Active History is on its annual August hiatus. In honour of syllabus-writing season, we are reposting a selection of teaching-related articles from the past year. Next up is Erica L. Fraser’s piece from 21 February 2024. While you’re here, we also invite you complete our survey.

Photo by Fernando Arcos, public domain, https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-caution-cone-on-keyboard-211151/
This is the second in a three-part series on the use of content warnings in classrooms, archives, and museums. You can read the first entry here.
Erica L. Fraser
Looking back, I probably began using content warnings for students after giving myself night terrors from reading the memoir of a Holocaust survivor as class prep. I was on an evening train back to Ottawa after winter break. I was tired, trying to anticipate how students in a new class on the topic would respond to Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, and thumbing through it quickly to check it off my to-do list. It is a beautiful, horrifying memoir – but I had read material like this before. Next thing I knew, I was sitting bolt upright in bed the next three nights, terrified of something unnamed and with vague images from Kluger’s text fading from my mind.
(Before I go further, please note that this blog post contains references to Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust and the sexual assault of serf women in 18th century Russia).