Before the advent of machines in the late 1950s, hop-picking was undertaken by an army of people, many of whom saw the countryside only during these four to six weeks of picking. It was work and a way of earning some much needed extra money, but it was also their annual holiday, an opportunity to which they looked forward all year. For the 'home-dwellers' (the people local to the farms) it meant extra work, sometimes unpaid and always hard. This fascinating and informative collection of reminiscences has been compiled using the contributors' own words. It captures the lives of the hop-pickers in every detail, from the preparation and anticipation before departure, through the epic journeys to the hopfields and tiring work during the harvest, to the evenings and days off spent at the pub, round a fire or with the family. Throughout, the collection is brought to life by numerous anecdotes, both humorous and moving. Despite hardship and poverty, there is a deep-rooted nostalgia for a way of life that no longer exists. One-time hop-pickers miss the warm camaraderie, the open honesty and the satisfaction of working together for a common purpose: to harvest the hops. These emotions are all recorded here.

Some beg for forgiveness. Others claim innocence. At least three cheer for their favorite football teams.

Death waits for us all, but only those sentenced to death know the day and the hour--and only they can be sure that their last words will be recorded for posterity. "Last Words of the Executed" presents an oral history of American capital punishment, as heard from the gallows, the chair, and the gurney.

The product of seven years of extensive research by journalist Robert K. Elder, the book explores the cultural value of these final statements and asks what we can learn from them. We hear from both the famous--such as Nathan Hale, Joe Hill, Ted Bundy, and John Brown--and the forgotten, and their words give us unprecedented glimpses into their lives, their crimes, and the world they inhabited. Organized by era and method of execution, these final statements range from heartfelt to horrific. Some are calls for peace or cries against injustice; others are accepting, confessional, or consoling; still others are venomous, rage-fueled diatribes. Even the chills evoked by some of these last words are brought on in part by the shared humanity we can't ignore, their reminder that we all come to the same end, regardless of how we arrive there."

Last Words of the Executed" is not a political book. Rather, Elder simply asks readers to listen closely to these voices that echo history. The result is a riveting, moving testament from the darkest corners of society.

When four New York City police officers killed Amadou Diallo in 1999, the forty-one shots they fired echoed loudly across the nation. In death, Diallo joined a long list of young men of color killed by police fire in cities and towns all across America. Through innuendos of criminality, many of these victims could be discredited and, by implication, held responsible for their own deaths. But Diallo was an innocent, a young West African immigrant doing nothing more suspicious than returning home to his Bronx apartment after working hard all day in the city. Protesters took to the streets, successfully demanding that the four white officers be brought to trial. When the officers were acquitted, however, horrified onlookers of all races and ethnicities despaired of justice. In ""41 Shots...and Counting"", Beth Roy offers an oral history of Diallo's death. Through interviews with members of the community, with police officers and lawyers, with government officials and mothers of young men in jeopardy, the book traces the political and racial dynamics that placed the officers outside Diallo's house that night, their fingers on symbolic as well as actual triggers. With lucid analysis, Roy explores events in the courtroom, in city hall, in the streets, and in the police precinct, revealing the interlacing conflict dynamics. ""41 Shots...and Counting"" allows the reader to consider the implications of the Diallo case for our national discourses on politics, race, class, crime, and social justice.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, born out of the 1934 West Coast maritime and San Francisco general strikes under the charismatic leadership of Harry Bridges, has been known from the start for its strong commitment to democracy, solidarity, and social justice. In this collection of firsthand narratives, union leaders and rank-and-file workers - from the docks of Pacific Coast ports to the fields of Hawaii to bookstores in Portland, Oregon - talk about their lives at work, on the picket line, and in the union.

Workers recall the back-breaking, humiliating conditions on the waterfront before they organized, the tense days of the 1934 strike, the challenges posed by mechanization, the struggle against racism and sexism on the job, and their activism in other social and political causes. Their stories testify to the union's impact on the lives of its members and also to its role in larger events, ranging from civil rights battles at home to the fights against fascism and apartheid abroad.

"Solidarity Stories" is a unique contribution to the literature on unions. There is a power and immediacy in the voices of workers that is brilliantly expressed here. Taken together, these voices provide a portrait of a militant, corruption-free, democratic union that can be a model and an inspiration for what a resurgent American labor movement might look like. The book will appeal to students and scholars of labor history, social and economic history, and social change, as well as trade unionists and anyone interested in labor politics and history.

