Monday, June 20, 2016

Conference Overview


“How do we pass down peace lessons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the next generation?”

The effort to organize “Technologies of Peace,” a U.S.-Japan youth peace conference, started with this simple question. This September, “Technologies of Peace” will bring together high school students from Boston, New York and Tokyo to learn about the legacies of the Pacific War (1941-1945) through a new learning tool: Digital history archives.

Using smartphones and tablets, the students will explore Hiroshima and Nagasaki Archives, which allow people to access pictures of city landscapes from before and after the atomic bombings, detailed survivors’ accounts and their photos and other historical data with a click of the mouse through interactive city maps. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Archives are a nonpartisan citizen project aimed to make historical data and survivors’ stories accessible and relatable to future generations around the world. “Technologies of Peace” is designed as an opportunity for American and Japanese students to take part in the “memory community” and start a dialogue about how to build a more peaceful world.  


The conference will feature talks by atomic bomb survivors. By the end of the conference, the students will have developed a plan for using the digital archives for peace studies. They will also learn digital mapping skills so they can create memory communities for their own “digital humanities” projects.

Conference venues:
  • Sept. 16, UN headquarters, New York City 
  • Sept. 18, Science Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 
  • Sept. 19, Boston Public Library, Boston (Public event)
Participating schools:
  • Stuyvesant High School (New York)
  • Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School (Sudbury, Mass.)
  • Boston Latin Academy (Boston)
  • Boston Latin School (Boston)
  • Noble and Greenough School (Dedham​, ​Mass.)