On Bonifratrow Street is the story of how Michael Katz survived the Holocaust as a Jewish boy hiding ‘in plain sight’ on the streets of Warsaw after escaping from Janowska concentration camp in Lviv (Lwow).

He moved to Warsaw under an assumed name and joined the Polish resistance. Michael fought in the Warsaw Uprising. He was one of the remaining group of 200 people to evacuate Warsaw.

This book tells his exceptional story.

On 6 June 1944 Britain woke up to a profound silence. Overnight, 160,000 Allied troops had vanished and an eerie emptiness settled over the country. The majority of those men would never return. This is the story of that extraordinary 24 hours. Using a wealth of first person testimonies, renowned historian Max Arthur recounts a remarkable new oral history of D-Day, beginning with the two years leading up to the silent day which saw the UK transformed by the arrival of thousands of American and Canadian troops. We also hear the views of the American troops, who quickly formed strong views of both the British military and civilian populations. Then, on that June morning, many Britain people woke up to discover that vast areas of the country, which had throbbed with life only the day before, were now empty and silent. Civilian workers found coffee pots still warm on the stove but not a soul to greet them. Many women - and children - felt bewildered and betrayed. Then, throughout that day and the days that followed, the whole population gathered around wireless sets, waiting for news. There are powerful testimonies from families of who lost loved ones on the beaches of Normandy, and dramatic personal accounts from young widows who had never had the chance to say goodbye. THE SILENT DAY is an original and evocative portrait of a key event in world history, and a poignant reminder of the human cost of D-Day.

Through sources ranging from ancient forsundun (praise songs) and the hero kings to newspaper accounts, public decrees, and even graffiti, this book offers vivid portraits of major events and everyday life in Ireland through the centuries--beginning with Golamh, the legendary leader of the band of Iberian Celts who settled the island more than three thousand years ago, and concluding with gripping accounts by those on both sides of the bloody civil conflict in Northern Ireland.

Remembering Mass Violence breaks new ground in oral history, new media, and performance studies by exploring what is at stake when we attempt to represent war, genocide, and other violations of human rights in a variety of creative works. A model of community-university collaboration, it includes contributions from scholars in a wide range of disciplines, survivors of mass violence, and performers and artists who have created works based on these events. This anthology is global in focus, with essays on Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. At its core is a productive tension between public and private memory, a dialogue between autobiography and biography, and between individual experience and societal transformation. Remembering Mass Violence will appeal to oral historians, digital practitioners and performance-based artists around the world, as well researchers and activists involved in human rights research, migration studies, and genocide studies.

What role does memory play in migrants' adaption to the emotional challenges of migration? How are migrant selfhoods remade in relation to changing cultural myths? This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Based on richly contextualised case studies addressing experiences of emigration, urban life, work, religion, and the Troubles in England, chapters shed new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants and the circumstances that formed them, as well as the cultural and personal dynamics of subjective change over the life course. At the core of the book lie the processes by which migrants 'recompose' the self as part of ongoing efforts to adapt to the transition between cultures and places. Life history and the Irish migrant experience offers a fresh perspective on the significance of England's largest post-war migrant group for current debates on identity and difference in contemporary Britain. Integrating historical, cultural and psychological perspectives in an innovative way, it will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geography. -- .

Selected from a conference on Aboriginal oral traditions, these essays cover three broad subject areas: oral traditions and knowledge of the environment, economy, education, and/or health of communities; oral traditions and the continuance of language and culture; and the effects of intellectual property rights, electronic media, and public discourse on oral traditions.

How is an oral historian to react when the unexpected emerges, whether in field research or interview analysis? Answers tend to be scattered throughout the scholarly literature or confined to backstage conversations. This book brings the unexpected to the center of the scene and promotes a collective reflection about ways of dealing with uneasy encounters, surprises, and interviews that seem to have gone off the rails. The contributors come from a dozen countries, especially Brazil, where a classic piece about a "great liar" paved the way for this discussion. Rather than eccentric descriptions of unusual situations, these chapters evoke a dense web of reflections about dialogue, the production of oral sources, and the complexities of personal narratives. Theoretically informed but written in an engaging language, the book presents readers with fascinating case studies of the eruptions of the unexpected that occur in oral history research.

This book is the first of its kind to investigate the ongoing significance of industrial craft in deindustrialising places such as Australia. Providing an alternative to the nostalgic trope of the redundant factory 'craftsman', this book introduces the intriguing and little-known trade of engineering patternmaking, where objects are brought to life through the handmade 'originals' required for mass production. Drawing on oral histories collected by the author, this book highlights the experiences of industrial craftspeople in Australian manufacturing, as they navigate precarious employment, retraining, gendered career pathways, creative expression and technological change. The book argues that digital fabrication technologies may modify or transform industrial craft, but should not obliterate it. Industrial craft is about more than the rudimentary production of everyday objects: it is about human creativity, material knowledge and meaningful work, and it will be key to human survival in the troubled times ahead.

Despite acute labour shortages during the Second World War, Canadian employers--with the complicity of state officials--discriminated against workers of African, Asian, and Eastern and Southern European origin, excluding them from both white collar and skilled jobs. Jobs and Justice argues that, while the war intensified hostility and suspicion toward minority workers, the urgent need for their contributions and the egalitarian rhetoric used to mobilize the war effort also created an opportunity for minority activists and their English Canadian allies to challenge discrimination.Juxtaposing a discussion of state policy with ideas of race and citizenship in Canadian civil society, Carmela K. Patrias shows how minority activists were able to bring national attention to racist employment discrimination and obtain official condemnation of such discrimination. Extensively researched and engagingly written, Jobs and Justice offers a new perspective on the Second World War, the racist dimensions of state policy, and the origins of human rights campaigns in Canada.

Drawing on rich oral histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, Robtel Neajai Pailey examines socio-economic change in Liberia, Africa's first black republic, through the prism of citizenship. Marking how historical policy changes on citizenship and contemporary public discourse on dual citizenship have impacted development policy and practice, she reveals that as Liberia transformed from a country of immigration to one of emigration, so too did the nature of citizenship, thus influencing claims for and against dual citizenship. In this engaging contribution to scholarly and policy debates about citizenship as a continuum of inclusion and exclusion, and development as a process of both amelioration and degeneration, Pailey develops a new model for conceptualising citizenship within the context of crisis-affected states. In doing so, she offers a postcolonial critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction.

This book traces the life of Maria Mia Truskier, who fled the Nazis as a young Polish Jew in early 1940 and once safely resettled in the United States, became an activist for other refugees, earning renown in the Bay Area as "the oldest refugee" of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant. Mia worked for decades assisting those fleeing from war, violence and hardship, mainly from Central America and Haiti. Based on extensive interviews with Truskier before she passed away, as well as memorabilia from her own lifetime, including coded letters, newspaper clippings, and old photographs, this book results in a complex and multi-layered oral history. As Mia drew on memories of her life in Europe and World War II, she was situating and constructing those memories while re-reading and discovering these artifacts alongside the author of this book, and ultimately relating the ways that she and her family years later sought to make a difference for other refugees, drawing a connection between two major eras of human displacement: the end of World War II and today.

Illuminating the experiences of immigrants to Australia in the late twentieth century, this book uses oral history to explore how identity and belonging are shaped through migration. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, many inhabitants from the small Greek island of Limnos travelled to Australia to flee post-war devastation and economic disaster. With an emphasis on the lived experiences and memories of Limnians, the book sheds light on the emotional pain and trauma they felt as they were separated from their families and homeland. Moving away from more traditional outlooks on migration studies, this book emphasises the significance of ethno-regional identity, and analyses how it can bring strength and longevity to a constructed community. Both the roles of men and women within the Greek diaspora are examined, in the way that they made the difficult decision to leave their homeland, and subsequently how they came to nurture and build families within a new, evolving community. Looking beyond first-generation migration, the author analyses the pattern of return visits to Limnos by the descendants of migrants. Acting as a form of identity consolidation for second-generation migrants, this journey to the ancestral homeland highlights the fluidity of what it means to belong somewhere, and redefines the notion of 'home'. The author provides an alternative perspective to traditional migration studies and reaffirms the importance of transnational identity. A unique and important addition to research, this book combines memory studies and oral narrative to analyse how identity and belonging can be shaped across borders, rather than within them.

In the 1980s, as China transitioned to the post-Mao era, a state-sponsored oral history project led to the publication of local, regional, and national histories. They took the form of written and transcribed personal testimonies of events that preceded the turmoil of both the Cultural Revolution and, in many cases, the Communist victory in 1949. Known as wenshi ziliao, these publications represent an intense process of historical memory production that has received little scholarly attention. Hitherto unexamined archival materials and oral histories reveal unresolved tensions in post-Cultural Revolution reconciliation and mobilization, informing negotiations between local elites and the state, and between Party and non-Party organizations. Taking the northeast Russia-Manchuria borderlands as a case study, Martin T. Fromm examines the creation of post-Mao identities, political mobilization, and knowledge production in China.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 'Absolutely essential and heartbreaking reading. There's a reason Ms. Alexievich won a Nobel Prize' - Craig Mazin, creator of the HBO / Sky TV series Chernobyl - A new translation of Voices from Chernobyl based on the revised text - In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget. 'Beautifully written. . . heart-breaking' - Arundhati Roy, Elle 'One of the most humane and terrifying books I've ever read' - Helen Simpson, Observer