Harvey Schwartz is an oral historian at the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University, and curator of the Oral History Collection, ILWU Library.

"Harvey Schwartz is the dockworkers' Studs Terkel. "Solidarity Stories" is right up there with the best of Terkel's books, an inspiring account in their own words of how the men and women working the Pacific Coast docks and beyond built a great union and won dignity and fair pay on the job. Schwartz's oral history is so well organized and fully annotated that it rises to the level of a genuine history of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union." - David Brody, professor emeritus, University of California, Davis

"An engaging and revealing story about the 'making' of one of our country's most democratic and progressive unions - a story of the past that speaks powerfully to the challenges facing labor today." - Howard Kimeldorf, University of Michigan

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers' radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In "Chicana Sexuality and Gender," she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. Lopez and Yolanda Lopez.

Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernan Cortes during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

Do, Die, or Get Along weaves together voices of twenty-six people who have intimate connections to two neighboring towns in the southwestern Virginia coal country. Filled with evidence of a new kind of local outlook on the widespread challenge of small community survival, the book tells how a confrontational ""do-or-die"" past has given way to a ""get-along"" present built on coalition and guarded hope. St. Paul and Dante are six miles apart; measured in other ways, the distance can be greater. Dante, for decades a company town controlled at all levels by the mine owners, has only a recent history of civic initiative. In St. Paul, which arose at a railroad junction, public debate, entrepreneurship, and education found a more receptive home. The speakers are men and women, wealthy and poor, black and white, old-timers and newcomers. Their concerns and interests range widely, including the battle over strip mining, efforts to control flooding, the 1989-90 Pittston strike, the nationally acclaimed Wetlands Estonoa Project, and the grassroots revitalization of both towns led by the St. Paul Tomorrow and Dante Lives On organizations. Their talk of the past often invokes an ethos, rooted in the hand-to-mouth pioneer era, of short-term gain. Just as frequently, however, talk turns to more recent times, when community leaders, corporations, unions, the federal government, and environmental groups have begun to seek accord based on what will be best, in the long run, for the towns. The story of Dante and St. Paul, Crow writes, ""gives twenty-first-century meaning to the idea of the good fight."" This is an absorbing account of persistence, resourcefulness, and eclectic redefinition of success and community revival, with ramifications well beyond Appalachia.

Presents a work of personal histories from the villages all around the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. This book is a work of a collection of memories, and includes stories and photographs from the villages: Acrefair, Cefn Mawr, Froncysyllte, Garth, Newbridge, Pentre, Rhosymedre and Trevor.

This book documents the history of two celebrated mines in Sussex County, New Jersey, through the eyes of those who lived it. The two mines, consolidated in 1897 under the New Jersey Zinc Company, were recognised world-wide for their diverse and magnificent mineral deposits and are acknowledged as the birthplace of the US zinc industry. At its peak of operations in Sussex County in the first half of the 20th century, the Zinc Company employed over 2000 hourly workers. The Company developed the towns of Franklin and Ogdensburg for the miners, and one of them, Franklin, became known as the 'model mining town of America'. The book is divided into three parts: The Mines and the Miners; The Model Mining Town of America; and The Legacy and the Future. In the first two parts, the narratives explore the positive and negative aspects of life in the mines and in the company towns. In these sections, the author compares the lives of Zinc Company miners to those of other hard-rock miners in the US. The third part looks at the continuing educational impact of the mines, including the influence on the development of local museums and on the Smithsonian Institution's mine exhibit that opened in 1997.

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.

In this provocative study, Stephen Howe traces the sources and ancestries of the Afrocentric movement, and closely analyses the writings of its leading proponents. Hard-hitting yet subtle and scholarly in its appraisal of Afrocentric ideas, and based on wide-ranging research in the histories both of Afro-America and of Africa itself, Afrocentrism not only demolishes the mythical "history" taught by black ultra-nationalists but suggests paths towards a true historical consciousness of Africa and its diaspora.

