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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Oral history
Memories of the German presence in the central Volta Region of Ghana are deep and vivid. This ethnically diverse area was part of the German Togoland colony from roughly 1884 to 1914 but German-speaking missionaries established stations earlier in the mid-nineteenth century. Ghanaian oral historians describe the violence, burdens, and inconveniences they associate with German rule, yet place greater emphasis on the introductions by German missionaries of Christianity and western education and the prevalence of what they say was the "honesty," "order," and "discipline" of the German colonial period. Remembering the Germans in Ghana examines this oral history, scrutinizes its sources and presentation, contextualizes it historically, and uses it to make larger arguments about memory and identity in Ghana. It also presents the case for more deliberate and extensive use of oral history in reconstructing the African colonial past and provides a methodology for its collection and analysis.
This practical but inspiring book considers what local history is, why researching it is valuable and rewarding, and how we should go about it. Issues addressed include: getting oral and documentary evidence; keeping records; the nature of data, information and knowledge; and their use to create the different products of local history research. Michael Williams is both a professional scientist and a local historian of long standing, and he uses both sides of his experience in a text that is at once rigorous about the historical process, and also a fascinating - and often moving - account of his adventures into the past of his own family and community. He demonstrates local history methodology through his research into ancestry, migration, work, war and religion in the towns and villages of England and Wales. It is richly illustrated throughout.
The use of contemporary oral history to improve public policies and programs is a growing, transdisciplinary practice. Indispensable for students and practitioners, Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs is the first book to define the practice, explain how policy-makers use it, show how it relates to other types of oral history, and provide guidance on the ethics and legalities involved. Packed with case studies from disciplines as diverse as medicine, agriculture, and race relations, as well as many examples from the author's own work, this book provides an essential overview of the current state of the field within oral history for public policy and a complete methodology for the process of designing and implementing an oral history project. The comprehensive How To section demonstrates how to use the practice to advance the reader's career, their chosen discipline and the public interest, whether their field is in oral history or in public policy. This book is an important resource for oral historians, fledgling or experienced, who are keen to find new applications and funding for their work, as well as for professionals in the public and not-for-profit sectors who want to learn to use oral history to improve their own policies and programs.
Practicing Critical Oral History: Connecting School and Community provides ways and words for educators to use critical oral history in their classroom and communities in order to put their students and the voices of people from marginalized communities at the center of their curriculum to enact change. Clearly and concisely written, this book offers a thought-provoking overview of how to use stories from those who have been underrepresented by dominant systems to identify a critical topic, engage with critical processes, and enact critical transformative-justice outcomes. Critical oral history both writes and rights history, so that participants-both interviewers and narrators-in critical oral history projects aim to contextualize stories and make the voices and perspectives of those who have been historically marginalized heard and listened to. Supplemented throughout with sample activities, lesson-plan outlines, tables, and illustrative figures, Practicing Critical Oral History: Connecting School and Community is an essential resource for all those interested in integrating the techniques of critical oral history into an educational setting.
The rapid rise in the study of Oral History has been evident across a wide range of academic and community settings. From surgeons in England investigating the embodied memories of half-remembered techniques in no longer practiced operations, to truth and reconciliation projects in countries recovering from civil conflict, including in South Africa, Oral History is as diverse and widespread in practice as it is in application. This four-volume collection of cutting edge and canonical research will be of interest to students and scholars alike.
This book is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with Partition survivors from west Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, in Delhi and its surroundings between 2017–18. It locates the global rise of far-right nationalism within globalisation and memories of victimhood. Focussing on Hindu nationalism in India, this book is an important and timely contribution to the literature on South Asian Partition Studies that shows how tragedy begets tragedy. It tries to answer an urgent, provocative but nevertheless necessary question: 'What does it mean to remember the Partition in the time of fascism?' The author shows what makes up cycles of violence by connecting the reinscription of trauma in Partition memories to the self-serving justifications of the contemporary violence of Hindu nationalism. It analyses how the hegemony of Hindu nationalism has structured the narratives of Hindu Partition survivors and recruited them in service of a putative Hindu nation.
