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In this second volume of interviews conducted by Nebraska judge Eli S. Ricker, he focuses on white eyewitnesses and participants in the occupying and settling of the American West in the nineteenth century.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, as the Old West became increasingly distant and romanticized in popular consciousness, Eli S. Ricker (1842-1926) began interviewing those who had experienced it firsthand, hoping to write a multivolume series about its last days, centering on the conflicts between Natives and outsiders. For years Ricker traveled across the northern Plains, gathering information on and off reservations, in winter and in summer. Judge Ricker never wrote his book, but his interviews are priceless sources of information about that time and place, and they offer more balanced perspectives on events than were accepted at the time.
Richard E. Jensen brings together all of Ricker's interviews with those men and women who came to the American West from elsewhere--settlers, homesteaders, and veterans. These interviews shed light on such key events as the massacre at Wounded Knee, the Little Bighorn battle, Beecher Island, Lightning Creek, the Mormon cow incident, and the Washita massacre. Also of interest are glimpses of everyday life at different agencies, including Pine Ridge, Yellow Medicine, and Fort Sill School; brief though revealing memoirs; and snapshots of cattle drives, conflicts with Natives, and the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.

The interviews in this book were conducted for the Nordic Africa Institute 's research project National Liberation in Southern Africa The role of the Nordic countries . Around 80 representatives of the Southern African liberation movements, as well as Swedish and other opinion makers, administrators and politicians, reflect on the Nordic support to these struggles. Prominent contemporary leaders among them Joaquim Chissano from Mozambique, Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia and Thabo Mbeki from South Africa give their views on a relationship that largely developed outside the public arena and of which there is scant evidence in open sources. The book is a reference source to a unique North-South relationship in the Cold War period.

From the memories of everyday experience, "Living Atlanta" vividly recreates life in the city during the three decades from World War I through World War II--a period in which a small, regional capital became a center of industry, education, finance, commerce, and travel. This profusely illustrated volume draws on nearly two hundred interviews with Atlanta residents who recall, in their own words, "the way it was"--from segregated streetcars to college fraternity parties, from moonshine peddling to visiting performances by the Metropolitan Opera, from the growth of neighborhoods to religious revivals. The book is based on a celebrated public radio series that was broadcast in 1979-80 and hailed by Studs Terkel as "an important, exciting project--a truly human portrait of a city of people." "Living Atlanta" presents a diverse array of voices--domestics and businessmen, teachers and factory workers, doctors and ballplayers. There are memories of the city when it wasn't quite a city: "Back in those young days it was country in Atlanta," musician Rosa Lee Carson reflects. "It sure was. Why, you could even raise a cow out there in your yard." There are eyewitness accounts of such major events as the Great Fire of 1917: "The wind blowing that way, it was awful," recalls fire fighter Hugh McDonald. "There'd be a big board on fire, and the wind would carry that board, and it'd hit another house and start right up on that one. And it just kept spreading." There are glimpses of the workday: "It's a real job firing an engine, a darn hard job," says railroad man J. R. Spratlin. "I was using a scoop and there wasn't no eight hour haul then, there was twelve hours, sometimes sixteen." And there are scenes of the city at play: "Baseball was the popular sport," remembers Arthur Leroy Idlett, who grew up in the Pittsburgh neighborhood. "Everybody had teams. And people--you could put some kids out there playing baseball, and before you knew a thing, you got a crowd out there, watching kids play." Organizing the book around such topics as transportation, health and religion, education, leisure, and politics, the authors provide a narrative commentary that places the diverse remembrances in social and historical context. Resurfacing throughout the book as a central theme are the memories of Jim Crow and the peculiarities of black-white relations. Accounts of Klan rallies, job and housing discrimination, and poll taxes are here, along with stories about the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, early black forays into local politics, and the role of the city's black colleges. Martin Luther King, Sr., historian Clarence Bacote, former police chief Herbert Jenkins, educator Benjamin Mays, and sociologist Arthur Raper are among those whose recollections are gathered here, but the majority of the voices are those of ordinary Atlantans, men and women who in these pages relive day-to-day experiences of a half-century ago.

