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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Oral history
Much has been written about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but one story remains untold: that of the grassroots activism that maintained local communities in the face of violence. This book speaks through the voices of the activists themselves, drawn from both sides of a divided society. It records their memories of community organising and work on social issues, as well as their insights into surviving the politics of the period and contributing to peacebuilding. Providing a vivid account of how politics touched people's lives, the book celebrates the energy, imagination and determination of community activism. It also examines the challenges faced by policymakers struggling to make sense of conflicting community narratives and official government positions. There are vital lessons here for organisers, activists and policymakers working in any contested society, particularly those operating at the interface between social need and peacebuilding. Informed by an oral history approach, this book argues that conflict transformation is possible and that community activism has a major contribution to make in creating alternatives to violence.
Britain and the world were shocked in October 1966 by live television pictures coming from a small mining village in Wales. They showed a human tragedy unfolding after thousands of tons of coal waste fell from a mountainside onto its primary school and surrounding houses. The majority of the 144 people killed were children under 12. After more than 50 years the survivors of that disaster -- among the worst in Britain's peacetime history -- still live with painful memories and all-too-real after effects. In this first ever oral history of the tragedy, people who were there tell their stories, some speaking publicly for the first time. Built around 27 extensive interviews, Surviving Aberfan is a story of official neglect and betrayal, horror and great sadness. But it also demonstrates how courage, hope and effort can rebuild a devastated community and move forward.
The Life of Ten Bears is a remarkable collection of nineteenth-century Comanche oral histories given by Francis Joseph "Joe A" Attocknie. Although various elements of Ten Bears's life (ca. 1790-1872) are widely known, including several versions of how the toddler Ten Bears survived the massacre of his family, other parts have not been as widely publicized, remaining instead in the collective memory of his descendants. Other narratives in this collection reference lesser-known family members. These narratives are about the historical episodes that Attocknie's family thought were worth remembering and add a unique perspective on Comanche society and tradition as experienced through several generations of his family. Kavanagh's introduction adds context to the personal narratives by discussing the process of transmission. These narratives serve multiple purposes for Comanche families and communities. Some autobiographical accounts, "recounting" brave deeds and war honors, function as validation of status claims, while others illustrate the giving of names; still others recall humorous situations, song-ridicules, slapstick, and tragedies. Such family oral histories quickly transcend specific people and events by restoring key voices to the larger historical narrative of the American West.
The Vietnam War has had many long-reaching, traumatic effects, not just on the veterans of the war, but on their children as well. In this book, Weber examines the concept of the war as a social monad, a confusing array of personal stories and public histories that disrupt traditional ways of knowing the social world for the second generation.
This collection presents diverse scholarly approaches to oral narratives in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds. Eleven essays, originally written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, coalesce around major themes that have long concerned oral historians and social scientists: collective memories of conflictive national pasts, subjectivity in re/framing social identities, and visual and performative re/presentations of identity and public memory.
Based on archival sources and oral history, this book reconstructs a border-building process in Namibia that spanned more than sixty years. The process commenced with the establishment of a temporary veterinary defence line against rinderpest by the German colonial authorities in the late nineteenth century and ended with the construction of a continuous two-metre-high fence by the South African colonial government sixty years later. This 1250-kilometre fence divides northern from central Namibia even today. The book combines a macro and a micro-perspective and differentiates between cartographic and physical reality. The analysis explores both the colonial state's agency with regard to veterinary and settlement policies and the strategies of Africans and Europeans living close to the border. The analysis also includes the varying perceptions of individuals and populations who lived further north and south of the border and describes their experiences crossing the border as migrant workers, African traders, European settlers and colonial officials. The Red Line's history is understood as a gradual process of segregating livestock and people, and of constructing dichotomies of modern and traditional, healthy and sick, European and African.
Discover a powerful collection of the hardships, hairbreadth escapes, and mortal struggles of enslaved people seeking freedom: These are the true stories of the Underground Railroad. A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of over 30,000 slave 'passengers' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network. Abridged from William Still's The Underground Railroad Records - an epic historical document that chronicles the first-hand stories of American slaves who escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad - Passengers tells of the secret methods, risks and covert sacrifices that were made to liberate so many from slavery. From tales of men murdered in cold blood for their part in helping assist runaways and terrifyingly tense descriptions of stowaways and dramatic escape plans, to stories of families reunited and the moments of absurdity that the Underground Railroad forced its 'passengers' to sometimes endure, Still's narratives testify to the humanity of this vast enterprise.
