American historian of Europe
Harold Marcuse (born November 15, 1957, in Waterbury, Connecticut) is an American professor of modern and contemporary German history and public history. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[1] He is the grandson of philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
Education
Marcuse majored in physics at Wesleyan University (B.A. 1979, magna cum laude) in Middletown, Connecticut. 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".[2]
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 that examined the legacies of Dachau.[1] Marcuse says that since the end of World War II, much art, literature and public debate in Germany have revolved around the issues of resistance, collaboration and complicity with the Third Reich.[1]
Career
Marcuse began teaching history at UC Santa Barbara in 1992. His study of the different ways Germans memorialized events under Hitler's rule led him to research the broader question of 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. Marcuse was instrumental in connecting a student, Collette Waddell, with a Polish Holocaust survivor, Nina Morecki, which led to a book about the Holocaust that discussed not just the era, but how survivors pursued their lives afterward.[3] Marcuse has stated that his interest in history education also resulted in him becoming active in the reform of UC Santa Barbara's General Education requirements between 1997 and 2004.[4]
He is also interested in the use of technology, such as videorecording[5] and the Internet in history education; the use of oral history in social studies teaching;[6] and questions of public conceptions of history, often referred to as "collective memory."[7] He serves as webmaster of the Marcuse family's website.[8]
Personal
Marcuse and his first wife (m. 1987–2010) had two children, Aaron (born 1988) and Miriam (born 1993). On the family website, Marcuse states that he and his first wife separated in 2001 and divorced in 2010.[4] He married again in 2012.[4] He is the grandson of German critical theorist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse[9] as well as a son of Herbert's son Peter Marcuse.
In 2012, Marcuse stated that his interests were "history education and public exposure to history (monuments, museums, school curricula, films, ...)." This in turn led him to study the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act on his local school system from 2004 to 2008.[4][10] Since 2002 he has worked to reform the University of California, Santa Barbara General Education Curriculum.[11]