"This book serves as a window into the rich and revealing lives and self-representations of the particular individuals who have produced the life histories. In so doing, it makes very important broader points about the use of life histories in social science research in general and in the study of South Asian social-cultural life in particular." Sarah Lamb

Life histories have a wide, if not universal, appeal. But what does it mean to narrate the story of a life, whether one s own or someone else s, orally or in writing? Which lives are worth telling, and who is authorized to tell them? The essays in this volume consider these questions through close examination of a wide range of biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and oral stories from India. Their subjects range from literary authors to housewives, politicians to folk heroes, and include young and old, women and men, the illiterate and the learned.

Contributors are David Arnold, Stuart Blackburn, Sudipta Kaviraj, Barbara D. Metcalf, Kirin Narayan, Francesca Orsini, Jonathan P. Parry, Jean-Luc Racine, Josiane Racine, David Shulman, and Sylvia Vatuk."

George Ewart Evans, who wrote the classic Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, was one of the pioneers of oral history. This anthology is drawn from his writings about the memories of men and women of a past era - farm labourers, shepherds, horsemen, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, sailors, fisherman, miners, maltsters, domestic servants and many others. The anthology is edited and includes drawings by David Gentleman.

'A pleasure to look at and a delight to read . . . A treasury of country folklore in words and pictures, and a monument to a great and pioneering man . . . It is right that the past should be heard of in the words of those who lived it . . . Those who actually cut the hay.' Daily Telegraph

In the English language World War I has largely been analysed and understood through the lens of the Western Front. This book addresses this imbalance by examining the war in Eastern and Central Europe. The historiography of the war in the West has increasingly focused on the experience of ordinary soldiers and civilians, the relationships between them and the impact of war at the time and subsequently. This book takes up these themes and, engaging with the approaches and conclusions of historians of the Western front, examines wartime experiences and the memory of war in the East. Analysing soldiers' letters and diaries to discover the nature and impact of displacement and refugee status on memory, this volume offers a basis for comparison between experiences in these two areas. It also provides material for intra-regional comparisons that are still missing from the current research. Was the war in the East wholly 'other'? Were soldiers in this region as alienated as those in the West? Did they see themselves as citizens and was there continuity between their pre-war or civilian and military identities? And if, in the Eastern context, these identities were fundamentally challenged, was it the experience of war itself or its consequences (in the shape of imprisonment and displacement, and changing borders) that mattered most? How did soldiers and citizens in this region experience and react to the traumas and upheavals of war and with what consequences for the post-war era? In seeking to answer these questions and others, this volume significantly adds to our understanding of World War I as experienced in Central and Eastern Europe.

The stories of Kaua'i's ruling chiefs were passed from generation to generation in songs and narratives recited by trained storytellers either formally at the high chief's court or informally at family gatherings. Their chronology was ordered by a ruler's genealogy, which, in the case of the pua ali'i (flower of royalty), was illustrious and far reaching and could be traced to one of the four great gods of Polynesia - Kane, Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa. In these legends, Hawaiians of old sought answers to the questions ""Who are we?"" ""Who are our ancestors and where do they come from?"" ""What lessons can be learned from their conduct?"" Na Pua Ali'i o Kaua'i presents the stories of the men and women who ruled the island of Kaua'i from its first settlement to the final rebellion against Kamehameha I's forces in 1824. Only fragments remain of the nearly two-thousand-year history of the people who inhabited Kaua'i before the coming of James Cook in 1778. Now scattered in public and private archives and libraries, these pieces of Hawai'i's precontact past were recorded in the nineteenth century by such determined individuals as David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and Abraham Fornander. All known genealogical references to the Kaua'i ali'i nui (paramount chiefs) have been gathered here and placed in chronological order and are interspersed with legends of great voyages, bitter wars, courageous heroes, and passionate romances that together form a rich and invaluable resource.

Until the 1960s and the advent of African independence, African history was rarely concerned with African lives. Africans were not considered fitting subjects or authoritative sources for historical research and their voices and experiences were largely absent from the continent's history. Efforts to restore African expression to African history have characterized much of postcolonial historical research and writing, but questions about the use of oral sources in the quest for truth continue to plague interpreters and interpretations of the African past. This analysis reveals African historians involved with and committed to developing unique methodologies for dealing with history on their own terms. African historians from North America, Europe and Africa confront questions such as the relationship between a community's oral and written history, the role of personal histories, the effects of racism and colonialism, the suppression of facts, and how historians should mediate and interpret research data.; Focusing on all areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, the essays brought together here seek to reflect the extraordinary range of engagement that represents the state-of-the-art of African h

