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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Oral history
Living in the shadow of state is not a dark, static and silent
world. It was the world in full radiance, involving multiple
process of reenactment to life, lifeways and relationship. If state
and history demonized the hill people as the 'pest' and 'nuisance'
to civilization, and the hill practices as the 'relics' of the
'primitive', the hillmen's narratives celebrated them as their core
cultural collective. Against State, Against History is a radical
reevaluation of the dominant civilizational narratives on the
'tribe' and attempts to recast their history in the light of recent
historiography that presents the hillmen as state evading
population. Bringing together both conventional and oral
narratives, and from the counter-perspectives of the margin, the
book explores the conditions in which section of valley population
escaped to the hills, their migration history, how they reenact
their space, society, culture and economy in the hills. Their
physical dispersion in the highland terrain, choosing an
independent village polity, defended by trained warriors,
fortressed at the top of hills, connected by repulsive pathways,
following jhum economy, and adopting a pliable social, cultural,
ethnic and gender formations, are their counter cultural collective
at the margins of state. They were reenacted to prevent state
control and the emergence of domination relations in the hills.
This process is understood as unstate involving the process of
disowning state and becoming an egalitarian society where freedom
of individuals was located at the core of their cultural
collective.
Gender and Memory is the fourth volume of the International
Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories . Once again, its theme
is a fundamental issue, the shaping of memory by gender. Are the
different ways in which men and women are recalled in public and
private memory, and also the differences in men's and women's own
memories of similar experiences, simply reflections of unequal
lives in gendered societies, or are they more deeply rooted? How
early in childhood do girls and boys reveal differences in memory?
How far does the character of memory change as gender roles evolve?
The Special Editors of Gender and Memory , Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa
Passerini, and Paul Thompson, draw on original contributions
reflecting on the relationships between gender and memory in
western and eastern Europe, China, Africa, Australia, the United
States and Brazil. The aim of the International Yearbook is to
increase our understanding of the recent past and the changing
present. It sets out to present and interpret autobiographical
testimony, whether in the firm of written autobiography, oral
history, or life story interviews. Each issue forms a coherent
volume focusing on a single theme. This book i
Migration and Identity concerns the shaping of identity using the theme of migration, revealing how migration acts as a crucible for individual social development and for wider social change. The International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories aims to increase our understanding of the recent past and the changing present through autobiographical testimony, in the form of written biography, oral history, and life story interviews.
During the 872-day siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to
January 1944, civilians endured air raids, bread rations as low as
125 grams, food theft and speculation by opportunistic officials
and shadow market traders, and death by starvation. As shocks of
total war weaken institutions, desperate survival can compel
violation of norms, and personal suffering can shatter long-held
beliefs and practices. In Wartime Suffering and Survival, Jeffrey
K. Hass uses the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II to explore
the social practices and dynamics by which we cope or collapse.
Using hundreds of personal accounts from diaries, recollections,
police records, interviews, and state documents, Hass tells the
story of how average Leningraders coped with the nightmares of war,
starvation, and extreme uncertainty. By exploring the state and
shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, death, and
suffering, he describes the routines of daily life, the functioning
of official institutions, and the development of illegal practices
that were made and remade in the interactions of citizens and state
agencies coping with new and extreme situations. The key to what
Leningraders did and how they survived, Hass argues, is relations
to anchors-entities of symbolic and personal significance that
tethered Leningraders to each other and shaped practices of empathy
and compassion, and of opportunism and egoism. Moving and powerful,
Wartime Suffering and Survival goes to the heart of human
resilience and fragility and to the core of the human
condition-both individual and social.
Few cultural activities speak more powerfully to international
histories of the modern world than football. In the late nineteenth
century, this cheap and simple sport emerged as a major legacy of
Britain's formal and informal empires and spread quickly across
Europe, South America, and Africa. Today, football (known to many
as soccer) is arguably the world's most popular pastime, an
activity played and watched by millions of people around the globe.
Contested Fields introduces readers to key aspects of the global
game, synthesizing research on football's transnational role in
reflecting and shaping political, socio-economic, and cultural
developments over the past 150 years. Each chapter uses case
studies and cutting-edge scholarship to analyze an important
element of football's international story: migration, money,
competition, gender, race, space, spectatorship, and confrontation.
