One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps

For over a century, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. Andrea Pitzer traces the chronological and geopolitical history of these camps, beginning with 1890s Cuba and extending across four continents. She documents camps in the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century, the Soviet Gulag, and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War. Governments have employed camp systems as tools for civilian relocation and political repression, often justifying them as protective measures. Instead, these camps have functioned as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed millions of lives. Based on archival records and interviews conducted during extensive travel, Pitzer examines the roots of this phenomenon, exploring survivors' accounts, historical scholarship, and the human experiences within camp systems across the past century.