Smuggling has been a way of life in Galicia for millennia. The Romans considered its windswept coast the edge of the world. To the Greeks it was from where Charon ferried souls to the Underworld. Since the Middle Ages, its shoreline has scuppered thousands of pirate ships. But the history of Cape Finisterre is no fiction and by the late twentieth century a new and exotic cargo flooded the cape's ports and fishing villages. In Snow on the Atlantic, the book the Spanish national court tried to ban, intrepid investigative journalist Nacho Carretero tells the incredible story of how a sleepy, unassuming corner of Spain became the cocaine gateway into Europe, exposing a new generation of criminals, cartels and corrupt officials, more efficient and ruthless than any who came before.

Coauthor Erich Friedrich won the Iron Cross fighting the Soviets. But when he refused to give the Nazi salute and criticized Hermann Goring, he was charged with subversion and thrown into a cell. With him were a suspected spy, two accused deserters, a Jehovah's Witness, a draft dodger, and a leftist. To try to push back the terror of the unknown, each man took a turn telling why he was awaiting torture and possibly death. Friedrich vowed to remember their remarkable stories forever.

In this poignant collection of oral histories, four Indian elders recount their life stories in their own quiet but uncompromising words. Growing up and living in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Stella Pretty Sounding Flute and Iola Columbus (Dakota)and Celane Not Help Him and Cecelia Hernandez Montgomery (Lakota) share recollections of early family life interrupted by years at government boarding schools designed to eradicate tribal culture. Recounting their complex lives, the grandmothers reveal how they survived difficult circumstances to become activists in Indian politics, reconciling urban with reservation life and Christianity with native spirituality. Particularly memorable is one grandmother's detailed family account of the tragic events and consequences of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Defying stereotypes, these clear and forthright voices are unforgettable. As the traditional teachers and bearers of culture, the grandmothers also share their concern for future generations.

Oral epic poetry is still performed by Turkic singers in Central Asia. On trips to the region, Karl Reichl collected heroic poems from the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Karakalpak oral traditions. Through a close analysis of these Turkic works, he shows that they are typologically similar to heroic poetry in Old English, Old High German, and Old French and that they can offer scholars new insights into the oral background of these medieval texts.

Reichl draws on his research in Central Asia to discuss questions regarding performance as well as the singers' training, role in society, and repertoire. He asserts that heroic poetry and epic are primarily concerned with the interpretation of the past in song: the courageous deeds of ancestors, the search for tribal and societal roots, and the definition and transmission of cultural values. Reichl finds that in these traditions the heroic epic is part of a generic system that includes historical and eulogistic poetry as well as heroic lays, a view that has diachronic implications for medieval poetry.

Singing the Past reminds readers that because much medieval poetry was composed for oral recitation, both the Turkic and the medieval heroic poems must always be appreciated as poetry in performance, as sound listened to, as words spoken or sung.

Filled with true stories, legends, and descriptions of traditional Dakota Sioux life, this book is a unique record of a people whose existence was engulfed and forever changed by the westward expansion of the United States. It is also the story of the Deloria family. Vine Deloria's grandfather, Chief Tipi Sapa (Philip Joseph Deloria), provided the detailed portrait of the Yankton band of the Dakota Nation that is the centerpiece of this book. In 1917 this great 19th-century leader told the story of the Yankton people to an informant, drawing both on his own experiences and on the accounts passed down by other elders of the Yankton band. In addition to describing spiritual beliefs, rituals, and traditions of all kinds, he recounted the stories and songs that bound the community together.

Vine Deloria has expanded the story of the Dakota people with material handed down in his family. In his introductory chapters, Deloria revisits ancestral territory, telling the life stories of his grandfather and his greatgrandfather Saswe (Francois des Laurier), a medicine man whose vision experience would have profound effects on his descendants. Both men played prominent roles in the religious life of the Yankton and Standing Rock Sioux. The Deloria family stories help us understand the revolutionary changes the Sioux were experiencing during this period, and they offer a poignant contrast to Tipi Sapa's descriptions of a distinctive way of life that was already lost to the on rush of history.