From the bestselling author of FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE GREAT WAR,
comes an unforgettable collection of vivid eyewitness accounts of
life in the Royal Navy Acclaimed historian Max Arthur pays tribute
to the Royal Navy from 1914 to 1945. Drawing on the personal
stories of those who have served during this period, he has created
a unique narrative history of the senior service. FORGOTTEN VOICES:
THE ROYAL NAVY is a memorable and moving testament to the courage,
spirit, skill and irrepressible humour of those who served in the
Royal Navy during these crucial years.
Our Portion of Hell: Fayette County, Tennessee: An Oral History of
the Struggle for Civil Rights offers an unrivalled account of how a
rural Black community drew together to combat the immense forces
aligned against them. Author Robert Hamburger first visited Fayette
County as part of a student civil rights project in 1965 and, in
1971, set out to document the history of the grassroots movement
there. Beginning in 1959, Black residents in Fayette County
attempting to register to vote were met with brutal resistance from
the white community. Sharecropping families whose names appeared on
voter registration rolls were evicted from their homes and their
possessions tossed by the roadside. These dispossessed families
lived for months in tents on muddy fields, as Fayette County became
a "tent city" that attracted national attention. The white
community created a blacklist culled from voter registration rolls,
and those whose names appeared on the list were denied food, gas,
and every imaginable service at shops, businesses, and gas stations
throughout the county. Hamburger conducted months of interviews
with residents of the county, inviting speakers to recall childhood
experiences in the "Old South" and to explain what inspired them to
take a stand against the oppressive system that dominated life in
Fayette County. Their stories, told in their own words, make up the
narrative of Our Portion of Hell. This reprint edition includes
twenty-nine documentary photographs and an insightful new afterword
by the author. There, he discusses the making of the book and
reflects upon the difficult truth that although the civil rights
struggle, once so immediate, has become history, many of the core
issues that inspired the struggle remain as urgent as ever.
Our Portion of Hell: Fayette County, Tennessee: An Oral History of
the Struggle for Civil Rights offers an unrivalled account of how a
rural Black community drew together to combat the immense forces
aligned against them. Author Robert Hamburger first visited Fayette
County as part of a student civil rights project in 1965 and, in
1971, set out to document the history of the grassroots movement
there. Beginning in 1959, Black residents in Fayette County
attempting to register to vote were met with brutal resistance from
the white community. Sharecropping families whose names appeared on
voter registration rolls were evicted from their homes and their
possessions tossed by the roadside. These dispossessed families
lived for months in tents on muddy fields, as Fayette County became
a "tent city" that attracted national attention. The white
community created a blacklist culled from voter registration rolls,
and those whose names appeared on the list were denied food, gas,
and every imaginable service at shops, businesses, and gas stations
throughout the county. Hamburger conducted months of interviews
with residents of the county, inviting speakers to recall childhood
experiences in the "Old South" and to explain what inspired them to
take a stand against the oppressive system that dominated life in
Fayette County. Their stories, told in their own words, make up the
narrative of Our Portion of Hell. This reprint edition includes
twenty-nine documentary photographs and an insightful new afterword
by the author. There, he discusses the making of the book and
reflects upon the difficult truth that although the civil rights
struggle, once so immediate, has become history, many of the core
issues that inspired the struggle remain as urgent as ever.
THESE ARE THE WORDS THAT CAME TO ME. NO MATTER HOW THEY GOT HERE,
THEY DID THE F***ING JOB. Iggy Pop hasn't left a mark on music;
he's left it battered and bruised, too. Inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, here for the first time are his selected
lyrics, complete with stunning original photographs, illustrations,
alongside Iggy and others' reflections on a genre-defining music
career that spans five decades. Coinciding with a new album, FREE,
this is the ultimate book for every rock and roll fan.
Pickers come from near and far, year after year, for the
berry-picking season, and from a variety of backgrounds. In the
20th century, for local people, both adults and children, it was an
opportunity to supplement the family income; Glasgow folk combined
it with a holiday. For the Scottish Traveller community it was an
annual opportunity to meet up with friends and family, and forge
new relationships. Roger Leitch encouraged many of those berry
pickers to share their (mostly happy) recollections for this book -
which is published at a time of political change with challenges
for the soft fruit cultivation business. He also interviewed
workers in other seasonal employments: potato picking; working with
crops: hay/bracken/reed/flax cutting and sugar-beet lifting;
fencing; repairing drystone dykes; being a deer ghillie or a river
ghillie or water bailiff; salmon fishing.
Oral history gives history back to the people in their own words.
