Timothy Snyder being interviewed in a museum

History

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

The War on History is a War on Democracy

New York Times, July 2021

Efforts to restrict historical education—such as banning critical race theory and sanitizing national memory—undermine democracy by suppressing truth and weakening civic accountability. Timothy Snyder compares these trends to authoritarian “memory laws” abroad, explaining that control of historical narratives is a hallmark of regimes that fear open debate and pluralism. Honest history is vital to sustain democratic institutions.

Beware the destruction of the state!

Eurozine, June 2020

In the twentieth century, mass violence was enabled more by the collapse of legal and state institutions than by ideology or national identity, creating 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

The study of history deepens civic understanding and calls us to responsible participation in public life. History reveals how unexpected events shape outcomes, allowing us to recognize patterns before crises escalate and to act while it still matters. Professor Snyder urges rejection of 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—including the collapse of institutions and the erosion of truth—that enabled mass violence, and highlights connections between past atrocities and present-day political threats.

(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 2017 - 1 hr 40 mins)

Books

Bloodlands

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 shows how these atrocities were interconnected and driven by ideology, bureaucracy, and territorial ambition. Professor Snyder demonstrates that the region is central to understanding the logic of totalitarian violence.

(Published 2010)

Black Earth

This lecture links the Holocaust to the collapse of state institutions, ecological instability, and ideological mythmaking. 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)