Our Community and the Holocaust: About the Project

Sedona Benjamin performed scholarly research for the exhibition as an intern at Henderson Library. She will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Writing and Linguistics in Fall 2021. While studying at Georgia Southern University, Sedona found great interest in rhetorical studies and professional and technical writing. She also enjoys writing creative non-fiction in her free time. In the future, Sedona plans to integrate her education and passion for advocacy by studying public interest law. 

In 2022, Georgia Southern University Libraries will host the Americans and the Holocaust travelling exhibition. The 1,100-square-foot traveling exhibition is based on the exhibition that opened in April 2018 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. The Americans and the Holocaust traveling exhibition addresses important themes in American history, including Americans’ responses to refugees, war and genocide in the 1930s and ‘40s. This exhibition will challenge the commonly held assumptions that Americans knew little and did nothing about the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews as the Holocaust unfolded.

Georgia Southern University Libraries sought to create a companion exhibit, which would examine the events of the Holocaust through the lens of Georgia news media. This exhibit sought to transform the Americans and the Holocaust exhibition central question, “What did Americans know?,” into “What did our campus and greater communities know?” To facilitate this, a semester-long internship was designed to explore historic newspaper coverage of 41-Holocaust related events through the lens of our local and college newspapers. 

The project was part of the History Unfolded initiative, an ongoing effort of the USHMM. History Unfolded asks student, educators, and professional historians throughout the United States what was possible for Americans to have known about the Holocaust as it was happening and how Americans responded. In all, over 140 articles were discovered and submitted to the History Unfolded database in Fall 2021. The file below contains a list of relevant articles with links to their digitized locations.