Harold Marcuse

Harold Marcuse (b. 1957, Waterbury, Connecticut) is a professor of modern and contemporary German history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He majored in physics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (B.A. 1979). He earned an M.A. in Art History from the University of Hamburg in 1987, with a thesis about a 1949 memorial dedicated "to the Victims of National Socialist Persecution and the Resistance Struggle".

In 1985 Marcuse co-produced a photographic exhibition on monuments and memorials commemorating events of the Nazi and World War II periods. In 1986 he entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to write a dissertation about the post-1945 history of the (former) Dachau concentration camp, published as Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001.

Since 1992 he has been teaching history at UC Santa Barbara. He became fascinated with the different ways Germans memorialized events under Hitler's rule. Marcuse's research seeks to answer what people get out of learning about historical events. He examines the ways historical events have been portrayed over time, and the meanings various groups of people have derived from those events and portrayals. His current interests include the use of technology, especially of the internet, in history education; the use of oral history in social studies teaching; and questions of public conceptions of history, often referred to as "collective memory."

He is the grandson of famed German critical theorist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

References

• Harold Marcuse (2001). Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55204-4. 

External links

• Harold Marcuse's UCSB faculty homepage
• Harold Marcuse's Personal Page at marcuse.org
• Harold Marcuse's Dachau Project homepage
• Harold Marcuse's German History Courses index page
• Wikipedia pages based to some extent on Marcuse's research: First they came for ... quotation; Herbert Marcuse; Reception History

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