergenerational trauma, the evolution of memory over lifetimes, religion and religious development, artistic and literary expressions of the Russian German experience, the Gulag, and forced migration. Thus, while not exhaustive, it is essential reading for scholars of the Russian German diaspora. Alexander Frohn's contribution is particularly provoking. A psychologist, Frohn, brings together historical experience and psychological practice to understand the traumatic impact of Soviet legacies on Russian German emigres to Germany. Using interviews with psychologists who work with primarily second-generation Russian Germans in Germany, Frohn unearths the generational trauma of involuntary immigration under the Nazi administration from occupied Soviet territories to Germany. Equating Russian Germans from this migration wave to "stepchildren" in Germany, Frohn grapples with their treatment as both preferred immigrants and Russian outsiders. Many felt not entirely German enough and deprived of any official recognition of their suffering. This placed them in competition with other immigrant groups, who often fleeing violence, had their suffering recognized. German Russian immigrants could not become totally German, in part because they did not identify with the German experience under Nazism, perceiving themselves not as perpetrators but as victims. This rupture made it extremely difficult to reconcile Russian German and German understandings of Germanness and the German experience. Shame usually accompanied these feelings of displacement and resentment, resulting in generational silences. Moreover, within families, the second generation frequently suffered from

The Polish Review, 2024

Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the co-founder and central figure of the Catholic Worker movement, and c... more Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the co-founder and central figure of the Catholic Worker movement, and current candidate for sainthood, visited Poland, the USSR, and other countries in the Soviet bloc for three weeks in summer 1971. In her youth, she had associated with communist and left-wing causes in the United States, and retained a radical political outlook derived from her understanding of the true interpretation of Christianity. Her intent in visiting Eastern Europe was to satisfy a lifelong fascination with Russian culture and to explore religious conditions behind the Iron Curtain. Although Poland was a secondary destination, she found its capital unexpectedly charming and moving. In Moscow, she irritated her Soviet hosts with open statements of admiration for the banned writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The article is based largely on Day's own writings and materials in her archival papers at Marquette University.

In this book, Volodymyr V. Kravchenko examines the interplay between historic and geographic unde... more In this book, Volodymyr V. Kravchenko examines the interplay between historic and geographic understandings of Ukrainianness and Russianness along the Ukrainian-Russian borderland, specifically in the historic region known as Sloboda Ukraine. Kravchenko upends several of the larger historiographical debates waged between Ukrainian and Russian studies scholars, who tend to emphasize the tensions between empire and nation, which increased over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He sidesteps this decades-long historiographical debate, predicated on assumptions of organic Ukrainian nationality and Great Russian chauvinism. As opposed to taking sides in the increasingly charged either-or debates surrounding this borderland, Kravchenko instead opts for a both-and approach. He treats Sloboda Ukraine as a Ukrainian and Russian contact zone and a nested geography. In doing so, Kravchenko expertly illustrates how both Ukrainian nation-building projects and Russian imperial ambitions have turned this contact zone and much of the historical terminology surrounding it into "object[s] of rivalry" (p. 5). This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland, where the forces of nationalism, imperialism, and what Kravchenko dubs "imperial nationalism" jockeyed for supremacy within the Russian-Ukrainian borderland and extended far beyond any real administrative and temporal boundaries. These borderland discourses became part and parcel of Ukrainian-Russian discourses past and present. Kravchenko structures the book into two parts, each with a separate introduction. The first part focuses on the intellectual genealogies of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland. This section hones in on the contested nature of historical terminology in Ukrainian-Russian discourses, where language and words have served and continue to serve as battlegrounds of imperial and national contestations. Kravchenko takes up a series of geographic and national terms in this section, ranging from "South Russia" to "Great Russia," locating Ukraine both geographically and intellectually within the turbulent linguistic landscape of the borderland. His address of the term Malorossiia (Little Russia) is particularly strong, as he teases out the contemporary connotations of the term and historical ones, which almost universally understood the identity to be something distinct from Rossiia (Russia). Intellectuals and nobles from within Malorossiia had their cultural discourses which were simultaneously distinct from Rossiia and part of Rossiia at the same time. This distinctiveness became the cultural fodder for Romantic nationals like Taras Shevchenko to build the Ukrainian nation in the century that followed. Even non-Malorossiia scholars, like Mykola Markevych, grasped this phenomenon, in which "one patrimony-rodina 'motherland'-and Russia as another-otechestvo 'fatherland'-did not contradict one another, but neither did they merge" (p. 81). In the second part, Kravchenko uses the historic city of Kharkiv and Kharkiv University as case studies to understand the mappings and re-mappings of Sloboda Ukraine in the Russian Empire, Soviet

