Carol Gluck, Columbia University's historian of 20th century Japan, will 
examine how history is filtered through memory in a series of October lectures.
	World War II, more than 50 years old, remains a contested issue in history 
and memory in many countries.  Such issues as Nazi gold in Swiss banks, the 
long shadow of Vichy in France, the Rape of Nanking and the issue of Korean 
"comfort women" in Japan, as well as Stephen Spielberg's hit film, "Saving 
Private Ryan," claim an important place in the political and cultural agenda of 
the late 1990s.
	The phenomenon, Prof. Gluck believes, poses both a challenge to our 
understanding of history and to moral efforts to do justice to the past.
	The lecture series, "Past Obsessions: War and Memory in the Twentieth 
Century" will be presented on consecutive Mondays, Oct. 12, 19 and 26, at 8 p.m. in 
the Dag Hammarskjold Lounge on the 6th floor of Columbia's International 
Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street.  Admission is free.  The talks are the sixth 
in the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures sponsored by the University 
Seminars at Columbia.
	The first lecture, "Operations of Memory," Oct. 12,  is about stories and how 
memory works in the 20th century.
	The second lecture, "No Accounting for History," Oct. 19, treats the so-
called truths of history in the presentations of  historians, witnesses, the courts, 
the media, films, museums and commemorations. 
	The concluding lecture Oct. 26 asks "What's the Use of the Past?" to pose the 
question of  doing justice to generations past and yet to come.
	Prof. Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History.  Since 1975, she has 
taught at Columbia in the departments of History and East Asian languages and 
cultures and as a member of the East Asian Institute.  Her book, Japan's  Modern 
Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period  (1985), received the Historical 
Association's John King Fairbank prize in East Asian History in 1986 and 
Columbia's Lionel Trilling Award in 1987.
	She edited, with Stephen Graubard, Showa: The Japan of Hirohito  (1992) 
and, with Ainslee Embree, Asia in Western and World History  (1997), and is 
completing a book entitled Versions of the Past: The Japanese and Their Modern 
History, a study of historical consciousness in modern Japan.  She is the recipient 
of Columbia's Mark van Doren Award for teaching and the Great Teacher Award 
from the Society of Columbia Graduates.
	Prof. Gluck's lectures, supported by a bequest from the Leonard Hastings 
Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Trust, will be published by Columbia 
University Press.

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