More than a mode of gathering information about the past, oral history has become an international movement. Historians, folklorists, and other educational and religious groups now recognize the importance of preserving the recollections of people about the past. The recorded memories of famous and common folk alike provide a vital complement to textbook history, bringing the past to life through the stories of those who lived it.

Oral History is designed to introduce teachers, students, and interested individuals to the techniques, problems, and pleasures of collecting oral history. The authors, themselves experienced educators, examine the uses of oral history in the classroom, looking at a wide range of projects that have been attempted and focusing on those that have succeeded best.

Besides suggesting many possible projects, they discuss the necessary hardware and its use: recording equipment and procedures, interview outlines and preliminary research, photography and note-taking in the field, transcription and storage of information, legal forms, and more. For the teacher, the authors offer helpful advice on training students to be sensitive interviewers in both formal and informal situations.

How can oral histories collected in the classroom be put to use? The authors discuss their uses within the curriculum; in projects such as oral history archives, publications such as the popular Foxfire books, and other media productions; and in researching current community problems. Useful appendixes survey a variety of reference tools for the oral historian and describe in detail how a Foxfire-concept magazine may be developed.

Many defenders of slavery have maintained that the slaves in Texas were well-treated and happy, but as a former slave remarked, ""Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is - 'tis he who has endured."" Here are the tales of those who have endured - a collection of the voices of the ex-slaves themselves, recalling what their lives were like under slavery. Over one hundred former slaves describe their slavemasters, their work, runaway slaves, their recollections of the Civil War and, finally, the coming of freedom. The narratives were collected by WPA interviewers in the late 1930s and subsequently edited by Ron Tyler and Lawrence R. Murphy. ""The Slave Narratives of Texas"" is a highly informative and readable book that provides a valuable history of the institution of slavery in Texas. It is also a profoundly moving text that yields great insight into the full impact of slavery upon human lives.

In the mid- to late-1930s, while he was a student at the Gregorian University in Rome, Bernard Lonergan wrote a series of eight essays on the philosophy and theology of history. These essays foreshadow a number of the major themes in his life's work. The significance of these essays is enormous, not only for an understanding of the later trajectory of Lonergan's own work but also for the development of a contemporary systematic theology. In an important entry from 1965 in his archival papers, Lonergan wrote that the "mediated object" of systematics is Geschichte or the history that is lived and written about. In the same entry, he stated that the "doctrines" that this systematic theology would attempt to understand are focused on "redemption." The seeds of such a theology are planted in the current volume, where the formulae that are so pronounced in his later work first appear. Students of Lonergan's work will find their understanding of his philosophy profoundly affected by the essays in this volume.

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.

In the early twelfth century a Burgundian monk set out to tell the 500-year history of his monastery, embedded within a broader history of early medieval France. The Cartulary-Chronicle of St-Pierre of Beze is both a history of the monastery and a collection of its 331 charters, from its seventh-century foundation until the middle of the twelfth century. Beze was a Benedictine house whose history included at least six incidents of sacking and destruction - and according to its twelfth-century chronicler it always recovered and emerged stronger than ever. Combining the history of Burgundy and Francia with the history of his house, John, the chronicler, created a past for Beze as he wanted it to be remembered. Based on John's autograph manuscript, The Cartulary-Chronicle of St-Pierre of Beze is published here in full for the first time. While the monks of Beze have often been overshadowed by their more famous neighbours, the monks of Dijon, this edition recounts the history of one of the oldest houses in Burgundy and gives it its proper due.

Inspired by the question of "what's next?" in the field of Canadian women's and gender history, this broadly historiographical volume represents a conversation among established and emerging scholars who share a commitment to understanding the past from intersectional feminist perspectives. It includes original essays on Quebecois, Indigenous, Black, and immigrant women's histories and tackles such diverse topics as colonialism, religion, labour, warfare, sexuality, and reproductive labour and justice. Intended as a regenerative retrospective of a critically important field, this collection both engages analytically with the current state of women's and gender historiography in Canada and draws on its rich past to generate new knowledge and areas for inquiry.

Between 1915 and 1923, over one million Armenians died, victims of a genocidal campaign that is still denied by the Turkish government. Thousands of other Armenians suffered torture, brutality, deportation. Yet their story has received scant attention. Through interviews with a hundred elderly Armenians, Donald and Lorna Miller give the "forgotten genocide" the hearing it deserves. Survivors raise important issues about genocide and about how people cope with traumatic experience. Much here is wrenchingly painful, yet it also speaks to the strength of the human spirit.

