Created at a moment when Latter-day Saints faced enormous public pressure to end the practice of polygamy, Representative Women of Deseret heralded the qualifications, accomplishments, and agency of Mormon women, countering prevailing stereotypes that rendered them as pitiable, deluded, or corrupted. 

The Tree of Life Synagogue building (Pittsburgh) and George Floyd Square (Minneapolis) became sites of commemoration through the gifts left in the aftermath of tragedy. Expressions of both mourning and militancy, the objects articulate political outrage, deep grief, and sadness. The "offerings" act as sacred forms of doing justice to those who died.

This introductory essay presents the origins and aims of the special issue. It examines how objects marked by violence and loss acquire dimensions of sacrality and affect, and highlights the essential—often invisible—professional labors of care and conservation in sustaining historical memory.

Suitcases, and their smaller cousins, the briefcase, hold things. They are both object and container, possessing a range of physical properties and material connections. They are also inherently material in their demands for care and curation, creating challenges for institutions that hold them to make sense of violent and traumatic pasts.

An exploration of how Holocaust museums and archives confront and contextualize perpetrator materials, addressing the ethical challenges of exhibiting “disgraceful” objects, this essay examines curatorial and archival approaches to preservation, interpretation, and display, and reflects on how these materials shape public engagement, historical understanding, and moral responsibility.

This article presents four objects, all relating to the Treblinka death camp, that would have been worn on the bodies of Holocaust victims. Each one, however, illustrates differences in the journeys, uses, spatialities, and temporalities of proximity. These items give pause to reflect on how value and sacrality are affected when objects have been in extremely close physical contact with the (living or dead) human body, and how the context in which they are found may affect their perceived status.