Kim A. Wagner
@kimatiwagner
Historian of imperialism, mass violence and atrocity photography - current project on the My Lai Massacre 1968. Author of 'Massacre in the Clouds' (2024), 'Amritsar 1919' (2019), 'The Skull of Alum Bheg' (2017) and a few others. Rep by Wylie Agency
Can't wait for the next episode of this podcast about My Lai, which has so far managed to not get a single thing right...
As part of the research for my book on My Lai, I am going through popular and easily accessible accounts online to get a sense of what people know (or think they know). And...it's not good. I could write the entire thing by simply dismantling commonplace misconceptions, one after the other...
I love spending years of my life carefully researching massacres and atrocity photography - making the argument that choosing not to look at images of graphic violence helps sustain historical amnesia. And then Facebook proves my point in the most meta-way conceivable... @michaelgvann.bsky.social
Just finished the final part of my book about My Lai, where I return with Ron Haeberle to the site of the massacre and describe how the survivors have learned to live with the dead. I already have the beginning of the book, so now I just have to write all the substantive chapters in the middle😑
Schell wrote extensively about the devastation in Quang Ngai prior to My Lai:
If only there was a historical precedent for the punitive logic of this kind of warfare...🤔 On a completely unrelated note, have you seen this excellent new book?
Just wrote 500 words about the Buddhist exorcism - Cầu Siêu ritual - I observed at the site of the My Lai Massacre and now I feel like a proper anthropologist (minus the suffocating theory...so maybe I don't feel like an anthropologist after all...😑)
I see Trump is now fully embracing the logic of colonial violence. The same guy who first ran for president with a story about using pig's blood against Muslims - which just so happens to be a colonial technique as well... (Sometimes I wish my scholarship was less relevant)
I was waiting for the neuro divergence to be used as a justification, which imo is really problematic (regardless of the merits of the claim). But it's also incompatible with the subsequent argument that everyone makes such 'mistakes'.
I think there's an article to be written about popular songs explicitly justifying atrocity...
The investigation took place in 1971 - the comic is published thirty years later.
Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam or Alice In Chains. (Had to make it three...)
"Despite his best efforts, the dead still found their way onto Ron’s b&w photos: like macabre visual illusions, the bodies were hiding in the background or in the margins of the otherwise sanitized images. That day, it was difficult not to photograph the dead." #MyLaiMassacre #OnHolidayButWriting
Funny that - in 1906, the US military justified killing hundreds of women during a massacre in the southern Philippines by arguing that they had forfeited their status as civilians by wearing trousers, which supposedly made them indistinguishable from the men. They even wrote a song about it...
Following the NYT exposé, New York Post and National Review are running the Greenidge-story with the exact framing you'd expect from them. Meanwhile, those in the know are keeping quiet. I think historians have a right to know what happened...
What does it even mean to 'fact-check' yourself - or hire others to do it?!? If this is really how American historians work, I think we have a problem...
Funny, I can't find a single book or article that examines the Vietnam War as a 'race war' the way that John Dower did for the Pacific in 'War Without Mercy'. Obviously, there is @nickturse.bsky.social and a few others, but I haven't seen any research that puts race at the heart of the analysis.
"More uncanny valley than lieux de mémoire" Currently writing about curatorial practice at the museum and memorial of the My Lai Massacre...
My 'FIFA's judicial bodies are independent' T-shirt is raising a lot of questions about the independence of FIFA's judicial bodies...
"Like Braveheart for Americans!" That's pretty much all you need to know about 'Young Washington' 😆
The perfect present for the patriot who has everything: 'The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley', Terry Nelson, 1971