This book consists of essays on methodological issues by Africana (African and African American) women scholars who have successfully employed oral narrative methods in their research. Some themes covered in these essays are the strengths of oral narrative research for expanding and transforming knowledge about black women and how these scholars learned to conduct oral narrative research; descriptions of the types of narratives they have gathered, the difficulties they have encountered and how these were overcome; and the ethical dilemmas faced while undertaking their research endeavors. What makes this book a valuable teaching tool are the pedagogical suggestions and research artifacts contained within. Contributors have described one or two activities that may assist instructorÆs efforts to teach oral narrative methodologies. Methodological essays about the phenomenological and empirical aspects of carrying out oral narrative research from an Afrafeminist/womanist standpoint are rare and book-length works are almost nonexistent. Oral Narrative Research with black women participates in the growing movement of Afrafeminist/womanist scholarship that fills this void. This is an insightful, thought-provoking resource for researchers, students, and scholars interested in conducting qualitative research or who want to include black women in their research.

Ultimately, World War II was the first war won by technology, but within only a few weeks after the war began, the U.S. Navy realized its torpedo program was a dismal failure. Submarine skippers reported that most of their torpedoes were either missing the targets or failing to explode if they did hit. The United States had to work fast if it expected to compete with the Japanese Long Lance, the biggest and fastest torpedo in the world, and Germany's electric and sonar models. Hellions of the Deep tells the dramatic story of how Navy planners threw aside the careful procedures of peacetime science and initiated "radical research" gathering together the nation's best scientists and engineers in huge research centers and giving them freedom of experimentation to create sophisticated weaponry with a single goal--winning the war.

The largest center for torpedo work was a requisitioned gymnasium at Harvard University, where the most famous names in science worked with the best graduate students from all around the country at the business of war. They had to produce tangible weapons, to consider production and supply tactics, to take orders from the military, and, in many cases, also to teach the military how to use the weapons they developed. World War II grew into a chess match played by scientists and physicists, and it became the only war in history to be won by weapons invented during the conflict.

For this book, Robert Gannon conducted numerous interviews over a twenty-year period with scientists, engineers, physicists, submarine skippers, and Navy bureaucrats, all involved in the development of the advanced weapons technology that won the war. While the search for new weapons was deadly serious, stretching imagination and resourcefulness to the limit each day, the need was obvious: American ships were being blown up daily just outside the Boston harbor. These oral histories reveal that, in retrospect, surprising even to those who went through it, the search for the "hellions of the deep" was, for many, the most exciting period of their lives.

1. Valuing the Subjective Experience: Oral History as Qualitative Research / 2. Using Theoretical Perspectives for Oral History Research in Social Work and Social Work Education / 3. Making a Bridge: Moving from Social Work Practice Knowledge and Skill to Oral History Research Skill / 4. Generating and Recording Oral Histories: Process and Method / 5. Analyzing and Interpreting Data and Writing Up the Project / 6. Black Family Adaption, Survival, and Growth Strategies: An Oral History Project / 7. The Realities of Soviet Jewish Migration: Illustrated Through Slava's Narratives / 8. Recapturing the Purpose of Settlements Through Oral History / 9. Oral History Methodology to Examine Issues of Adolescent Mothers / 10. Understanding Communities: The Pliny Street Block Association / 11. Concluding Remarks: Incorporating Oral History in Social Work Research / References

How does context shape biography? How do language and relationships affect the development of people's work lives? An international group of scholars from diverse disciplines addresses these and other issues in this volume of The Narrative Study of Lives. They explore what it means to take narrative seriously and how an empathic stance in narrative research opens out on the dialogic self. The contributors also consider questions of how participants make meaning out of their experience in the framework of available interpretive horizons. In addition, there are sections that use narrative approaches to develop a deeper understanding of loneliness and the "coming out" process in homosexuality. This volume examines the many ways in which people interpret their experience and explores conceptual avenues to make use of these understandings in the analysis of human life. Those interested in qualitative methods, evaluation, and education research will find Interpreting Experience to be an invaluable contribution.

