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.

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.

Inner-city Sydney was the epicenter of gay life in the Southern hemisphere in the 1970s and early 1980s. Gay men moved from across Australasia to find liberation in the city's vibrant community networks; and when HIV and AIDS devastated those networks, they grieved, suffered, and survived in ways that have often been left out of the historical record. This book excavates the intimate lives and memories of HIV-positive gay men in Sydney, focusing on the critical years between 1982 and 1996, when HIV went from being a terrifying unidentified disease to a chronic condition that could be managed with antiretroviral medication. Using oral histories and archival research, Cheryl Ware offers a sensitive, moving exploration of how HIV-positive gay men navigated issues around disclosure, health, sex, grief, death, and survival. HIV Survivors in Sydney reveals how gay men dealt with the virus both within and outside of support networks, and how they remember these experiences nearly three decades later.

Oral testimony is one of the most valuable but challenging sources for the study of modern history, providing access to knowledge and experience unavailable to historians of earlier periods. In this groundbreaking collection, oral testimonies are used to explore themes relating to the construction of urban memories in European cities during the twentieth century. From the daily experiences of city life, to personal and communal responses to urban change and regeneration, to migration and the construction of ethnic identities, oral history is employed to enrich our understanding of urban history. It offers insights and perspectives that both enhance existing approaches and forces us to re-examine official histories based on more traditional sources of documentation. Moreover, it enables the historian to understand something of the nature of memory itself, and how people construct their own versions of the urban experience to try to make sense of the past. By using the full range of opportunities offered by oral history, as well as fully considering the related methodological issues of interpretation, this volume provides a fascinating insight into one of the least explored areas of urban history. As well as adding to our understanding of the European urban experience, it highlights the potential of this intersection of oral and urban history.

This book presents new perspectives on the multiplicity of voices in the histories of mental ill-health. In the thirty years since Roy Porter called on historians to lower their gaze so that they might better understand patient-doctor roles in the past, historians have sought to place the voices of previously silent, marginalised and disenfranchised individuals at the heart of their analyses. Today, the development of service-user groups and patient consultations have become an important feature of the debates and planning related to current approaches to prevention, care and treatment. This edited collection of interdisciplinary chapters offers new and innovative perspectives on mental health and illness in the past and covers a breadth of opinions, views, and interpretations from patients, practitioners, policy makers, family members and wider communities. Its chronology runs from the early modern period to the twenty-first century and includes international and transnational analyses from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of sources and methodologies including oral histories, material culture, and the built environment. Chapter 4 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Damon DiMarco's Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 (20th Anniversary Commemorative Edition), eternally preserves a monumental tragedy in American history through the voices of the people who were in New York City on that fateful day. At the same time, the individuals featured in the book speak to the myriad ways by which Americans rose to meet the challenges presented by 9/11, and celebrates the many heroes that are found within its pages. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, DiMarco's literary time capsule includes a wide variety of viewpoints, including: The small group of people who miraculously made it safely down from the 89th floor of Tower 1, the New York Times reporter who desperately fought her way through the fleeing crowds to get back into Lower Manhattan, the paramedic who set up a triage area 200 yards from the base of the Towers before they collapsed, and the bereaved citizens of New York City who struggled to get on with their lives in the days and months following the tragic event, among dozens of others. The original edition of Tower Stories was one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed books on 9/11 ever published, and for this 20th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, DiMarco has conducted additional interviews that offer a contemporary perspective on the 9/11 tragedy. The individuals DiMarco interviewed for the new edition include: * Alice Greenwald (President and CEO of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum) * Father Jim Martin (New York Times bestselling author) * Tom Haddad (survivor of the 89th floor, Tower 1) * Stephen Adly Guirgis (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright). The 20th Anniversary Commemorative Edition of DiMarco's moving oral history preserves all of the voices from the original edition for generations to come, while offering new insights that benefit from twenty years of reflection on the world-shattering event. The voices in Tower Stories are in turn haunting and heartbreaking, always emotional, yet ultimately heroic. It's no wonder that MSNBC called Tower Stories "Arguably the most successful attempt at capturing the enormity of the events of 9/11," while Publishers Weekly wrote that "DiMarco's contribution to the memory of that horrific day is enormous; the testimonies collected here form a one-of-a-kind account."