H-Net Reviews, Jewish Studies , 2022

Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2019

Conference Presentations by Amber N Nickell

This project compliments a historical paper, which examines the 1921/22 Volga famine and the 1932... more This project compliments a historical paper, which examines the 1921/22 Volga famine and the 1932/33 Holodomor as experienced by Soviet Germans and understood by their co-ethnics in the West. Using German, Russian, and English language primary document this project nuances the current historiographies of both famines via analysis of the German experience. Several scholars have accurately demonstrated the class motivations for and genocidal nature of the Soviet terror famine(s). However, this paper extracts the underlying, often obscured, ethnic experiences of and motivations for class based genocide. The argument is two-fold. As part of its program against kulaks and unruly nationals, Soviet officials targeted ethnic German colonies for grain requisitions, resulting in a subsequent ethnocide(s). Secondly, the paper implies that 1921 famine in the Volga region may have served as a training ground for its successor—the Holodomor. One stark difference remains. Lenin, realizing the catastrophic consequences of his policies, allowed the West to offer aid during the 1921 famines. Stalin, fully aware of the 1921 context, refused Western aid and blocked foreign intervention.

The GIS element of this project demonstrates the geographic relationship between the famine zones and ethnic German populations. Moreover, it seeks to analyze the impact of the famines at the village level. Data for population analysis is incomplete; however, remnants of the 1897 Russian census, village censuses conducted prior to 1921, and the 1926 census of the Soviet Union remain. Unfortunately, the Soviet government postponed the 1933 census, which was completed in 1937. After which, the government ordered its destruction. Several scholars have speculated that this was an attempt to obscure population losses after forced collectivization and the Holodomor which numbered in the millions. The multi-village Am Trakt settlement and the Volga Mother Colonies serve as examples of this methodology.

Teaching Documents by Amber N Nickell

Graduate Historical Methods further acquaints history students with major philosophical concepts ... more Graduate Historical Methods further acquaints history students with major philosophical concepts and the problems underlying their discipline and directs them through the steps of historical research methods to the final graduate-level project. Course Objectives In this course, students will: 1.) Advance their understanding of different approaches to history; 2.) Advance their understanding of the problems that historians have faced and some solutions to these problems; 3.) Further, Develop critical reading and analytical skills for both primary and secondary sources; 4.) Increase their familiarity with the sources for history research that are available at Forsyth and other institutions; 5.) Hone their research, organization, and writing skills, including source selection, taking notes, organizing material, making an argument, and writing effectively; 6.) Edit, analyze, and critique the research and writing of fellow students; 7.) Perfect the mechanics of documentation according to the Chicago Manual of Style; and 8.) Effectively and responsibly gather, evaluate, and use the information for scholarship and problem-solving. Course Texts & Materials The readings for this course are neither optional nor unimportant. ALL of the written assignments and exams will include substantial material from the readings and they remain central to your participation grade.

This course explores the social, political, cultural, and economic transformations that defined E... more This course explores the social, political, cultural, and economic transformations that defined Europe between the French Revolution and the outbreak of World War I, including the collapse of absolutist regimes, the birth of modern ideologies, and the rise of industrial capitalism and empire. It was a time of upheaval and innovation, marked by revolutions, reforms, wars, and widespread debates over rights, power, and identity. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources, students will examine how ideas such as liberalism, nationalism, socialism, feminism, and imperialism emerged and evolved in response to historical conditions. The course covers major events and movements including the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna, the Revolutions of 1848, the unifications of Germany and Italy, internal and overseas colonization, the rise of mass politics, and the road to global war.