...is done. Submitted it today.

From the 6th of August on, for 4-7 days, I will be in solitary confinement. I have booked a single room at the Pension Oesterle in Schönmünzach near Baiersbronn in the Black Forest. There I will sit and write. No family. No banjo. No friends. No internet access (except a few visits to an internet cafe to keep up on my few classes). That means also: No excuses. The time is now. Wish me luck.

A book review I wrote for H-WAR is now online at

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175851216074997

My proposal to present a paper has been accepted for the Popular Culture Assocation/American Culture Association 2008 national conference in San Francisco. I will be in San Francisco from the 19th to the 22nd of March and am still hunting for a roommate at the Marriott.

My paper will be presented in the "cemeteries and gravemarkers" section. Read about it here.

This will be my first venture into the "culture associations". In order to attend the conference, I had to join either or both of the PCA or ACA by subscribing to one of the journals. I chose the Journal of American Culture and ended up finding lots of good material for my war and society class at APUS.

The latest issue of the bundeswehr-journal has a special section dedicated to war memorials. The background is the new initiative to create a memorial for the Bundeswehr dead in Berlin, an initiatve which has since been postponed. One of the articles is by yours truly:

Über den Tod des Staatsbürgers für die Nation. bundeswehr-journal November 2007 (2. Jahrgang), 12-15.

The article had to be shortened to cut out several of the examples and some of the interpretive content. A full version of the same article with links to various examples will be made available at sites-of-memory.de some time in the future.

Other articles on the same theme include one by the editor of the journal, Christian Dewitz, as well as reprints of articles by Werner Sonne, Manfred Hettling, and Christian Saehrendt.

The bundeswehr-journal is produced by Christian Dewitz, a lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr reserves, and is read widely in German defense and foreign policy circles.

I have been given a grant by American Public University to go to Riga to research an article on post-Soviet memorial culture there for the volume The Transformation of Memorial Landscapes in Europe since the Fall of Communism. I proposed an article entitled Out from under Moscow's Finger focusing on three memorials in or near the city of Riga:

• the Soviet victory memorial in the Pardaugava quarter ("Moscow's Finger")
• the newly expanded memorial to the mass murder of Jews at Rumbula
• and one other, perhaps the Ratu Laukums with the examples of the Occupation Museum, the Schwarzhäupterhaus and the as-yet-untouched memorial to the Latvian Riflemen

I am still exploring the options. I might make the whole ambiguity surrounding the history of 1905 and 1917-1919 in Latvia a section of its own. I expect the study to rely to heavily on some key secondary literature already published or available as MA theses.

I will also take the opportunity in Riga to "collect" all possible markers in the city for sites-of-memory.de.

I have been given a grant by American Public University to systematically expand the sites-of-memory.de webpage in the region of eastern France and/or western Germany.

I will now be deciding which regions and themes to concentrate on. Against the backdrop of my recent visit to Hamburg, I would like to systematically expand the coverage of memorials and mass graves having to do with Allied bombing during World War Two. I may take advantage of the grant, however, to explore and collect markers, cemeteries and battlefields from the Franco-Prussian and/or World War One in the west.