This bilingual volume focuses on the teachings, experiences, and practical wisdom of expert Native orators as they instruct a younger generation about their place in the world. In carefully crafted presentations, Yup'ik elders speak about their "rules for right living"-values, beliefs, and practices-which illuminate the enduring and still-relevant foundations of their culture today. While the companion volume, Wise Words of the Yup'ik Peopleweaves together hundreds of statements by Yup'ik elders on the values that guide human relationships, Yup'ik Words of Wisdom, highlights the words of expert orators and focuses on key conversations that took place among elders and younger community members as the elders presented their perspectives on the moral underpinnings of Yup'ik social relations. The orators in this volume-including Frank Andrew from Kwigillingok, David Martin from Kipnuk, and Nelson Island elders Paul John and Thersea Moses-were raised in isolated Yup'ik communities in Alaska and were educated much like their parents and grandparents. Translated, edited, and organized for a general audience, this bilingual edition is for those who want to know not only what the elders have to say but also how they say it. A new introduction explores this book's impact over the past decade.

The charivari is a loud, late-night surprise house-visiting custom from members of a community, usually to a newlywed couple, accompanied by a qu?te (a request for a treat or money in exchange for the noisy performance) and/or pranks. Up to the first decades of the twentieth century, charivaris were for the most part enacted to express disapproval of the relationship that was their focus, such as those between individuals of different ages, races, or religions. While later charivaris maintained the same rituals, their meaning changed to a welcoming of the marriage.

Make the Night Hideous explores this mysterious transformation using four detailed case studies from different time periods and locations across English Canada, as well as first-person accounts of more recent charivari participants. Pauline Greenhill's unique and fascinating work explores the malleability of a tradition, its continuing value, and its contestation in a variety of discourses.

This hugely important and ground-breaking book -- an unprecedented oral history -- gives voice to a silent generation and tells the secret history of 20th century China.
In 1912, five thousand years of feudal rule ended in China. Warlords, Western businessmen, soldiers, missionaries and Japanese all ruled China, exploited and fought one another and the Chinese. In 1949, Mao Zedong came to power.
China Witness is both a journey through time and through the author's own country, and a memorial to an extraordinary generation of men and women who have survived war, invasion, revolution, famine and modernization -- to tell the story of their times. It is an extraordinary personal testimony from a normally silent generation who, in their lifetimes have seen China transformed from a largely peasant, agricultural country of more than 1.3 billion people into a modern state. These are ordinary people -- a herb woman at a market, retired teachers, a legendary "bandit" woman, Red Guards, oil pioneers, an acrobat, a naval general, a shoe mender, a lantern maker, taxi drivers, and others -- from west to east, across the vast country, now in their seventies, eighties and nineties, and whose memories will soon die with them.
Here, for the first time many of them speak out about their lives and private thoughts about what they witnessed. Together their intimate stories are perhaps the only accurate record of modern Chinese history.

"From the Hardcover edition."

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.

The Americanist community played a vital role in the Cold War, as well as in large part directing the cultural consumption of Soviet society and shaping perceptions of the US. To shed light onto this important, yet under-studied, academic community, Sergei Zhuk here explores the personal histories of prominent Soviet Americanists, considering the myriad cultural influences - from John Wayne's bravado in the film Stagecoach to Miles Davis - that shaped their identities, careers and academic interests. Zhuk's compelling account draws on a wide range of understudied archival documents, periodicals, letters and diaries as well as more than 100 exclusive interviews with prominent Americanists to take the reader from the post-war origins of American studies, via the extremes of the Cold War, thaw and perestroika, to Putin's Russia. Soviet Americana is a comprehensive insight into shifting attitudes towards the US throughout the twentieth century and an essential resource for all Soviet and Cold War historians.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Soviet philologist, literary dissident, and university professor Viktor Duvakin made it his mission to interview the members of the artistic avant-garde who had survived the Russian Revolution, Stalin's purges, and the Second World War. Based on archival materials held at the Moscow State University Library, Russian Modernism in the Memories of the Survivors catalogues six interviews conducted by Duvakin. The interviewees talk about their most intimate life experiences and give personal accounts of their interactions with famous writers and artists such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Marina Tsvetaeva. They offer insights into the world of Russian emigrants in Prague and Paris, the uprising against the Communist government, what it was like to work at the United Nations after the Second World War, and other important aspects of life in the Soviet Union and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Archival photographs, as well as hundreds of annotations to the text, are included to help readers understand the historical and cultural context of the interviews. The unique and previously unpublished materials in Russian Modernism in the Memories of the Survivors will be of great interest to anyone who wants to learn more about this fascinating period in Soviet history.

The Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was created in 1917, re-formed in 1938 and maintained after 1945. This book determines for the first time the reasons for the expansion and contraction of the service and the impact key individuals had on it and in turn the influence it had on its members. Hannah Roberts offers new insights into a previously little studied British military institution, which celebrates its centenary in 2017. She shows how political and military decision-making within the fluctuating national security situation, coupled with a growing cultural acceptability of women taking on military roles, allowed for the growth of the service in World War II into realms never expected of women. Although it shared a similar pattern in its formation to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and had a similar ethos to its Air Force counterpart, the WAAF, the WRNS took on a wider-ranging role in the war, in part due to the latitude afforded to the service because of its uniquely independent origins. From 1941 onward the WRNS spread internationally and subverted the combat taboo by adopting semi-combatant roles. Using twenty-one new oral histories and a multitude of archived personal documents, this book demonstrates the pivotal importance of the Women's Royal Naval Service in both the world wars.

Discover the true value and exciting possibilities of oral history in the library: learn new and compelling ways to engage your patrons by sharing personal and community history with them. Have you thought about creating a collection to capture the experiences of your community? Perhaps you already have an oral history collection, but it's gathering dust. In either case, this book can help. After outlining what it means to effectively create oral history content, the author discusses how to establish public access to your collection, how to promote the content to your community, and how to use oral history in your library programs. Collaborating with other organizations, working with volunteers, and funding initiatives are a few of the other topics covered. Brimming with ideas and practical advice, the guide is meant to inspire and empower, taking the hassle out of oral history and replacing it with embracing oral history's power and the tools to bring it into your library. If you have an oral history collection, this book will help you to maximize its potential. If you don't have one, this book will show you how your library could benefit from one, what it can help your library to accomplish, and how to get started. If you're seeking a path to community engagement, start here. Shows librarians how to realize the potential of oral history collections Goes beyond content creation to cover creating access to and promoting oral history as well as using it to enhance library programming Provides public librarians a targeted way to engage with their communities

This bilingual volume focuses on the teachings, experiences, and practical wisdom of expert Native orators as they instruct a younger generation about their place in the world. In carefully crafted presentations, Yup'ik elders speak about their "rules for right living"-values, beliefs, and practices-which illuminate the enduring and still-relevant foundations of their culture today. While the companion volume, Wise Words of the Yup'ik Peopleweaves together hundreds of statements by Yup'ik elders on the values that guide human relationships, Yup'ik Words of Wisdom, highlights the words of expert orators and focuses on key conversations that took place among elders and younger community members as the elders presented their perspectives on the moral underpinnings of Yup'ik social relations. The orators in this volume-including Frank Andrew from Kwigillingok, David Martin from Kipnuk, and Nelson Island elders Paul John and Thersea Moses-were raised in isolated Yup'ik communities in Alaska and were educated much like their parents and grandparents. Translated, edited, and organized for a general audience, this bilingual edition is for those who want to know not only what the elders have to say but also how they say it. A new introduction explores this book's impact over the past decade.

In Newspaper City, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh scrutinizes the reluctance of early Torontonians to pave their streets. He demonstrates how Toronto's two liberal newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Toronto Daily Star, nevertheless campaigned for surface infrastructure as the leading expression of modern urbanity, despite the broad resistance of property owners to pay for infrastructure improvements under local improvements by-laws. To boost paving, newspapers used their broadsheets to fashion two imagined cities for their readers: one overrun with animals, dirt, and marginal people, the other civilized, modern, and crowned with clean streets. However, the employment of capitalism to generate traditional public goods, such as concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, regulated pedestrianism, and efficient automobilism, is complicated. Thus, the liberal newspapers' promotion of a city of orderly infrastructure and contented people in actual Toronto proved strikingly illiberal. Consequently, Mackintosh's study reveals the contradictory nature of newspapers and the historiographical complexities of newspaper research.

Barbadians were among the thousands of British West Indians who migrated to Cuba in the early twentieth century in search of work. They were drawn there by employment opportunities fuelled largely by US investment in Cuban sugar plantations. Tell My Mother I Gone to Cuba: Stories of Early Twentieth-Century Migration from Barbados is their story. The migrants were citizens of the British Empire, and their ill-treatment in Cuba led to a diplomatic tiff between British and Cuban authorities. The author draws from contemporary newspaper articles, official records, journals and books to set the historical contexts which initiated this intra-Caribbean migratory wave. Through oral histories, it also gives voice to the migrants' compelling narratives of their experience in Cuba. One of the oral histories recorded in the book is that of the author's mother, who was born in Cuba of Barbadian parents.

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.