This collection of interviews explores how the Chinese Dream is fueling the aspirations of individuals in China today and presents 40 representative cases that showcase the journeys that ordinary people undertake in pursuit of their dreams as well as their extraordinary achievements. The authors identify autonomy, self-awareness, and hard work as the most fundamental driving forces in individuals taking control of their own lives and achieving their dreams, with family and social support as further important factors. Despite the vast differences in the interviewees' dreams and experiences in pursuing them, there is a common thread in their stories, namely the impact of major changes in the country on their lives. The future of individuals is closely linked to the future of the country: a bright future for the country means a good life for all. People's longing for a better life is the basis and a central element of the Chinese Dream, which is the dream of the nation and the dream of every citizen. This book will appeal to a wide audience, including ordinary people.

This book sheds new light on the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt, drawing on a remarkable set of oral histories gathered in the 1950s from those who knew him. Remembering Theodore Roosevelt presents fourteen intimate interviews with Roosevelt's friends, family, and contemporaries. Never before published, the transcripts reveal colorful details about the infamous Rough Riders, the political scene in New York City, the lives of his extended family, including the Hyde Park Roosevelts Franklin and Eleanor, and how the former president inspired successive generations. The book benefits from the author's discerning annotations and commentary that provide the reader with lesser-known facts and a full appreciation of the oral history project.

" Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941: High on the bridge of the USS West Virginia Sfc. Lee Ebner was looking forward to the end of his watch and a relaxed Sunday morning breakfast. But the two low-flying planes painted with rising sun insignia and bearing down on the ship had other plans for him and his fellow seamen. Ten hours later, at Clark Field in the Philippines, Pfc. Jack Reed felt the brunt of another Japanese air attack and within weeks found himself a part of the gruesome Bataan Death March that was to claim the lives of hundred of his comrades. On another continent, four years into the war, Capt. Benjamin Butler led his exhausted company up a steep, fog-shrouded Italian mountain toward a well entrenched German defensive position. The odds against their survival were appalling, though worse was to come in the months ahead. Such were the experiences of many young men-plucked from their local communities all across America, trained for war, and hurled into the strange reality of combat thousands of miles form home. In this stunning collection of World War II oral histories, Arthur Kelly recreates the experiences of twelve young men from Kentucky who survived the seemingly unsurvivable, whether in combat or as prisoners of war.

In the early 1950s fisherfolk and other villagers around Minamata Bay on the western coast of Kyushu, Japan, began to suffer from mysterious and often fatal symptoms of what came to be known as Minamata disease. It was not until 1968 that the government acknowledged its cause organic mercury poisoning from effluent released by Chisso Corporation, a chemical manufacturer and the largest employer in the Japanese city for which the disease was named. For decades the company denied responsibility and was joined by the Japanese government in its attempt to cover up the problem despite lawsuits and political protests. In this compelling oral history, Ogata Masato, fisherman and Minamata disease sufferer, tells of the devastation of methyl mercury poisoning. Spanning fifty years, his story describes the impact of industrial pollution on his own life, on his extended family, and on the fishing culture of the Shiranui Sea. A one-time leader of Minamata disease patients seeking certification and compensation, Masato breaks away to follow his personal path to redemption. Masato's story begins with the vibrant village of his childhood and culminates with the possibility of return, if not to one's birthplace, then to a spiritual community, to a consciousness that we owe our existence to the web of interrelationships that constitute life. When we turn full circle, explains Masato, we find ourselves again at the water's edge, a place where all life gathers. This is the launching point for "Tokoyo," boat of the Eternal World-a world defined at once by the past, present and future; a state of mind in which we are responsible not only for our own actions but for those of our society and our species. Masato's story, larger than any one man or one incident, raises questions we must all consider as beneficiaries of modern industry and technology.

Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation.
For this book, Raleigh has interviewed sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in provincial Saratov. Part of the generation that began school the year the country launched Sputnik into space, they grew up during the Cold War, but in a Soviet Union increasingly distanced from the excesses of Stalinism. In this post-Stalin era, the Soviet leadership dismantled the Gulag, ruled without terror, promoted consumerism, and began to open itself to an outside world still fearful of Communism. Raleigh is one of the first scholars of post-1945 Soviet history to draw extensively on oral history, a particularly useful approach in studying a country where the boundaries between public and private life remained porous and the state sought to peer into every corner of people's lives. During and after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian citizens began openly talking about their past, trying to make sense of it, and Raleigh has made the most of this new forthrightness. He has created an extraordinarily rich composite narrative and embedded it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, "overtaking" America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization.
Including rare photographs of daily life in Cold War Russia, Soviet Baby Boomers offers an intimate portrait of a generation that has remained largely faceless until now.

Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union are a peculiarity in the Jewish world. After decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a strong sense of Jewish identity-but one that was almost completely divorced from Judaism. Today, more than ten percent of Jews speak or understand Russian, signaling the importance of an ever-vexing question: why are Russian Jews the way they are? In pursuit of an answer, Anna Shternshis's groundbreaking When Sonia Met Boris draws on nearly 500 oral history interviews on the Soviet Jewish experience with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s. Soviet Jews lived through tumultuous times: the Great Terror, World War II, the anti-Semitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best as they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Shternshis unearths heartbreaking, deeply poignant, and often funny stories of the everyday choices Jews were forced to make as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Shternshis reveals how ethnicity rapidly transformed into a disability, as well as a negative characteristic, for Soviet Jews in the postwar period. That sense of Jewish identity has persisted well into the twenty-first century, influencing the children and grandchildren of Shternshis's subjects, the foundational generation of contemporary Russian Jewish culture. An illuminating work of social and cultural history, When Sonia Met Boris traces the fascinating contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to their very roots.

THE BOOK: "Recollections of an Argyllshire Drover" & Other West Highland Chronicles Eric Cregeen's groundbreaking research into the Argyll Estate Papers and into the oral tradition of the Scottish West Highlands are at the heart of this collection. During his appointment at the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies, Cregeen tape-recorded tradition bearers in both Gaelic and English, gathering information that is today priceless, such as the descriptions of the last Argyll drover. He was a founding member of the Scottish Oral History movement, but his tragically early death in 1983 robbed Scotland of a great scholar, social historian and folklorist and of other proposed books. This collection, selected and edited by Dr Margaret Bennett, will be welcomed by a wide range of readers, especially those who share Cregeen's enthusiasm for 'approaching the history of the Highlands with a mind alert to the claims of oral tradition.' The book begins with a masterful introductory essay by the editor and also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Cregeen's work. This edition brings invaluable and beautifully written material to a new generation keen to reconnect with Scotland's Highland history and tradition.

This book looks beyond the Aylesbury's public face by examining its rise and fall from the perspective of those who knew it, based largely on the oral testimony and memoir of residents and former residents, youth and community workers, borough Councillors, officials, police officers and architects. What emerges is not a simple story of definitive failures, but one of texture and complexity, struggle and accord, family and friends, and of rapidly changing circumstances. The study spans the years 1967 to 2010 - from the estate's ambitious inception until the first of its blocks were pulled down. It is a period rarely dealt with by historians of council housing, who have typically confined themselves to the years before or after the 1979 watershed. As such, it demonstrates how shifts in housing policy, and broader political, economic and social developments, came to bear on a working-class community - for good and, more especially, for ill.

This book delves into the history of the Horn of Africa diaspora in Italy and Europe through the stories of those who fled to Italy from East African states. It draws on oral history research carried out by the BABE project (Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memories in Europe and Beyond) in a host of cities across Italy that explored topics including migration journeys, the memory of colonialism in the Horn of Africa, cultural identity in Italy and Europe, and Mediterranean crossings. This book shows how the cultural memory of interviewees is deeply linked to an intersubjective context that is changing Italian and European identities. The collected narratives reveal the existence of another Italy - and another Europe - through stories that cross national and European borders and unfold in transnational and global networks. They tell of the multiple identities of the diaspora and reconsider the geography of the continent, in terms of experiences, emotions, and close relationships, and help reinterpret the history and legacy of Italian colonialism.

Folktales of Mizoram is a translated collection of sixty-six short stories from northeast India taken up for a critical evaluation. The stories depict a typical Mizo culture in spirit and practice. This study focuses on the transformation of oral literature into written narratives. Folk practices, folk medicine, folk narratives, traditional songs, and received wisdom dominate these stories. A more insightful approach into folk narratives and songs emphasizes the world of new hermeneutics. The land, the culture, the language, the traditions have been remarkably explored through an elegant reading and evaluation of this collection. Antiquity speaks through the folk tales. The spirit of folktales becomes one of unique exploration of hermeneutics in the end.