The Vietnam War has had many long-reaching, traumatic effects, not just on the veterans of the war, but on their children as well. In this book, Weber examines the concept of the war as a social monad, a confusing array of personal stories and public histories that disrupt traditional ways of knowing the social world for the second generation.
Fishing Talk: The Language of a Lost Industry is the outcome of a lifetime's research by Lowestoft author David Butcher. Over the years he has recorded many hours of interviews with the fishermen of the east coast of the British Isles and has compiled their stories and accounts of their working lives into several books. For this title, he explains the words and phrases they use in their accounts, some to be found in the common parlance, some only found in use on the working boats of the fishing industry. The sea-going men - and women who handled the catches, kept the homes together and frequently looked after the business aspect of the fishing life - gladly contributed their recollections. The mid and deep sea fisheries of East Anglia have passed into history but this publication preserves their vocabulary.
Exploring the developments that have occurred in the practice of oral history since digital audio and video became viable, this book explores various groundbreaking projects in the history of digital oral history, distilling the insights of pioneers in the field and applying them to the constantly changing electronic landscape of today.
Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.
Condemned as a fascist putsch in the East and praised as a 'people's uprising' in the West, the uprising of 17 June 1953 shook East Germany. Drawing on interviews and archive research, this book examines East German citizens' memories of the unrest and reflects on the nature of state power in the GDR.
Times New Romanian provides a picture of Romania today through the individual first-person narratives of people who chose to go and make a life in this country. Each chapter a voice, each story in Times New Romanian provides readers with a look into the Romanian world - the way things work, the vitality of the people, the living heritage of rural traditions, ordinary life - sometimes dark, sometimes sublime, always interesting. In a land full of character and contradiction, there is a strong attraction for those with the spirit to meet the challenges, where the one thing you can be sure of is the unpredictable. Life is not always easy. These stories will tell you why... If you want to know more about Romanians and their country, the voices in Times New Romanian make for an enjoyable and lively read. Inspired by Studs Terkel and Tony Parker, Nigel used their oral history style and his own experience in Romania to guide him in recording these interviews.
The Vietnam War was a defining event for a generation of
Americans. But for years, misguided cliches about its veterans have
proliferated. Philip F. Napoli's "Bringing It All Back Home" strips
away the myths and reveals the complex individuals who served in
Southeast Asia. Napoli helped to create Tom Brokaw's The Greatest
Generation, and in the spirit of that enterprise, his oral
histories recast our understanding of a war and its legacy.
Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.
Most discussions of oral history method are rooted in abstract ideas about what interviewing should be and should achieve. However, interviews are ultimately personal interactions between human beings, and as such they rarely conform to a methodological ideal. Nonetheless, oral history's complex, capricious nature is rarely addressed by its practitioners when they share their work with the world. The struggles and negotiations interviewers face while conducting interviews - ethical, political, personal - either go unacknowledged or are discussed only with trusted colleagues in informal settings. This groundbreaking collection shows that a full account of oral history methodology must include honest and rigorous analyses of actual practice, allowing us to embrace the uncertainties and remarkable opportunities that define a human-centered methodology. Here, fourteen practitioners draw connections between vastly different areas of study, including Holocaust memories, work with Aboriginal communities, Islamic studies, immigration, and conflict studies. All are united by the shared experience of encountering complex individuals with messy, difficult, and ultimately illuminating stories to tell.
Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This book makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence-or ignored altogether. Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab's human rights movement: Baljit Kaur, who armed herself with a video camera to record essential evidence of the conflict; Justice Ajit Singh Bains, who became a beloved "people's judge"; and Inderjit Singh Jaijee, who returned to Punjab to document abuses even as other elites were fleeing. Together, they are credited with saving countless lives. Braiding oral histories, personal snapshots, and primary documents recovered from at-risk archives, Kaur shows that when entire conflicts are marginalized, we miss essential stories: stories of faith, feminist action, and the power of citizen-activists.
