By UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATION
Fort Hays State University will host two distinguished scholars of history for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s 2025 Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture, “Territorial Expansion in Nazi Europe and the United States in the 19th and 20th Centuries.”
Between 1939 and 1945, as part of their efforts to eliminate Jews from the European continent, the Nazi dictatorship removed people from the Reich they considered unworthy of being citizens because they did not fit into their vision of the racial “national community.” They forcibly displaced Jews, whom they called “undesirables,” eastward into ghettos where conditions were extremely harsh, simultaneously expanding their borders to create “living space” for “racially pure” Germans. In a much different context, the democratic United States expanded its borders westward between the 19th and 20th centuries. To free up land for its growing population, the United States violently removed Indigenous peoples, whom some Americans perceived as incompatible with national and racial ideals. While these two histories are distinct, by discussing them together, we can learn new things about how and why they unfolded.
Join us with two major scholars of these topics in a program designed to illuminate some phenomena common to the persecution histories of those considered “others” in society, as well as what is unique in each of these experiences.
Territorial Expansion in Nazi Europe and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries
- Thursday, April 3, 2025
- 6 p.m. Central Time
- Palmer Hall on the campus of Fort Hays State University
- Live streamed on Zoom and YouTube
Note: This program is free and open to the public, but registration for the on-campus and live-streamed events is required. To register, go to https://www.ushmm.org/events/meyerhoff-forthays.
Speakers
- Dr. Elise Boxer, Director, Institute of American Indian Studies; Associate Professor, Department of History, University of South Dakota
- Dr. Edward B. Westermann, Regents Professor of History, Texas A&M University-San Antonio
- Moderator Dr. Wendy Rohleder-Sook, Chair, Department of Communication Studies, Law, and Political Science, Fort Hays State University
Two representatives from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies will also participate in three days of programming, including classroom visits and other university activities on the FHSU Campus. Museum Campus Outreach Program Officer Kierra Crago-Schneider, PhD and Laura Brade, PhD, the Museum’s Rosalyn Unger Director of Campus Outreach Programs, will join Boxer and Westermann for a series of additional lectures and discussions on campus and in the Hays Community. The FHSU Department of History and Philosophy, FHSU’s Forsyth Library, the Hays Public Library, and the FHSU College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences are sponsors of event programming.
About the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture Series
The Meyerhoff Lecture Series is a Campus Outreach Program of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The series was endowed by the Meyerhoff family in 1994 to honor excellence in research and foster the dissemination of scholarly work in Holocaust studies. Since 2020, the Meyerhoff Lecture has been held in partnership with a university on its campus as part of the Regional Programming Initiative. The mission of the Mandel Center is to ensure the long-term growth and vitality of Holocaust Studies. To do that, it is essential to provide opportunities for new generations of scholars. The vitality and the integrity of Holocaust Studies require openness, independence, and free inquiry so that new ideas are generated and tested through peer review and public debate. The opinions of scholars expressed before, during, or after their activities with the Mandel Center do not represent and are not endorsed by the Mandel Center or the Museum.