And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their
own making. Oral history and life stories help to create a truer
picture of the past and the changing present, documenting the lives
and feelings of all kinds of people, many otherwise hidden from
history. It explores personal and family relationships and uncovers
the secret cultures of work. It connects public and private
experience, and it highlights the experiences of migrating between
cultures. At the same time it can bring courage to the old, meaning
to communities, and contact between generations. Sometimes it can
offer a path for healing divided communities and those with
traumatic memories. Without it the history and sociology of our
time would be poor and narrow. In this fourth edition of his
pioneering work, fully revised with Joanna Bornat, Paul Thompson
challenges the accepted myths of historical scholarship. He
discusses the reliability of oral evidence in comparison with other
sources and considers the social context of its development. He
looks at the relationship between memory, the self and identity. He
traces oral history through its own past and weighs up the recent
achievements of a movement which has become international, with
notably strong developments in North America, Europe, Australia,
Latin America, South Africa and the Far East, despite resistance
from more conservative academics. This new edition combines the
classic text of The Voice of the Past with many new sections,
including especially the worldwide development of different forms
of oral history and the parallel memory boom, as well as
discussions of theory in oral history and of memory, trauma and
reconciliation. It offers a deep social and historical
interpretation along with succinct practical advice on designing
and carrying out a project, The Voice of the Past remains an
invaluable tool for anyone setting out to use oral history and life
stories to construct a more authentic and balanced record of the
past and the present.
This book explores the transition from oral to written history now
taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many
ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national
identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As
traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him
through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and
meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how
he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local
to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in
oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on
the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality,
and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock
discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its
creators - those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative
oral history and those who have experimented with the first written
accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a
'genealogical nationalism' as well as on the tensions that arise
between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and
cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to
traditional assumptions about the way history is written.
Over a span of eighteen years, Lady Bird Johnson recorded
forty-seven oral history interviews with Michael Gillette and his
colleagues. These conversations, just released in 2011, form the
heart of Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History, an intimate story of a
shy young country girl's transformation into one of America's most
effective and admired First Ladies. Lady Bird Johnson's odyssey is
one of personal and intellectual growth, political and financial
ambition, and a shared life with Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the
most complicated, volatile, and powerful presidents of the 20th
century. The former First Lady recounts how a cautious,
conservative young woman succumbed to an ultimatum to marry a man
she had known for less than three months, how she ran his
congressional office during World War II, and how she transformed a
struggling Austin radio station into the foundation of a
communications empire. As a keen observer of the Washington scene
during the eventful decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, Lady
Bird Johnson shares dramatic accounts of pivotal moments in
American history. We attend informal dinners at Sam Rayburn's
apartment and opulent social events at grand mansions from an
earlier age. Her rich verbal portraits bring to life scores of
personalities, including First Ladies Edith Bolling Wilson, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, and
Pat Nixon. An informal, candid narrative by one of America's most
admired First Ladies, this volume reveals how instrumental Lady
Bird Johnson's support and guidance were at each stage of her
husband's political ascent and how she herself emerged as a
significant political force.
Women were at the forefront of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011,
with the Arab Spring protests providing an unprecedented
opportunity to make their voices heard. But these women also faced
an intense backlash from Egypt's patriarchal authorities, with
female activists subjected to sexual violence and intimidation by
the regime and even fellow protestors. Centered on the testimonies
of four women who each played a significant role in the protests,
this book provides unique insight into women's experiences during
the Egyptian Revolution, and into the methods of resistance these
women developed in response to sexual violence. In the process,
Hamzeh casts new light on the relationship between gendered and
state violence, and argues that women's resistance to this violence
is reshaping gender relations in Egypt and the wider Arab world.
This is an oral history of a second-generation, urban-born woman
who struggles to survive in the poor, Andean city of La Paz. It
shows how her identity shifts over time, shaped by the major events
in her life. Topics range fron social networks to magical
interventions and clairvoyant dreaming.
Topics discussed in these recorded oral interviews with residents
of Stranraer and district, in south-west Scotland, include tattie
howking, war, the capsizing of the Larne-Stranraer ferry and the
stormy winter of 1947. The interviews took place over a period of
time, the first being with Helen Davies who was 87 when recorded in
1997.This is the first book based on research carried out by the
European Ethnological Research Centre (EERC) as part of their
current research programme: Dumfries and Galloway: A Regional
Ethnology - part of a wider research programme, The Regional
Ethnology of Scotland Project.Co-published by NMS Enterprises Ltd -
Publishing and the EERC.
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