World War II Series

World War II: Experience and Legacy is a series that began in 2020 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the ending of the war.  

Presenters from the Radford University community have covered a variety of topics, including efforts to find the remains of a lost Marine patrol on Guadalcanal, changes to nursing during the war, baseball during the war years, wartime Soviet songs, JD Salinger's war and the impact on his writing, codebreaking, rememberances of the holocaust, cartoons go to war, and more.

Recordings of many of the talks are available through the links below, with more to be added.

Suzanne Ament  Sing to Victory:  Song in Soviet Society during World War II

 Rhett Herman   An Archaeological and Geophysical Expedition to Guadalcanal.     

 Sarah Gilbert and Samuel Lee    Women on the Battlefield: Nurses in World War II.

Patricia Heberer-Rice     "Scientific Racism:  The History of Eugenics in Nazi Germany and the United States" Q&A Session with Patricia Herberer-Rice from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)

 Jennifer Hedges with Moira Baker    J. D. Salinger, War Trauma, and Fiction.

 Johnny Moore     "Keep Baseball Going":  The National Pastime during World War II

Sept. 30     Michael Meindl      Animating World War II: Animation on the Home Front and Beyond

 Neil Sigmon       Breaking Enigma:  The Bletchley Park Codebreakers and the Turing Bombe

Neil Sigmon    Navajo Code of World War II

Mike Montgomery   German Perspectives on VE Day

Roann Barris   From the Holocaust to Now: Visual Narratives of Trauma

Tom Snediker  Life During Wartime: Jazz Music in Occupied Paris

Sandy French  Germany's Memory Problem -- The Memorial ot the Murdered Jews of Europe

Arye Ephrath Amazing Grace: My Holocaust Story

Adam Bennett, Powder, People and Politics: the Radford Ordnance Works and the New River Valley

Becky Brackin, John O'Connor, and Amy VanKirk, Impact on Next Generations

Vesna Costello, Arye Ephrath, and Anne Prucha, The Holocaust: Legacies.

This series was sponsored and organized by the Department of History, the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences, and McConnell Library.  For further information, please contact, Dr. Suzanne Ament (seament@radford.edu) or Dr. Matthew Oyos (moyos@radford.edu) at 540-831-5147.

*(The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement)