The extraordinary true story of a courageous school principal who saw the dangers of Nazi Germany and took drastic steps to save those in harm’s way.

In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England.

As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives.

Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large. Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."

"Highly recommended read." - SharedTroubles "What Ken is creating is something historians will be using centuries from now."- The Pathfinder Magazine This is the second oral history of the Northern Ireland troubles, following on from A Long, Long War (Helion, 2008), again told from the perspective of the ordinary British soldier. This book looks deeper into the conflict, with new contributors providing revealing stories of the troubles from the back streets of the Ardoyne to the bandit country of South Armagh. In researching this subject Ken Wharton, a former soldier, is now known and trusted by those who served and they are keen for their part in Britain's forgotten war to now be made public. For the first time, he tells the stories of the 'unseen victims'; the loved ones who sat and dreaded a knock at the door from the Army telling them that their loved one had been killed on the streets of Northern Ireland. There are more first hand accounts from the Rifleman, the Private, the Guardsman, the Driver, the Sapper and the Fusilier on the street as they recall the violence, the insults and the shock of seeing a comrade dying in front of them. There is an explosive interview with a soldier who killed an IRA gunman fresh from the murder of two Royal Artillerymen. Building on the huge success of Ken's first book, this second volume will provide plenty of new material for the reader to reconsider afresh the role of Britain's soldiers in Northern Ireland and the fate that so many suffered.

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.

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People's Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin's Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy. Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert. A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China-now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.

This book brings together the Armenian Genocide process and its transgenerational outcome, which are often juxtaposed in existing scholarship, to ask how the Armenian Genocide is conceptualized and placed within diasporic communities. Taking a dual approach to answer this question, Anthonie Holslag studies the cultural expression of violence during the genocidal process itself, and in the aftermath for the victims. By using this approach, this book allows us to see comparatively how genocide in diasporic communities in the Netherlands, London and the US is encapsulated in an historic narrative. It paints a picture of the complexity of genocidal violence itself, but also in its transgenerational and non-spatial consequences, raising new questions of how violence can be perpetuated or interlocked with the discourse and narratives of the victims, and how the violence can be relived.

From Moses to Nelson Mandela, speeches have changed the way we see the world and the way the world is shaped. The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches gathers together the world's greatest speeches, bringing together the words of over one hundred men and women. These brilliant and passionate declarations by Socrates, Robespierre, Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth I, Churchill, Washington, Pankhurst, Gandhi and many others provide a vivid glimpse of history in the making while retaining their power to move and inspire today. 'Impeccable. MacArthur prefaces each address with a short but scholarly historical explanation that sets the scene perfectly. An attractive volume' Andrew Roberts, Sunday Times 'Works well not just as an anthology but as a history' Independent on Sunday

***** 'There have been many books written about the events of Bloody Sunday, however, none has wrenched the reader as violently back to those CS gas-choked streets, dumping them right in the heart of the screaming, running, shooting and crying, as Julieann Campbell's On Bloody Sunday. A powerful chronicle of one of the darkest episodes of modern times.' - Sunday Times 'Powerful and moving ... The strength of this important new book lies in the artistry the author brings to the tasks of portraying both the community upon which the massacre was perpetrated, and the individuals within it.' - Irish Times 'Meticulous.... On Bloody Sunday possesses a veracity and cumulative power that sets it apart from previous accounts' - Observer 'A momentous chronicle, timely and vital, which highlights that the burden of change rests, as always, upon the shoulders of those who suffered and yet, have nurtured the desire that lessons be learned.' - Michael Mansfield QC, who represented a number of families during the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. 'It is a vital record of the time, the city, and its people, and more impressive still it does so almost entirely in their own words, their heartbreak, their anger, their resilience, their humour. Julieann Campbell has given their voices, so long silenced, the dignity they deserve. It is a staggering achievement.' - Seamas O'Reilly 'It's a wonderful book. The technique used - multiple voices speaking directly to us - is very simple but it has a profound effect. It puts us into the middle of the chaos of Bloody Sunday and keeps us there throughout the grief and anger that follow. A wonderful, wonderful book.' - Jimmy McGovern, BAFTA winning screenwriter, creator of 'Sunday' (2002) In January 1972, a peaceful civil rights march in Northern Ireland ended in bloodshed. Troops from Britain's 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment opened fire on marchers, leaving 13 dead and 15 wounded. Seven of those killed were teenage boys. The day became known as 'Bloody Sunday'. The events occurred in broad daylight and in the full glare of the press. Within hours, the British military informed the world that they had won an 'IRA gun battle'. This became the official narrative for decades until a family-led campaign instigated one of the most complex inquiries in history. In 2010, the victims of Bloody Sunday were fully exonerated when Lord Saville found that the majority of the victims were either shot in the back as they ran away or were helping someone in need. The report made headlines all over the world. While many buried the trauma of that day, historian and campaigner Juliann Campbell - whose teenage uncle was the first to be killed that day - felt the need to keep recording these interviews, and collecting rare and unpublished accounts, aware of just how precious they were. Fifty years on, in this book, survivors, relatives, eyewitnesses and politicians, shine a light on the events of Bloody Sunday, together, for the first time. As they tell their stories, the tension, confusion and anger build with an awful power. ON BLOODY SUNDAY unfolds before us an extraordinary human drama, as we experience one of the darkest moments in modern history - and witness the true human cost of conflict.

In the pre-reserve era, Aboriginal bands in the northern plains were relatively small multicultural communities that actively maintained fluid and inclusive membership through traditional kinship practices. These practices were governed by the Law of the People as described in the traditional stories of Wisashkecahk, or Elder Brother, that outlined social interaction, marriage, adoption, and kinship roles and responsibilities. In Elder Brother and the Law of the People, Robert Innes offers a detailed analysis of the role of Elder Brother stories in historical and contemporary kinship practices in Cowessess First Nation, located in southeastern Saskatchewan. He reveals how these tradition-inspired practices act to undermine legal and scholarly definitions of "Indian" and counter the perception that First Nations people have internalized such classifications. He presents Cowessess's successful negotiation of the 1996 Treaty Land Agreement and their high inclusion rate of new "Bill-C31s" as evidence of the persistence of historical kinship values and their continuing role as the central unifying factor for band membership. Elder Brother and the Law of the People presents an entirely new way of viewing Aboriginal cultural identity on the northern plains.

"I Have Spoken" is a collection of American Indian oratory from the 17th to the 20th century, concentrating on speeches focusing around Indian-white relationships, especially treaty-making negotiations. A few letters and other writings are also included.
Here, in their own words, is the Indian's story told with integrity, with drama, with caustic wit, with statesmanship, with poetic impact; a story of proffered friendship, of broken promises, of hope, of disillusionment, of pride, of a whole land and life gone sour.

Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholarship aims to challenge memory and fill its gaps. At the same time, scholars often use testimonies uncritically or selectively-mining them to support generalizations. This book is a departure, bringing several scholars together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. Helen "Zippi" Spitzer Tichauer was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. One of the few early arrivals to survive the camp and the death marches, she met her future husband in a DP camp. They moved to New York in the 1960s. Since the end of the war, Zippi devoted many hours to talking with a small group of scholars about her life. Zippi's testimony covers a wide range of human experiences in extremis and spans fifty-odd years. It is thus uniquely suited to raise questions on the meaning and use of survivor testimony. What do we know, sixty years after the Nazi era, about the workings of a death camp? How willing are we to learn from the experiences of a survivor, and how much is our perception preconditioned by standardized images? What are the mechanisms, aims and pitfalls of story-telling? Can survivor testimonies be understood properly without guidance from those who experienced the events? This book, written by established Holocaust scholars who have known Helen Tichauer for years, attempts to approximate survivor testimony and probe the limits of its representation and understanding. Contributors include Atina Grossmann (author, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton, 2007), Konrad Kwiet (co-ed., Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, 2005), Wendy Lower (author, Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memory, Indiana UP, 2007), Nehama Tec (author, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, Yale, 2003, and Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, OUP, 1993). The book will be of interest to both Holocaust scholars and oral historians.

The Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been in the news constantly since the U.S. began using it as a prison camp after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. With all the controversy surrounding the torture of suspects at the prison, its precedent-setting prior use as an immigrant detention center for Haitian and Cuban boat people has been largely overlooked. Overcoming Guantanamo is an oral history of the rafter crisis and the camps written by an anthropologist who worked in the camps. More than a straight oral history, the book is a study of group-level trauma and coping. Using a trauma studies perspective along with discourse-oriented models from anthropology, the book discusses examples of the extensive camp artwork as well as the oral history narratives as part of a meaning-making process that necessarily occurs as people recover from trauma. Campisi worked in the Cuban camps for a year as a temporary employee of the Justice Department's mediation service, and then returned to analyze the camps from an anthropological point of view. She conducted life history interviews of twelve of the rafters, which included the process of disenchantment with the Revolution, leaving Cuba, the rafting trip, life on the base, and their initial experiences in Cuban Miami, focusing on life on the base. Their stories are gripping. Some people provided disturbing accounts of military abuses, which is an ancillary reason that Overcoming Guantanamo is important right now: human rights violations that occurred at the prison for terror suspects also occurred in the Cuban and Haitian camps, but few people know about them. All such violations should be taken into account in current debates about the use of the base. While it is important as an oral history, the book's examination of the camp culture also makes it a new contribution to the field of anthropology. Campisi argues that because trauma has cognitive and emotional impacts that require an individual to create new meanings, when people work through individually-traumatic experiences as a group, the new meanings they generate together create new cultural forms. Hence, social trauma can be culturally generative. In these times, that is an important conclusion.

The Talk of the Town explores everyday communication in a sixteenth-century small town and the role it played in the circulation of information across and within early modern communities. It does so through the lens of the St Gall linen trader Johannes Rutiner (1501-1556/7) and his notebooks, the Commentationes; a little-known source which offers unusual insights into an oral world normally hidden from view. A close reading of Rutiner's notes on hundreds of conversations reveals what the inhabitants of a sixteenth-century town talked about, through which channels such information reached them, and how it was then processed, shared, criticized, contradicted, and employed as a means to forge and strengthen social bonds. By bringing together the histories of sociability and information, reconstructing Ru?tiner's network of informants and probing a broad variety of exchanges-jokes, gossip, news, and tales of the past-Carla Roth rethinks both what constituted valuable information in the sixteenth century and who was able to provide it, and argues that the circulation of information remained inseparably linked to the social dynamics of face-to-face exchanges long into the age of print.

As a subculture, cloistered monastic nuns live hidden from public view by choice. Once a woman joins the cloister and makes final vows, she is almost never seen and her voice is not heard; her story is essentially nonexistent in the historical record and collective, public history. From interviews conducted over six years, Abbie Reese tells the stories of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, a cloistered contemplative order at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois. Seldom leaving their 25,000-square-foot gated enclosure, members of this community embrace an extreme version of poverty and anonymity-a separation that enables them to withdraw from the world to devote their lives to prayer. This removal, they contend, allows them to have a greater impact on humanity than if they maintained direct contact with loved ones and strangers. Dedicated to God explores individual and cultural identity through oral history interviews with several generations of nuns, focusing on the origins and life stories of the women who have chosen to become members of one of the strictest religious orders. But the narrative is also one of a collective memory and struggle against extinction and modernity, a determination to create community within the framework of ancient rules. The author's stunning photographs of their dual worlds, religious and quotidian, add texture to the narrative. This artistic and ethnographic work highlights the countercultural values and dedication of individuals who, at incredible personal cost, live for love of God and humanity, out of faith in what cannot be seen, and with the belief that they will be rewarded in the afterlife.

A powerful account of the decline of the Cuban Revolution, told through the lives of five ordinary Cuban citizens. 'Masterful... Dore uses oral history to tell a history of Cuba from the bottom up' Professor Linda Gordon 'A vital addition to Cuba's rich oral tradition' Will Grant, BBC Cuba Correspondent 'Opens wide a window on the last forty years of Cuban history' Professor Gerald Martin 'To have gathered these life stories together with such grace, eloquence and trust is a towering achievement' Professor Ruth Behar Cuba is not the country it used to be. The regime is disintegrating, and unprecedented protest marches are challenging the gerontocratic Communist Party leadership. How Things Fall Apart reveals the decay of this political system through the lives of five ordinary Cuban citizens. Born in the 1970s and 80s, these men and women recount how their lives changed over a tumultuous stretch of thirty-five years: first when Fidel opened the country to tourism following the fall of the Soviet bloc; then when Raul Castro allowed market forces to operate, thinking it would stop the country's economic slide; and finally when President Trump's tightening of the US embargo combined with the Covid-19 pandemic to cause economic collapse. With warmth and humanity, they describe learning to survive in an environment where a tiny minority has grown rich by local standards, the great majority has been left behind, and inequality has destroyed the very things that used to give meaning to Cubans' lives. Born out of the first oral history project authorized by the Cuban government in forty years, Professor Elizabeth Dore gathers these stories to illuminate the slow and agonizing decline of the Cuban Revolution over the past four decades. For over sixty years the government controlled the historical narrative. In this book, Cubans tell their own stories.