Over the years, the phrase ""southern oratory"" has become laden with myth; its mere invocation conjures up powerful images of grandiloquent antebellum patriarchs, enthusiastic New South hucksters, and raving wild-eyed demagogue politicians. In these essays, Waldo Braden strips away the myths to expose how the South's orators achieved their rhetorical effects and manipulated their audiences. The Oral Tradition in the South begins with two essays that trace the roots of the South's particular identification with oratory. In The Emergence of the Concept of Southern Oratory, 1850- 1950, Braden suggests that it was through the influence of southern scholars that southern oratory gained its renown. The second essay, The Oral Tradition in the Old South, focuses on antebellum times to reveal the several factors that combined to make the region a fertile ground for oratory. Braden further explores the antebellum oratorical tradition in The 1860 Election Campaign in Western Tennessee, analyzing speeches made in Memphis by such national figures as William L. Yancey, Andrew Johnson, and Stephen A. Douglas, and revealing the nature of political canvassing in that era. Shifting his discussion to the years that followed the Civil War, Braden examines, in Myths in a Rhetorical Context, how such speakers as General John B. Gordon and Henry Grady worked to restore the shattered self-esteem of the region by spinning myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause and by proclaiming the hopeful era of the New South. The fifth essay, The Rhetoric of Exploitation, probes the rhetorical strategies of the demagogue politicians of the twentieth century-strategies such as ""plain folks"" appeals and race-baiting. In the final essay, The Rhetoric of a Closed Society Braden analyzes the movement opposing racial integration in Mississippi. Showing how the White Citizens' Council, Governor Ross Barnett, and other leaders manipulated the public to make the state a closed society from 1954 to 1964. Although he takes pains to establish the historical context in each of these essays, Braden's emphasis as a rhetorical critic is always on the speeches themselves. He pays close attention to the kinds of appeals found in the words of the speeches and to the individual speaker's use of images and phrases to evoke particular myths. But Braden looks beyond the texts of the speeches to take into account the full context of the event. ""What the reader finds in the printed version of the text,"" he explains, ""might be only a small part of the myth, a tiny hint of what grinds inside frustrated listeners. Sometimes the trigger for the myth does not even appear in the printed version, because face-to-face the listeners and the speaker, feeling a oneness, evoke the myth without verbal expression."" To account for this nonverbal dimension of oratory, these essays assess the impact of the location and atmosphere of the gathering, the audience's expectations, and the speaker's use of ritual, symbolic gestures, and props. During the nearly forty years of his career, Waldo Braden has been a pioneer in the serious study of oratory. A landmark work, The Oral Tradition in the South is the capstone to a distinguished career, a comprehensive and authoritative study of the subject Braden has so innovatively researched.

"Just as SNCC's courage and commitment shaped the civil rights movement in the 1960s, so this critical reflection by SNCC activists deepens our understanding of what happened then, and what it means today. A Circle of Trust is essential reading for all interested in struggles for a more inclusive democracy." Patricia Sullivan, Harvard University "The reminiscences and reflections voiced at the SNCC reunion remind us of the remarkable vision and courageous dedication of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Framed by Cheryl Greenberg's eloquent and probing introduction, the SNCC veterans' comments about the triumphs and limitations of their movement represent a major contribution to the historical literature on race and power in modern America." --Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida On the occasion of SNCC's twenty-fifth anniversary, more than five hundred people gathered at Trinity College in Connecticut to both celebrate and critique its accomplishments. In A Circle of Trust, forty SNCC members tell their stories and reflect on the contributions, limits, and legacies of the movement. Engaging in spirited debates with each other, with historians of the movement, and with contemporary political culture more broadly, these former and perpetual activists speak of their vision of a just society and what still remains to be done. Given racial tensions and the resurgence of the debate over integration and separatism in America in the 1990s, the content of this conference is more relevant than ever. Cheryl Greeenberg begins with an overview of SNCC and introduces each of the chapters of oral history. Participants explore the origins of SNCC, its early adoption of nonviolent protest, its ultimate renuciation of liberal integration and embrace of militant black radicalism, its refusal to repudiate far-left organizations, and controversies over the roles of women in SNCC and society at large. The result is a thoughtful, moving, if sometimes acrimonious account of one of the nation's most significant civil rights organizations and its successes and failures. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg is associate professor of history at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and author of "Or Does It Explode?" Black Harlem in the Great Depression.

