Project MUSE and USHMM Announce Landmark Initiative
By Project MUSE
WASHINGTON, DC – Project MUSE, a division of Johns Hopkins University Press, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are proud to announce a landmark initiative to host the most comprehensive scholarly resource on Nazi persecutory sites, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 (ECG), as a new open access, fully searchable, digital publication. Hosting the ECG on the Project MUSE platform will allow users to dynamically engage with this empirically grounded prodigious resource of thousands of camps, ghettos, and other sites of persecution operated by the Nazis and their allies.
Project MUSE and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are committed to broadening access to and increasing engagement with this vital scholarship. This new digital publication will be an invaluable resource for wide-ranging audiences including scholars, researchers, Holocaust survivors and their descendents, digital humanists, educators, students, librarians, archivists, nonprofits, and the general public. Users will gain straightforward entrance to extensive bibliographic citations comprising research in more than a dozen languages and varied source bases including material in hundreds of archival collections, survivor and eyewitness testimonies, memoirs, diaries, memory books, and up-to-date scholarship.
"The ECG is a groundbreaking resource that has helped transform our understanding of the size and scope of Nazi persecution. When we started it in the late 1990s and based on the knowledge at the time, we thought we were dealing with several thousand camps. Over time, it turned out the landscape of camps, ghettos, and other punitive sites run by Germany and its allies was not only much more vast in terms of site numbers, but also more complex in its component parts, its evolution, and its impact on the fate of inmates. As with Holocaust Studies at large, ECG reflects the deepening of our understanding of what happened during the Nazi era, and of how much remains to be researched." - Dr. Jürgen Matthäus, Director, Applied Research, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The digital publication will launch on Project MUSE in early 2025 with the content from the first four volumes of the ECG, published in print between 2009 and 2022, and currently available as open access PDFs on Project MUSE. The publication will add new entries continuously to eventually encompass research from all seven planned volumes as well as newly updated content that incorporates previously inaccessible and undiscovered sources.
“Welcoming The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 to the Project MUSE platform represents a significant milestone in our commitment to advancing scholarly research and accessibility. This collaboration underscores Project MUSE's dedication to facilitating global accessibility and engagement with vital historical scholarship, empowering users to explore, learn, and contribute to our collective understanding of the Holocaust era.” – Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE
“We are excited about the interactive ways in which our audiences will be able to engage with information on tens of thousands of persecutory sites once the series is published in its entirety on Project MUSE. The Nazi camp system was an incredibly dynamic, ever-changing phenomenon, and the new online platform will allow readers to fully explore this system, its linkages, and the many different paths of persecution that it contained.” - Dr Alexandra Lohse, Applied Research Scholar Team Lead, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
For more information about Project MUSE and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, visit https://about.muse.jhu.edu/resources/USHMM-encyclopedia-holocaust-camps-ghettos
About Project MUSE:
About the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
A nonpartisan federal, educational institution, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America’s national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, dedicated to ensuring the permanence of Holocaust memory, understanding, and relevance. Through the power of Holocaust history, the Museum challenges leaders and individuals worldwide to think critically about their role in society and to confront antisemitism and other forms of hate, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity. For more information, visit ushmm.org.
Funding for the new digital Encyclopedia is provided in part with assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, sponsored by the Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future," and supported by the German Federal Ministry of Finance.