Mussolini in myth and memory. Paul Corner looks at the brutal reality of the Italian dictator's fascist regime and confronts the nostalgia for dictatorial rule evident today in many European countries. Mussolini has rarely been taken seriously as a totalitarian dictator; Hitler and Stalin have always cast too long a shadow. But what was a negative judgement on the Duce, considered innocuous and ineffective, has begun to work to his advantage. As has occurred with many other European dictators, present-day popular memory of Mussolini is increasingly indulgent; in Italy and elsewhere he is remembered as a strong, decisive leader and people now speak of the 'many good things' done by the regime. After all, it is said, Mussolini was not like 'the others'. Mussolini in Myth and Memory argues against this rehabilitation, documenting the inefficiencies, corruption, and violence of a highly repressive regime and exploding the myths of Fascist good government. But this short study does not limit itself to setting the record straight; it seeks also to answer the question of why there is nostalgia - not only in Italy - for dictatorial rule. Linking past history and present memory, Corner's analysis constructs a picture of the realities of the Italian regime and examines the more general problem of why, in a moment of evident crisis of western democracy, people look for strong leadership and take refuge in the memory of past dictatorships. If, in this book, Fascism is placed in its totalitarian context and Mussolini emerges firmly in the company of his fellow dictators, the study also shows how a memory of the past, formed through reliance on illusion and myth, can affect the politics of the present.

How could Nazi killers shoot Jewish women and children at close range? Why did Japanese soldiers rape and murder on such a horrendous scale? How was it possible to endure the torment of a Nazi death camp? Award-winning documentary maker and historian Laurence Rees has spent decades wrestling with such questions in the course of filming hundreds of interviews with people tested to the extreme during World War II. He has come face-to-face with rapists, mass murderers, even cannibals, but he has also met courageous individuals who are an inspiration to us all. In Their Darkest Hour he presents 35 of his most electrifying encounters. 'A remarkably powerful collection' Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph 'An incredible, well-written, must-read book' Glasgow Evening Times 'A lasting contribution to our understanding of the Second World War and a powerful insight into the behaviour of human beings in crisis' Independent

Manitous are mysteries and spirits - the essences - that infuse and safeguard plants and animals, including humans, in all aspects of life. The tales of the manitous are simple in narration and complex in spirit, rich with incident and detail, and attempt to explain the mysterious ways of the natural world. Here are wily tricksters, timorous tree spirits, wise grandmothers, seductive maidens, and the ever-hungry evil manitous, fearsome giants known as Weendigoes. Here is a half-man, half-manitou legend of Ojibway lore who represents the wonders and shortcomings of all humankind and who becomes a hero by masquerading as one; a powerful warrior who is riled and routed by a younger sibling with a fight for dancing and disguises; a man who seems obsessed with the trivial but learns to understand the spiritual; and The Prophecy - which is told but disbelieved - telling of the changes in the native world to come. By turns comic, erotic, dramatic, and tragic, these engrossing stories - most of which have never before been recorded - provide a window into an ancient culture, and hold great meaning for modern readers.

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.

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.

Many books have been written about Appalachia, but few have voiced its concerns with the warmth and directness of this one. From hundreds of interviews gathered by the Appalachian Oral History Project, editors Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg have woven a rich verbal tapestry that portrays the people and the region in all their variety. The words on the page have the ring of truth, for these are the people of Appalachia speaking for themselves. Here they recollect an earlier time of isolation but of independence and neighborliness. For a nearer time they tell of the great changes that took place in Appalachia with the growth of coal mining and railroads and the disruption of old ways. Persisting through the years and sounding clearly in the interviews are the dignity of the Appalachian people and their close ties with the land, despite the exploitation and change they have endured. When first published, Our Appalachia was widely praised. This new edition again makes available an authentic source of social history for all those with an interest in the region.

Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform 'peasants' into citizens, Gina Anne Tam centers the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan - languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language, Mandarin. She traces how, on the one hand, linguists, policy-makers, bureaucrats and workaday educators framed fangyan as non-standard 'variants' of the Chinese language, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. She simultaneously highlights, on the other hand, the folksong collectors, playwrights, hip-hop artists and popular protestors who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China's national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the height of the Maoist period, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation - one spoken in one voice, one spoken in many - interacted and shaped one another, and in the process, shaped the basis for national identity itself.

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 explores a central methodological issue at the heart of studies of the histories of children and childhood. It questions how we understand the perspectives of children in the past, and not just those of the adults who often defined and constrained the parameters of youthful lives. Drawing on a range of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs, and objects, this interdisciplinary volume uncovers the voices of historical children, and discusses the challenges of situating these voices, and interpreting juvenile agency and desire. Divided into four sections, the book considers children's voices in different types of historical records, examining children's letters and correspondence, as well as multimedia texts such as film, advertising and art, along with oral histories, and institutional archives.

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.

A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.