Elderly Southeast Asians experienced great changes in their lives - of war and violence, of the imposition of the nation-state, of economic development - and remember them in different ways. Their oral histories may bear the influence of state-sanctioned narratives, attempt to speak truth to power or reconcile individual and official memories. By taking an inter-disciplinary approach, "Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments" considers the relationship of these fragments of memory to dominant accounts; it unravels the complex ways through which people remember and make sense of their pasts.
This book introduces lexomics, the use of computer-aided statistical analysis of vocabulary, to measure influence and integrate research from cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology with traditional, philological approaches to literature. Connecting the theory of tradition with the phenomenon of influence, Drout moves beyond current theories.
Because oral history interviews are personal interactions between human beings, they rarely conform to a methodological ideal. These reflections from oral historians provide honest and rigorous analyses of actual oral history practice that address the complexities of a human-centered methodology.
Virgil Richardson blazed his own unique trail through the twentieth century: a co-founder of Harlem's American Negro Theater, 1930s radio personality, World War II pilot, and expatriate for most of his life. In Flight, this remarkable man tells his story in his own vivid words. Educated in Texas, Richardson set out for New York City in 1938 to build a career on the stage. Just when he was on the brink of success as an actor, World War II broke out and he was drafted into the army. After overcoming numerous obstacles, Richardson became a Tuskegee cadet in 1943, and later saw action flying over the battlefields of Europe. Upon returning to the racially divided U.S., he decided to move to Mexico, where he encountered a society quite different from the one he had left behind. Compellingly told and historically fascinating, this is the story of a determined individual unwilling to accept the limited options of Jim Crow America.
Of the 400,000 German-speaking Jews that escaped the Third Reich, about 16,000 ended up in Shanghai, China. This groundbreaking volume gathers 20 years of interviews with over 100 former Shanghai refugees. It offers a moving collective portrait of courage, culture shock, persistence, and enduring hope in the face of unimaginable hardships.
The nineteenth-century ""cult of curability"" engendered the optimistic belief that mental illness could be cured under ideal conditions-removal from the stresses of everyday life to asylum, a pleasant, well-regulated environment where healthy meals, daily exercise, and social contact were the norm. This utopian view led to the reform and establishment of lunatic asylums throughout the United States. The Texas State Lunatic Asylum (later called the Austin State Hospital) followed national trends, and its history documents national mental health practices in microcosm.Drawing on diverse sources-patient records from the nineteenth century, papers and reports of the institution's various superintendents, transcripts of interviews of former employees, newspaper accounts, personal memoirs, and interviews-Sarah C. Sitton has recreated what life in ""our little town"" was like from the institution's opening in 1861 to its de-institutionalization in the 1980s and 1990s.For more than a century, the asylum community resembled a self-sufficient village complete with its own blacksmith shop, icehouse, movie theater, brass band, baseball team, and undertakers. Beautifully landscaped grounds and gravel lanes attracted locals for Sunday carriage drives. Patients tended livestock, tilled gardens, helped prepare meals, and cleaned wards. Their routines might include weekly dances and religious services, as well as cold tubs, paraldehyde, and electroshock. Employees, from the superintendent on down, lived on the grounds, and their children grew up ""with inmates for playmates."" While the superintendent exercised almost feudal power, deciding if staff could date or marry, a multigenerational ""clan"" of several interlinked families controlled its day-to-day operations for decades.With the current emphasis on community-based care for the mentally ill and the negative consequences of de-institutionalization increasingly apparent, the debate on how best to care for the state's-and the nation's-mentally ill continues.This examination offers historical and practical insights which will be of interest to practitioners and policy makers in the field of mental health as well as to individuals interested in the history of the state of Texas.
This book approaches a central concern of oral literature studies worldwide, with a special focus on Africa: how to deal with oral genres in a world where new technologies have become available to more and more people? As the book asserts, what is new is that the spotlight is directed towards (old and new) "interlocutors" who cooperate in the making of technologized oral genres in an increasingly technologized world. Their interactions affect the performance, as well as research - their roles and positions raise methodological and ethical questions particularly when local/national identities and commercial interests are at stake. (Series: African Studies / Afrikanische Studien - Vol. 45) |
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