In the spring of 1935, at Snaketown, Arizona, two Pima Indians recounted and translated their entire traditional creation narrative. Juan Smith, reputedly the last tribesman with extensive knowledge of the Pima version of this story, spoke and sang while William Smith Allison translated into English and Julian Hayden, an archaeologist, recorded Allison's words verbatim. The resulting document, the "Hohokam Chronicles", is the most complete natively articulated Pima creation narrative ever written and a rare example of a single-narrator myth. Now this extraordinary work, composed of thirty-six separate stories, is presented in its entirety for the first time. Beautifully expressed, the narrative constitutes a kind of scripture for a native church, beginning with the creation of the universe out of the void and ending with the establishment in the sixteenth century of present-day villages. Central to the story is the murder/resurrection of a god-man, Siuuhu, who summoned the Pimas and Papagos (Tohono O'odham) as his army of vengeance and brought about the conquest of his murderers, the ancient Hohokam. Donald Bahr extensively annotates the text and supplements it with other Pima-Papago versions of similar stories. Important as a social and historic document, this book adds immeasurably to the growing body of Native American literature and to our knowledge of the development of Pima-Papago culture.

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.

"This volume is especially appealing in that it celebrates diversity and embraces disagreement. . . . The narrative scholar, regardless of her/his research tradition or field, will most certainly benefit from the diversity and depth provided in The Narrative Study of Lives. Editors Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich have admirably fulfilled their criteria of breadth, coherence, and aesthetic appeal for works included in this volume. Moreover, they have provided the necessary forum for the study of lives and life histories. We can only hope to continue the conversation in future volumes." --Journal of Contemporary Ethnography "Few questions have a longer, deeper, and livelier intellectual history than how we 'construct' our lives--and, indeed, how we create ourselves in the process. But it is a question newly alive today, for modern scholarship has brought challenging new perspectives to the study of life writing. Literary theorists, linguists, legal scholars, and even political activists are bringing new and powerful insights to bear. The Narrative Study of Lives provides a needed forum for the debates now in progress and should attract a loyal and numerous band of readers." --Jerome Bruner, New York University "For those psychologists searching for new approaches to the study of lives, this volume takes an important step toward the editors' promise of filling this gaping hole in psychology." --The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease How do we derive concepts from stories and then use these concepts to understand people? What would have to be added to transform story material from the journalistic or literary to the academic and theoretically-enriching? Addressing these and other such issues as the interface between life as lived and the social times, this group of distinguished contributors from six different countries and four different disciplines explores this emerging new field. Beginning with the philosophical framework that underlies the study of narrative, the book covers such questions as: What makes people want to preserve the stories of their past? What methods can be used to deconstruct a narrative text? Can what we learn from people's narratives of their past be used to account for their current psychological functioning? What happens if people lose their ability to narrate their story? Can people's narrative accounts tell us something about identity and its development? Useful to researchers and students of human development and behavior, The Narrative Study of Lives provides rich stories and analysis of narrative approaches to life history.

The Liberian civil wars of the 1990s and 2000s became notorious for their atrocities, and for the widespread use of child soldiers. Girls and young women accounted for up to 40 per cent of these soldiers, but their unique perspective and experiences have largely been excluded from accounts of the conflict. In Liberia's Women Veterans, Leena Vastapuu uses an innovative auto-photographic methodology to tell the story of two of Africa's most brutal civil wars through the eyes of 133 female former soldiers. Incorporating their testimonies alongside a series of vivid illustrations by Emmi Nieminen, the book provides an in-depth account of these women's experiences of trauma, stigma, and the challenges of reintegration into post-war society, as well as their hopes and aspirations for the future. Vastapuu argues that these women, too often been perceived merely as passive victims of the conflict, can in fact play an important role in post-war reconciliation and peace-building. Overturning gendered perceptions of warfare and militarism, the book provides a unique take on humanitarian practices and post-conflict societies, making essential reading for policymakers as well as students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

In 2018, Palestinians mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when over 750,000 people were uprooted and forced to flee their homes in the early days of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even today, the bitterness and trauma of the Nakba remains raw, and it has become the pivotal event both in the shaping of Palestinian identity and in galvanising the resistance to occupation. Unearthing an unparalleled body of rich oral testimony, An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba tells the story of this epochal event through the voices of the Palestinians who lived it, uncovering remarkable new insights both into Palestinian experiences of the Nakba and into the wider dynamics of the ongoing conflict. Drawing together Palestinian accounts from 1948 with those of the present day, the book confronts the idea of the Nakba as an event consigned to the past, instead revealing it to be an ongoing process aimed at the erasure of Palestinian memory and history. In the process, each unique and wide-ranging contribution leads the way for new directions in Palestinian scholarship.