First published in 1998. The following monograph is a revised and updated study which developed as a result of three experiences of the author: an advanced tutorial in Old English, a Fulbright year in Iceland, and a year teaching Old Icelandic. It is intended as a contribution to the ongoing revision of oral theory.
It has been half a century since the last book that addressed how historical societies can utilize oral history. In this brief, practical guide, internationally known oral historian Barbara W. Sommer applies the best practices of contemporary oral historians to the projects that historical organizations of all sizes and sorts might develop. The book -covers project personnel options, funding options, legal and ethical issues, interviewing techniques, and cataloging guidelines;-identifies helpful steps for historical societies when developing and doing oral history projects;-includes a dozen model case studies;-provides additional resources, templates, forms, and bibliography for the reader.
What is re-enactment and how does it relate to heritage? Re-enactments are a ubiquitous part of popular and memory culture and are of growing importance to heritage studies. As concept and practice, re-enactments encompass a wide range of forms: from the annual 'Viking Moot' festival in Denmark drawing thousands of participants and spectators, to the (re)staged war photography of An-My Le, to the Titanic Memorial Cruise commemorating the centennial of the ill-fated voyage, to the symbolic retracing of the Berlin Wall across the city on 9 November 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of its toppling. Re-enactments involve the sensuousness of bodily experience and engagement, the exhilarating yet precarious combination of imagination with 'historical fact', in-the-moment negotiations between and within temporalities, and the compelling drive to re-make, or re-presence, the past. As such, re-enactments present a number of challenges to traditional understandings of heritage, including taken-for-granted assumptions regarding fixity, conservation, originality, ownership and authenticity. Using a variety of international, cross-disciplinary case studies, this volume explores re-enactment as practice, problem, and/or potential, in order to widen the scope of heritage thinking and analysis toward impermanence, performance, flux, innovation and creativity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.
In addition to the problem of language, conducting oral histories with immigrant narrators often requires special considerations: past violence, cultural sensitivity, and lack of trust. Yet, these narrators are often witnesses to, or participants in, important historical events, or can describe otherwise-undocumented social phenomena. The first book to focus specifically on oral history practices with immigrant narrators, it -gives both the novice and experienced oral historian insights into their narrators' needs;-provides the tools to effectively plan and execute an oral history project in an immigrant community;-includes case studies, additional resources, and templates of important oral history processes.
Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone. For too long, Africa’s history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight. In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history – from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story. The result is a gripping new account of Africa: an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.
When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: oh Pium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire's financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself. Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Amitav Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
In August 1961, 22-year-old Valerie Storie and 36-year-old Michael Gregsten were the victims of James Hanratty in the notorious 'A6 Murder'. After a five-hour ordeal, ending in a layby on the A6 in Bedfordshire, Michael was shot dead and Valerie was raped, shot and left for dead. She survived, but was paralysed and remained in a wheelchair until her death in 2016. In 1962, Hanratty became one of the last men in the UK to be hanged, unleashing forty years of fierce and passionate debate, as many were convinced of his innocence, until 2002 when DNA evidence proved that he was indeed guilty. Valerie, however, was never in any doubt, and picked out Hanratty in an identity parade. She always intended to write a book, and over the years had secretly drafted its contents and written hundreds of notes. Yet for over thirty-five years she gave no interviews, despite persistent media pressure to do so. The Long Silence is, in essence, Valerie's posthumous autobiography, explaining for the first time every explicit detail of the 'cat and mouse' drive, as Michael and Valerie tried on over twenty occasions to deter and thwart the apparently indecisive Hanratty.