The Punjab region of India sent more than 600,000 combatants to assist the British war effort during World War I. Their families back home, thousands of miles from the major scenes of battle, were desperate for war news, and newspapers provided daily reports to keep the local population up-to-date with developments on the Western Front. This book presents the first English-language translations of hundreds of articles published during World War I in the newsapers of the Punjab region. They offer a lens into the anxieties and aspirations of Punjabis, a population that committed resources, food, labour as well as combatants to the British war effort. Amidst a steadily growing field of studies on World War I that examine the effects of the war on colonial populations, War News in India makes a unique and timely contribution.

Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two grandmothers. While analyzing tapes of these sessions, she noticed the way inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of painful stories. The topics of the narratives she recorded include natural disasters, family dissolution, child abuse, sexual harassment, and suicide. In Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women. and Serious Stories, Thomas combines these personal accounts with original scholarship to uncover the meaning behind the startling presence of unconventional laughter in women's histories.

Going beyond conventional theories of humor, Thomas demonstrates how Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas of carnival laughter can apply to narratives about gender and the female body, and she finds in Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection a key to understanding the significance of laughter in a nonhumorous context. The author offers close readings of traumatic subject matter: a child witnessing her aunt attempt suicide with strychnine, a tornado that not only strips the feathers from chickens but compels a husband to leave his wife, a young woman watching her mother and grandmother being institutionalized against their will. The laughter that accompanies some of these stories expresses feelings of horror and the sense that boundaries are being transgressed. By studying the origins of this laughter, she suggests, we can reveal obscured meanings and gain a fuller understanding of painful family narrative.

Thomas offers a fresh perspective on women and laughter that has implications not only for the study of oral histories but for the written word as well. Equal parts solidscholarship and engaging personal narrative, her book is an important contribution to women's studies, folklore studies, and humor theory and should interest a wide academic audience.

"Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories provides a rich intersection of personal narrative, gendered experience, and folk tradition. Thomas's application of postmodern theory to the nuances of oral performance in family traditions is one of the most cogent articulations I have ever seen, and her treatment of humor as an index to more complex levels of meaning is fully persuasive. This book represents an impressive stride in the movement toward full utilization of women's perspectives in the discussion of traditional narrative forms". -- Barre Toelken, Utah State University

Ojibwa Narratives presents a fresh view of an early period of Ojibwa thought and ways of life in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the south shore of Lake Superior. This fascinating collection of fifty-two narratives features, for the first time, the tales of three nineteenth-century Ojibwa storytellers-Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jaques LePique-collected by Homer H. Kidder. By the late nineteenth century, typical Ojibwa life had been disrupted by the influx of white developers. But these tales reflect a nostalgic view of an earlier period when the heart of Ojibwa semi-nomadic culture remained intact, a time when the fur trade, together with seasonal roving, traditional transportation, and indigenous practices of child rearing, religious thought, art, and music permeated daily life.

Apache Mothers and Daughters, an illustrated family history of four generations of Chiricahua Apache women from 1848 to the present, is an eloquent testimonial to the strength and the stamina of Apache women. Over the course of thirty-five years, anthropologist Ruth McDonald Boyer collected the remembrances of Narcissus Duffy Gayton, great-great-granddaughter of the Apache chief Victorio. This intimate record of Apache life, told from an Apache perspective, highlights the key roles women play in tribal life. The story begins with Dilth-cheyhen, Victorio's daughter, whose life encompassed much of the traditional cultures of the Tchi-hene band of the Chiricahua Apaches. Her daughter, Beshad-e, was just sixteen in 1886 when the twenty-seven-year incarceration of the Chiricahuas began. Beshad-e and her family were forced to move to Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, and then New Mexico, where the Mescalero Apaches remain today. When Beshad-e's daughter Christine died of tuberculosis in her twenties, she left her daughter Narcissus in Beshad-e's care. After struggling to complete her education, Narcissus returned to serve her tribe as a registered nurse and an advocate for health care. This account documents rituals such as the puberty rite and the cradle-making ceremony, the importance of religion (traditional as well as Anglo) in Apache life, and the intense bond between Apache mothers and daughters.

The Cherokee husband-and-wife team who recorded and translated these folktales in 1961 helped to preserve the lore of seventeen elder Oklahoma Cherokees. This volume includes a wide variety of folklore; talking-animal stories, tales of a dragon-like creature and other monsters, accounts of little people inhabiting the hills of eastern Oklahoma, variants of European tales, fragments of Cherokee mythology and cosmology, and legends and lore of historical personages and events. The authors present the stories exactly as they were told, adding brief comments to place the stories clearly in the context of Cherokee life and thought. Musical notations are included wherever a song formed part of a story.