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

The increased participation of women in the labour force was one of the most significant changes to Canadian social life during the quarter century after the close of the Second World War. Transforming Labour offers one of the first critical assessments of women's paid labour in this era, a period when more and more women, particularly those with families, were going 'out to work'.

Using case studies from across Canada, Joan Sangster explores a range of themes, including women's experiences within unions, Aboriginal women's changing patterns of work, and the challenges faced by immigrant women. By charting women's own efforts to ameliorate their work lives as well as factors that re-shaped the labour force, Sangster challenges the commonplace perception of this era as one of conformity, domesticity for women, and feminist inactivity. Working women's collective grievances fuelled their desire for change, culminating in challenges to the status quo in the 1960s, when they voiced their discontent, calling for a new world of work and better opportunities for themselves and their daughters.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, born out of the 1934 West Coast maritime and San Francisco general strikes under the charismatic leadership of Harry Bridges, has been known from the start for its strong commitment to democracy, solidarity, and social justice. In this collection of firsthand narratives, union leaders and rank-and-file workers - from the docks of Pacific Coast ports to the fields of Hawaii to bookstores in Portland, Oregon - talk about their lives at work, on the picket line, and in the union. Workers recall the back-breaking, humiliating conditions on the waterfront before they organized, the tense days of the 1934 strike, the challenges posed by mechanization, the struggle against racism and sexism on the job, and their activism in other social and political causes. Their stories testify to the union's impact on the lives of its members and also to its role in larger events, ranging from civil rights battles at home to the fights against fascism and apartheid abroad. Solidarity Stories is a unique contribution to the literature on unions. There is a power and immediacy in the voices of workers that is brilliantly expressed here. Taken together, these voices provide a portrait of a militant, corruption-free, democratic union that can be a model and an inspiration for what a resurgent American labor movement might look like. The book will appeal to students and scholars of labor history, social and economic history, and social change, as well as trade unionists and anyone interested in labor politics and history.

Collected in this book are the personal life histories of four female St'at'imc elders: Beverley Frank, Gertrude Ned, Laura Thevarge, and Rose Agnes Whitley. These elders are among the last remaining fluent speakers of St'at'imcets, a severely imperilled Northern Interior Salish language, also known as Lillooet, spoken in the southwest interior of British Columbia. Their stories are presented in the original St'at'imcets as well as in English translation. A morpheme-by-morpheme gloss is provided for the purposes of linguistic analysis. These texts are among the longest oral narratives of the Salish language to be grammatically analyzed. They are also of a rare type, in that they consist of personal memories rather than of myths or legends. They provide first-hand accounts of what it was like to be a female child growing up in the 1930s and '40s both within St'at'imc communities and in residential schools. Important historical information is woven into the stories - about events in the Lillooet area, the traditional St'at'imc way of life, and the consequences of contact with Western culture. When I Was Small - I Wan Kwikws will be of interest to members of St'at'imc communities, including teachers and curriculum developers, and to linguists, anthropologists, and others studying the St'at'imc, their culture, and their language.

"An Unauthorized Biography of the World" explores the practice of engaged oral history: the difficult, sometimes dangerous work of recovering fragments of human story that have gone missing from the official versions.
Michael Riordon has thirty years' experience as a writer and broadcaster in the field. Readers will encounter a gallery of brave, passionate people who gather silenced voices and lost life stories. The canvas is broad, the stakes are high: the battles for First Nations lands in Canada; environmental justice in Chicago; genocide in Peru; homeless people organizing in Cleveland; September 11/01, and after, in New York City; gay survivors of electroshock in Britain; the struggle to preserve a people's identity in Newfoundland; peasant resistance to a huge transnational gold mine in Turkey.

In August 1965 the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in flames and violence following an incident of police brutality. The official death toll was thirty-four; property losses reached hundreds of millions of dollars; but the political results were even more profound. The civil rights movement was placed on the defensive as the image of rioting blacks in the West replaced the image of meek and angelic protestors in the South. A white backlash ensued that led directly to Ronald Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966.This is the first comprehensive treatment of the uprising, its causes, and its aftermath, and is based on hundreds of oral histories and unprecedented archival research. With a cast that includes Ronald Reagan, Tom Bradley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Edmund G. Brown, the NAACP, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and thousands of blacks and whites, "Fire This Time" is a compelling account of an event that changed the face of racial justice in America.