For Kennedy devotees, as well as readers unfamiliar with the "lion of the Senate", this book presents the compelling story of Edward Kennedy's unexpected rise to become one of the most consequential legislators in American history and a passionate defender of progressive values, achieving legislative compromises across the partisan divide. What distinguishes Edward Kennedy: An Oral History is the nuanced detail that emerges from the senator's never-before published, complete descriptions of his life and work, placed alongside the observations of his friends, family, and associates. The senator's twenty released interviews reveal, in his own voice, the stories of Kennedy triumph and tragedy-from the Oval Office to the waters of Chappaquiddick. Spanning the presidencies of JFK to Barack Obama, Edward Kennedy was an iconic player in American political life, the youngest sibling of America's most powerful dynasty; he candidly addresses this role: his legislative accomplishments and failures, his unsuccessful run for the White House, his impact on the Supreme Court, his observations on Washington gridlock, and his personal faults. The interviews and introductions to them create an unsurpassed and illuminating volume. Gathered as part of the massive Edward Kennedy Oral History Project, conducted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center, the senator's interviews allow readers to see how oral history can evolve over a three-year period, drawing out additional details as the interviewee becomes increasingly comfortable with the process and the interviewer. Yet, given the Kennedys' well-known penchant for image creation, what the senator doesn't say or how he says what he chooses to include, is often more revealing than a simple declarative statement.
Practicing Oral History among Refugees and Host Communities provides a comprehensive and practical guide to applied oral history with refugees, teaching the reader how to use applied, contemporary oral history to help provide solutions to the 'mega-problem' that is the worldwide refugee crisis. The book surveys the history of the practice and explains its successful applications in fields from journalism, law and psychiatry to technology, the prevention of terrorism and the design of public services. It defines applied oral history with refugees as a field, teaching rigorous, accessible methodologies for doing it, as well as outlining the importance of doing the same work with host communities. The book examines important legal and ethical parameters around this complex, sensitive field, and highlights the cost-effective, sustainable benefits that are being drawn from this work at all levels. It outlines the sociopolitical and theoretical frameworks around such oral histories, and the benefits for practitioners' future careers. Both in scope and approach, it thoroughly equips readers for doing their own oral history projects with refugees or host communities, wherever they are. Using innovative case studies from seven continents and from the author's own work, this manual is the ideal guide for oral historians and those working with refugees or host communities.
This book is about how Australians have responded to stories about suffering and injustice in Australia, presented in a range of public media, including literature, history, films, and television. Those who have responded are both ordinary and prominent Australians--politicians, writers, and scholars. All have sought to come to terms with Australia's history by responding empathetically to stories of its marginalized citizens. Drawing upon international scholarship on collective memory, public history, testimony, and witnessing, this book represents a cultural history of contemporary Australia. It examines the forms of witnessing that dominated Australian public culture at the turn of the millennium. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in Australia in response to the increasingly audible voices of indigenous peoples, migrants, and more recently, asylum seekers. As these voices became public, they posed a challenge not only to scholars and politicians, but also, most importantly, to ordinary citizens. When former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his historic apology to Australia's indigenous peoples in February 2008, he performed an act of collective witnessing that affirmed the testimony and experiences of Aboriginal Australians. The phenomenon of witnessing became crucial, not only to the recognition and reparation of past injustices, but to efforts to create a more cosmopolitan Australia in the present. This is a vital addition to Transaction's critically acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.
Company towns are often portrayed as powerless communities, fundamentally dependent on the outside influence of global capital. Neil White challenges this interpretation by exploring how these communities were altered at the local level through human agency, missteps, and chance. Far from being homogeneous, these company towns are shown to be unique communities with equally unique histories.Company Towns provides a multi-layered, international comparison between the development of two settlements--the mining community of Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, and the mill town of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. White pinpoints crucial differences between the towns' experiences by contrasting each region's histories from various perspectives--business, urban, labour, civic, and socio-cultural. Company Towns also makes use of a sizable collection of previously neglected oral history sources and town records, providing an illuminating portrait of divergence that defies efforts to impose structure on the company town phenomenon.
This book consists of essays on methodological issues by Africana (African and African American) women scholars who have successfully employed oral narrative methods in their research. Some themes covered in these essays are the strengths of oral narrative research for expanding and transforming knowledge about black women and how these scholars learned to conduct oral narrative research; descriptions of the types of narratives they have gathered, the difficulties they have encountered and how these were overcome; and the ethical dilemmas faced while undertaking their research endeavors. What makes this book a valuable teaching tool are the pedagogical suggestions and research artifacts contained within. Contributors have described one or two activities that may assist instructorAEs efforts to teach oral narrative methodologies. Methodological essays about the phenomenological and empirical aspects of carrying out oral narrative research from an Afrafeminist/womanist standpoint are rare and book-length works are almost nonexistent. Oral Narrative Research with black women participates in the growing movement of Afrafeminist/womanist scholarship that fills this void. This is an insightful, thought-provoking resource for researchers, students, and scholars interested in conducting qualitative research or who want to include black women in their research.