The world's first women combat pilots were members of the Soviet Army Air Force, flying fighters and bomber aircraft opposite the Luftwaffe. Thirty women flyers received Hero of the Soviet Union awards, one of that nation's highest honors.

During three visits to Moscow during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Anne Noggle interviewed more than seventy of these veteran pilots. Freed by glasnost to speak openly of their experiences, they told of flying flimsy aircraft and watching many of their friends -- as well as foes -- fall to earth in flames.

But equally courageous were the women's efforts to show the Red Army that they were adequate to the great role they sought. The women had to grapple with deep distrust from male pilots and officers, against whom they eventually prevailed. War, Stalin-era politics, and human emotion mix in these gripping, first-person accounts.

Parliament is Britain's most important political institution, yet its workings remain obscure to academics and the wider public alike. MPs are often seen as 'out of touch' or 'all the same' and their individual motivations, achievements and regrets remain in the background of party politics. In this book, Emma Peplow and Priscila Pivatto draw on the History of Parliament Trust's collection of oral history interviews with postwar British MPs to highlight their diverse political experiences in Parliament. Featuring extracts from a collection of interviews with over 160 former MPs who sat from the 1950s until the 2000s, The Political Lives of Postwar British MPs gives a voice to those MPs' stories. It explores why they became interested in politics, how they found their seat and fought election campaigns, what it felt like to speak in the chamber and how their class or gender dictated their experiences at Westminster. In the process, readers will be given rare glimpse into the spaces inhabited by MPs, the political rivalries and friendships and the rising and falling of their careers. With accounts from MPs of all political stripes, from the well-known like David Owen and Ann Taylor to those who sat for just a few years such as Denis Coe; from old political families like Douglas Hurd to those like Maria Fyfe who felt themselves outsiders, this book provides deep insight into the political lives of MPs in our age.

Discover the stories passed down over time from the people of the Ozark region. Oral history is shared through the years to provide a perspective on the landscape and people who inhabit the beautiful, culturally rich area. These oral histories show essential connections among settlers in a challenging landscape. Written to inspire history buffs, outdoor enthusiasts, travelers, tycoons in training and students of all ages, this path-breaking collection will take readers deep into a region averse to change, tricky to know, yet brimming with American culture.

Decree-making is a defining aspect of ancient Greek political activity: it was the means by which city-state communities went about deciding to get things done. This two-volume work provides a new view of the decree as an institution within the framework of fourth-century Athenian democratic political activity. Volume 1 consists of a comprehensive account of the literary evidence for decrees of the fourth-century Athenian assembly. Volume 2 analyses how decrees and decree-making, by offering both an authoritative source for the narrative of the history of the Athenian demos and a legitimate route for political self-promotion, came to play an important role in shaping Athenian democratic politics. Peter Liddel assesses ideas about, and the reality of, the dissemination of knowledge of decrees among both Athenians and non-Athenians and explains how they became significant to the wider image and legacy of the Athenians.

The Cold War is one of the furthest-reaching and longest-lasting conflicts in modern history. It spanned the globe - from Greece to China, Hungary to Cuba - and lasted for almost half a century. It has shaped political relations to this day, drawing new physical and ideological boundaries between East and West. In this meticulously researched account, Bridget Kendall explores the Cold War through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand. Alongside in-depth analysis that explains the historical and political context, the book draws on exclusive interviews with individuals who lived through the conflict's key events, offering a variety of perspectives that reveal how the Cold War was experienced by ordinary people. From pilots making food drops during the Berlin Blockade and Japanese fishermen affected by H-bomb testing to families fleeing the Korean War and children whose parents were victims of McCarthy's Red Scare, The Cold War covers the full geographical and historical reach of the conflict. The Cold War is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how the tensions of the last century have shaped the modern world, and what it was like to live through them.

The 1970s were the era of the three-day week, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the winter of discontent, trade union Bolshevism and wildcat strikes. Through sitcoms, Raising Laughter provides a fresh look at one of our most divisive and controversial decades. Aside from providing entertainment to millions of people, the sitcom is a window into the culture of the day. Many of these sitcoms tapped into the decade's sense of cynicism, failure and alienation, providing much-needed laughter for the masses. Shows like Rising Damp and Fawlty Towers were classic encapsulations of worn-out, run-down Britain, while the likes of Dad's Army looked back sentimentally at a romanticised English past. For the first time, the stories behind the making of every sitcom from the 1970s are told by the actors, writers, directors and producers who made them all happen. This is nostalgia with a capital N, an oral history, the last word, and an affectionate salute to the kind of comedy programme that just isn't made anymore.