Museums for Peace: In Search of History, Memory and Change highlights the inspiring as well as conflicting representations and purposes of diverse museums for peace around the world. Coming from various cultural and professional backgrounds, the authors explore “what are museums for peace and what do they mean?” Some chapters introduce alternative histories of peace, conflict, and memorialization. This innovative collection examines grassroots museums, military sexual slavery, historical memory in East Asia, and cultural heritage in the Africanized peace museum movement. The chapters discuss differing representations of Gandhi, technology of war and opposition to it, and structural violence such as racial terror and imperialism. Investigating how institutions interact with political and cultural forces, the volume demonstrates that some museums reinforce hegemonic narratives, while others resist authoritative tropes to reveal silenced histories, including peace histories. Museums for Peace will appeal to academics and students in museum studies, heritage studies, peace studies, memory studies, social justice, and human rights. Those working in cultural studies and trauma studies will also find this volume valuable.

Nominated for the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in non-fiction This volume examines peace museums, a small and important (but often overlooked) series of museums whose numbers have multiplied world-wide in recent decades. They relate stories and display artifacts—banners, diaries, and posters for example about such themes as: art and peace, antiwar histories, protest, peacekeeping and social justice and promote cultures of peace. This book introduces their different approaches from Japan, which has the largest number of sites, to Bradford, UK and Guernica, Spain. Some peace museums and centers emphasize popular peace symbols and figures, others provide alternative narratives about conscientious objection or civil disobedience, and still others are sites of persuasion, challenging the status quo about issues of war, peace, disarmament, and related issues. Introducing Peace Museums distinguishes between different types of museums that are linked to peace in name, theme or purpose and discusses the debates which surround peace museums versus museums for peace. This book is the first of its kind to critically evaluate the exhibits and activities of this group of museums, and to consider the need for a "critical peace museum studies" which analyses their varied emphasis and content. The work of an experienced specialist, this welcome introduction to peace museums considers the challenges and opportunities faced by these institutions now and in the future.

"The Role of Museums in the Transformation of a Culture of War and Violence to a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence": papers based on the 7th conference of the International Network of Museums for Peace, Barcelona Peace Resource Center, May 2011.

Takashi Yoshida provides a historical analysis of war and peace museums from the late nineteenth century to the present and traces the historical development of a pacifist discourse in postwar Japan that centered on Japan's war crimes and responsibility during the so-called Fifteen Year War, which began in 1931 with Japan's invasion of Manchuria and ended in 1945 with the nation's defeat. Prior to the defeat, a culture of war gripped the Japanese empire. Every segment of Japanese popular culture during the war bore witness to the flood of patriotism. In this book Yoshida attempts to demonstrate that the acceptance of Japanese wartime aggression and atrocities as historical facts remains evident to this day in the culture of peace museums in Japan. Those who have little knowledge of contemporary Japan often hastily conclude that the Japanese have been united and monolithic in the way they feel the war should be remembered. This book seeks to challenge that assumption.

Museums for Peace Worldwide, edited by Kazuyo Yamane and Ikuro Anzai. Museums for Peace Worldwide is an international directory of over 300 museums, across 49 countries, which document tragedies of war and violence or promote the human endeavour for peace. There are descriptions of each museum - its mission, vision, exhibitions - and both geographical and internet contact details. This is a 2020 publication of the International Network of Museums for Peace (INMP). Edited by Kazuyo Yamane and Ikuro Anzai, Museums for Peace Worldwide includes an essay, "Critical Museums for Peace: Visiting Museums for Peace Worldwide", by Joyce Apsel. Editorial Committee Members: Joyce Apsel, Clinical Professor, New York University, and President, Institute for Study of Genocide; Clive Barrett, Chair of Trustees, The Peace Museum, Bradford, UK; Kya Kim, Director, Peace Mask Project; Robert Kowalczyk, Professor (retired), Kindai University, Japan; Roy Tamashiro, Professor Emeritus, Webster University, USA; Peter van den Dungen, INMP former Coordinator.

Today, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. Exhibiting Atrocity documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to terms with past political violence and to promote democracy and human rights. Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the trend: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world.

The landmark survey that celebrates all the places where people hang out--and is helping to spawn their revival A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "Third places," or "great good places," are the many public places where people can gather, put aside the concerns of home and work (their first and second places), and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation. They are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of a democracy. Author Ray Oldenburg portrays, probes, and promotes th4ese great good places--coffee houses, cafes, bookstores, hair salons, bars, bistros, and many others both past and present--and offers a vision for their revitalization. Eloquent and visionary, this is a compelling argument for these settings of informal public life as essential for the health both of our communities and ourselves. And its message is being heard: Today, entrepreneurs from Seattle to Florida are heeding the call of The Great Good Place--opening coffee houses, bookstores, community centers, bars, and other establishments and proudly acknowledging their indebtedness to this book.