Women make up the vast majority of Protestant Christians in China-a largely faceless majority, as their stories too often go untold in scholarly research as well as popular media. This book writes Protestant Chinese women into the history of twenty-first-century China. It features the oral histories of over a dozen women, highlighting themes of spiritual transformation, politicized culture, social mobility, urbanization, and family life. Each subject narrates not only her own story, but that of her mother, as well, revealing a deeply personal dimension to the dramatic social change that has occurred in a matter of decades. By uncovering the stories of Christian women in China, Li Ma offers a unique window onto the interactions between femininity and Christianity, and onto the socioeconomic upheavals that mark recent Chinese history.
Fran Leeper Buss, a former welfare recipient who earned a PhD in history and became a pioneer in the field of oral history, has for forty years dedicated herself to the goal of collecting the stories of marginal and working-class U.S. women. Memory, Meaning, and Resistance is based on over 100 oral histories gathered from women from a variety of racial, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds, including a traditionalMexican American midwife, a Latina poet and organizer for the United Farm Workers, and an African American union and freedom movement organizer. Buss now analyzes this body of work, identifying common themes in women's lives and resistance that unite the oral histories she has gathered. From the beginning, her work has shed light on the inseparable, compounding effects of gender, race, ethnicity, and class on women's lives-what is now commonly called intersectionality. Memory, Meaning, and Resistance is structured thematically, with each chapter analyzing a concept that runs through the oral histories, e.g., agency, activism, religion. The result is a testament to women's individual and collective strength, and an invaluable guide for students and researchers, on how to effectively and sensitively conduct oral histories that observe, record, recount, and analyze women's life stories.
The prize was great -- not just land, but the riches it held, in the form of diamonds and gold. What became a country called South Africa was, until 1910, a vast and untamed land where great fortunes could be made (and lost); where great battles were fought (and lost); and where great men had their reputations forged, or dashed, or sometimes both. Martin Meredith's follow-up to his magisterial The State of Africais an equally epic new history of the making of South Africa. Covering the extraordinarily eventful four decades leading up to the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, it covers some of the most iconic tales of imperial history. The Zulus at Rorke's Drift; the Jameson Raid; the diamond and gold rushes at Kimberley and Witwatersrand; the Boer wars; the titanic struggle between the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his Boer rival, Paul Kruger -- DIAMONDS, GOLD AND WARbrings all of these and more together in a stunningly coherent and compelling narrative. History, somehow, just isn't as colourful any more.
John Haywood presents a grand sweep of global history in an immediately accessible format via concise, insightful and engaging text summaries alongside timelines, maps and illustrations. There are 50 sections, each dealing with significant moments in the human story from the origins of our first ancestors right up to the present day. A short essay introduces and summarizes the most important political and cultural landmarks with a clear timeline then presenting events in four categories: Politics & Economy, Religion & Philosophy, Science & Technology and Arts & Architecture. Maps revealing the changes in our physical world at key junctures in human history as well as galleries of images illustrating the rich and diverse products of our cultural heritage, offer a visual path through time. From this the reader is able to access a whole new understanding of contemporary events across the globe, making unexpected and surprising links and connections across history. Who knew, for example, that at the same time the Bayeux Tapestry was being completed in Europe, Chinese scientist Shen Kuo was correctly explaining the origin of fossils and Ghana was being conquered by the Almoravids? That as Peter the Great was modernizing Russia, La Salle was exploring the length of the Mississippi River and Christopher Wren was finishing St Paul's Cathedral in London? This original and authoritative book offers a whole new way of appreciating the diverse array of events that have shaped world history. |
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