History gives us an advantage in the present by allowing us to recognize patterns.
History buys us time: if we can recognize the patterns quickly enough, we can do something when action still matters.
History is bracing: it allows us to imagine solutions based on those earlier patterns and actions. It teaches us about freedom, about ethics and it gives us company. There are people who are wiser than us who have faced challenges that are greater than the ones we faced and they have generously left behind records of their thoughts and experiences.
History is all we’ve got: everything we think we know comes from past experience. The question is what do we do with it.
Articles & Essays
New York Times, July 2021
Efforts to restrict historical education—such as banning critical race theory or sanitizing national memory—undermine democracy by suppressing truth and weakening civic accountability. Professor Snyder describes trends towards authoritarian “memory laws” and warns that controlling historical narratives is a hallmark of regimes that fear open debate and pluralism. Democratic institutions are sustained by honest history.
Eurozine, June 2020
In the twentieth century, the collapse of legal and institutional structures enabled mass violence. The destruction of the state—more than national identity or ideology—created lawless spaces where atrocities such as the Holocaust became possible. Professor Snyder considers the Nazi and Soviet systems and the risks of institutional breakdown in modern contexts.
Videos
Studying history is essential for civic awareness and political responsibility. History reveals how unexpected events shape outcomes, helps us recognize patterns before crises escalate, and it empowers us to act when it still makes a difference. We should reject passive or mythic understandings of the past in favour of active engagement with its complexity.
(October 2020 - 7 mins)
The Holocaust is both a historical event and a contemporary warning. This lecture focuses on the structural conditions that enabled mass violence, including the collapse of institutions and the erosion of truth. Highlights connections between past atrocities and present-day political threats.
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 2017 - 1 hr 40 mins)
Books
The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned Eastern Europe—especially Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus—into sites of mass murder, resulting in over 14 million civilian deaths. This award-winning book explores the interconnected nature of these atrocities, which were driven by ideology, bureaucracy, and territorial ambition. Professor Snyder explains how the region is central to understanding the logic of totalitarian violence.
(Published 2010)
The Holocaust is an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think and thus all the more terrifying. Drawing on overlooked Eastern European sources, this book argues that mass killing became possible when law and truth were dismantled. It frames the Holocaust as a warning about the dangers of statelessness, propaganda, and unchecked power.
(Published 2015)