Oral history is increasingly acknowledged as a key tool for anyone studying the history of the recent past, and Oral History Theory provides a comprehensive, systematic and accessible overview of this important field. Combining the study of theories drawn from disciplines ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis with the observations of practitioners and including extensive examples of oral history practice from around the world, this book constitutes the first integrated discussion of oral history theory. Structured around key themes such as the peculiarities of oral history, the study of the self, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, memory, narrative, performance, power and trauma, each chapter provides a clear and user-friendly explanation of the various theoretical approaches, illustrating these with examples from the rich field of published oral history and making suggestions for the practicing oral historian. This second edition includes a new chapter on trauma and ethics, a preface discussing new developments in the field and updated glossary and further reading sections. Supplemented by a new companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/abrams) containing a comprehensive range of case studies, audio material and further resources, this book will be invaluable to experienced and novice oral historians, professionals, and students who are new to the discipline.

This book provides an oral history of women who served in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War. It follows the trajectory of eight women's lives from their decision to become nurses, to surgical and evacuation hospitals in Vietnam, and then home to face the consequences of war on their personal and professional lives. It documents their lived experience in Vietnam and explores the memories and personal stories of nurses who treated injured American soldiers, Vietnamese civilians, and the enemy. Their voices reveal the physical and emotional challenges, trauma, contradictions, and lingering effects of war on their lives. Women in the U.S. Army in Vietnam feared the enemy but also sexual violence and harassment: the experiences this book documents also shed light on the extent of historical sexual abuse in the military.

Series Information:
Garland Studies in Medieval Literature

Disasters in Australia and New Zealand brings together a collection of essays on the history of disasters in both countries. Leading experts provide a timely interrogation of long-held assumptions about the impacts of bushfires, floods, cyclones and earthquakes, exploring the blurred line between nature and culture, asking what are the anthropogenic causes of 'natural' disasters? How have disasters been remembered or forgotten? And how have societies over generations responded to or understood disaster? As climate change escalates disaster risk in Australia, New Zealand and around the world, these questions have assumed greater urgency. This unique collection poses a challenge to learn from past experiences and to implement behavioural and policy change. Rich in oral history and archival research, Disasters in Australia and New Zealand offers practical and illuminating insights that will appeal to historians and disaster scholars across multiple disciplines.

In this remarkable collection of 52 oral histories, first published in 1971, members of Dakota, Lakota, Winnebago, Crow, and other communities tell of their personal experiences: reservation life, the Great Depression of the 1930s, self-government, traditions, and life in the 1960s. Together these voices present a rich and complicated view of what it is to be an American Indian. """" ""To Be an Indian"'s""power flows from the actual recorded voices. The book is an outstanding adjunct to classes taught about oral history." -- Leonard Bruguier, director, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota "What is striking about the interviews is the clear and crisp point of view that each presents, underscoring the obvious fact that to be an Indian is to be an individual. . . . Highly recommended." -- "South Dakota History" "The reader will discover a wealth of information that will show the diversity of thought, the values and many of the problems and changes present in the Indian communities." -- "Nebraska History" "An interesting and very readable historical document of Native American cultural pluralism." -- "European Review of Native American Studies " "A fine contribution to any collection of oral narratives of the Native peoples of North America." -- "Journal of the West"

Here are the voices of London - rich and poor, native and immigrant, women and men - witnessed by Craig Taylor, an acclaimed journalist, playwright and writer, who spent five years exploring the city and listening to its residents. From the woman whose voice announces the stations on the London Underground to the man who plants the trees along Oxford Street; from a Pakistani currency trader to a Guardsman at Buckingham Palace - together, these voices and many more, paint a vivid, epic and wholly fresh portrait of Twenty-First Century London.

Based on interviews with former police officers, this book addresses two main issues. Firstly, the question of how the police themselves viewed the priorities of the job and what they considered their role to be. This is the first study to consider this question and its implications for the style and content of police work. Secondly, it challenges the view of the prewar period as a "Golden Age", and shows that policing from the 1930s to the 1960s was not as unproblematic as has often been assumed. Police violence and the fabrication of evidence were more prevalent than the cosy image of the British TV series Dixon of Dock Green would have us believe. The fact that this image often went unchallenged has much to do with prevailing concepts of masculinity and with the greater moral certitude of the police within a more stable and stratified society.