This oral history of London's East End spans the period after World War I to the upsurge of prosperity at the beginning of the 1960s--a time period which saw fresh waves of immigrants in the area, the Fascist marches of the 1930s, and its spirited recovery after virtual obliteration during the Blitz. Piers Dudgeon has listened to dozens of people who remember this fiercely proud quarter to record their real-life experiences of what it was like before it was fashionable to buy a home in the Docklands. They talk of childhood and education, of work and entertainment, of family, community values, health, politics, religion, and music. Their stories will make you laugh and cry. It is people's own memories that make history real and this engrossing book captures them vividly.

This essay collection explores the "photographic turn" in oral history. Contributors ask how oral historians can best use photographs in their interviewing practice and how they can best understand photographs in their interpretation of oral histories. The authors present a dozen case studies from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In exploring the intersection of oral history and photography, they complicate and move beyond the use of photographs as social documents and memory triggers and demonstrate how photographs frame oral narratives and how stories unsettle the seeming fixity of photographs' meanings.

This book demonstrates how oral history can provide a valuable way of understanding locality, which is important in light of major issues facing the world today, including global environmental concerns.

This book uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

This book brings together fascinating testimonies from thirty inhabitants of the 'Kommunalka,' the communal apartments that were the norm in housing in the cities of Russia during the whole history of the Soviet Union.

From the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the coming of Napoleon ten years later, the commemoration of the dead was a recurring theme during the French Revolution. Based on extensive research across a wide range of sources, this 2007 book was the first comprehensive study of the cultural politics of commemoration in Revolutionary France. It examines what remembrance meant to the people who staged and attended ceremonies, raised monuments, listened to speeches and purchased souvenirs in memory of the Revolution's dead. It explores the political purposes these commemorations served and the conflicts they gave rise to while also examining the cultural traditions they drew upon. Above all, it asks what private ends did the Revolution's rites of memory serve? What consolation did commemoration bring to those the dead left behind, and what conflicts did this relationship between the public and the private dimensions of remembrance give rise to?

Oral History is part of the Understanding Qualitative Research series, which is designed to provide researchers with authoritative guides to understanding, presenting, and critiquing analyses and associated inferences. There are three subareas in this series: Quantitative Research, Measurement, and Qualitative Research. This volume fits in the Qualitative Research group and addresses issues surrounding oral history - how to both fully and succinctly report and present this material, as well as the challenges of evaluating it.

Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholars, despite their aim to challenge memory and fill its gaps, often use testimonies uncritically or selectively-mining them to support generalizations. This book represents a departure, bringing Holocaust experts Atina Grossmann, Konrad Kwiet, Wendy Lower, Jurgen Matthaus, and Nechama Tec together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. Born in Bratislava at the end of World War I, Helen "Zippi" Spitzer Tichauer was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. One of the few early arrivals to survive the camp and the death marches, she met her future husband in a DP camp, and they moved to New York in the 1960s. Beginning in 1946, Zippi devoted many hours to talking with a small group of scholars about her life. Her wide-ranging interviews are uniquely suited to raise questions on the meaning and use of survivor testimony. What do we know today about the workings of a death camp? How willing are we to learn from the experiences of a survivor, and how much is our perception preconditioned by standardized images? What are the mechanisms, aims, and pitfalls of storytelling? Can survivor testimonies be understood properly without guidance from those who experienced the events? This book's new, multifaceted approach toward Zippi's unique story combined with the authors' analysis of key aspects of Holocaust memory, its forms and its functions, makes it a rewarding and fascinating read."

In Myth, Ritual and the Oral Jack Goody, one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists, returns to the related themes of myth, orality and literacy, subjects that have long been a touchstone in anthropological thinking. Combining classic papers with recent unpublished work, this volume brings together some of the most important essays written on these themes in the past half century, representative of a lifetime of critical engagement and research. In characteristically clear and accessible style, Jack Goody addresses fundamental conceptual schemes underpinning modern anthropology, providing potent critiques of current theoretical trends. Drawing upon his highly influential work on the LoDagaa myth of the Bagre, Goody challenges structuralist and functionalist interpretations of oral 'literature', stressing the issues of variation, imagination and creativity, and the problems of methodology and analysis. These insightful, and at times provocative, essays will stimulate fresh debate and prove invaluable to students and teachers of social anthropology.