It is impossible to discuss what shamans are and what they do, contends Gregory G. Maskarinec, without knowing what shamans say. When Maskarinec took an interest in shaman rituals on his first visit to Nepal, he was told by many Nepalis and Westerners that the shamans he had encountered in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal engaged in "meaningless mumblings." But in the course of several years of fieldwork he learned from the shamans that both their long, publicly chanted rituals and their whispered, secretive incantations are oral texts meticulously memorized through years of training. In The Rulings of the Night, he shows how the shamans, during their dramatic night-long performances, create the worlds of words in which shamans exist. Maskarinec analyzes several complete repertoires of the texts that the shamans use to diagnose and treat afflictions that trouble their clients. Through these texts, they intervene to manipulate and change the world, replacing its unbalanced, inexpressible chaos with orderly, balanced, grammatical, and eloquently expressible states. They negotiate the relations between language, action, and social realities, providing a well-constructed and thoroughly consistent intentional universe-and only in that universe can all shaman actions and beliefs be fully comprehended.

They hid wherever they could for as long as it took the Allies to win the war -- Jewish children, frightened, alone, often separated from their families. For months, even years, they faced the constant danger of discovery, fabricating new identities at a young age, sacrificing their childhoods to save their lives. These secret survivors have suppressed these painful memories for decades. Now, in The Hidden Children, twenty-three adult survivors share their moving wartime experiences -- some for the first time.
There is Rosa, who hid in an impoverished one-room farmhouse with three others, sleeping on a clay pallet behind a stove; Renee, who posed as a Catholic and was kept in a convent by nuns who knew her secret; and Richard, who lived in a closet with his family for thirteen months. Their personal stories of belief and determination give a voice, at last, to the forgotten. Inspiring and life-affirming, The Hidden Children is an unparalleled document of witness, discovery, and the miracle of human courage.

This account of English working-class communities in England from 1940 to 1970 is told through the words and memories of those who lived then. The book is at once vivid, moving and eye-opening.

This was a period of change, usually seen as progress. People everywhere became better off. Healthcare was provided free and the education of children was universal. This was the first age of the domestic machine, releasing women for employment in paid work. The church, the police, teachers and the state became less sources of authority than of care. Television provided entertainment in the home. Improved methods of contraception emancipated sexuality. But, as Elizabeth Roberts shows, the caring state and the privatized family were also accompanied by a diminished sense of community an neighborliness, and by a loss of confidence in previously accepted standards and values in family relationships and the rearing of children.

"Women and Families" provides an always fascinating insight into the realities of social change during three crucial decades of English history. Few of the accepted generalizations - concerning the changing roles of men and women, the loss of working-class solidarity, the decline of family and communal life, the effects of high-rise living, and the benefits of healthcare and social welfare - survive the evidence so ably assembled here. This is an important and exciting book: it will be widely read.

In Cowboys and Kansas, Jim Hoy educates and entertains us with essays and tales about cowboy life that are based on personal experience, folklore, and history. Introduced to cowboys - famous and obscure, historical and contemporary - we hear them tell about troublesome horses they have ridden, rattlesnakes they have encountered, and outlaws they have met. We experience the details of the cowhand's daily work (roping, counting, and shipping cattle, riding with a trail herd) and play (rodeos, horse races, roping contests, poetry). We meet women drovers, Wild West show riders, and jockeys in a section on cowgirls, and we learn the history of cowboy boots, pants, hats, and saddles.

" Richard Lukas's book, encompassing the wartime recollections of sixty "ordinary" Poles under Nazi occupation, constitutes a valuable contribution to a new perspective on World War II. Lukas presents gripping first-person accounts of the years 1939-1945 by Polish Christians from diverse social and economic backgrounds. Their narratives, from both oral and written sources, contribute enormously to our understanding of the totality of the Holocaust. Many of those who speak in these pages attempted, often at extreme peril, to assist Jewish friends, neighbors, and even strangers who otherwise faced certain death at the hands of the German occupiers. Some took part in the underground resistance movement. Others, isolated from the Jews' experience and ill informed of that horror, were understandably preoccupied with their own survival in the face of brutal condition intended ultimately to exterminate or enslave the entire Polish population. These recollections of men and women are moving testimony to the human courage of a people struggling for survival against the rule of depravity. The power of their painful witness against the inhumanities of those times is undeniable.