"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.

A major historical document, this book contains interviews with more than 150 Germans who witnessed, participated in, or resisted the rise of Adolph Hitler. The testimony comes from well-known figures like Manfred Rommel and Helmut Kohl former soldiers and ordinary civilians and victims of the criminal policies of the Nazi regime. Haunting and extraordinary tales of horror, courage, grim determination, and moral confusion fill these pages. Voices from the Third Reich takes the material of epic history and presents it in the form of the individual human experiences of men, women, and children subjected to the pressures of total war in a fascist state.

Am 25. Juli 1936 beschloss Hitler an der Seite General Francos im Spanischen Burgerkrieg zu intervenieren. Die geschichtstrachtige "Bayreuther Entscheidung" legte die Weichen fur eine faschistische Diktatur in Spanien, die das Land uber vierzig Jahre vom Rest Europas isolieren sollte. Der deutsche Geschaftsmann Johannes Bernhardt wurde als Protagonist des geheimen Treffens in Bayreuth von Hitler mit dem Aufbau eines oekonomischen Schattenimperiums in Spanien beauftragt. Eine Analyse historischer Schlusseltexte und anderer medialer Inszenierungen von Bernhardt und der deutschen Intervention in Spanien zeigt, welcher sprachlichen Strategien sich Historiker, Journalisten und Autoren bedienen, um die Erinnerungsgeschichte der deutsch-spanischen Beziehungen seit acht Jahrzehnten zu konstruieren, manipulieren und revidieren.

This book is part of the Tempus Oral History series, which combines the reminiscences of local people with old photographs and archived images to show the history of various local areas in Great Britain, through their streets, shops, pubs, and people.

The Battle of Britain was a critical period in the history of WWII when, thanks to the heroics of the RAF and their Spitfire and Hurricane aircraft, Britain managed to withstand the Luftwaffe onslaught and avoid the invasion that would have followed. This new account tells the story through the memories of surviving pilots and other military staff involved in every aspect of the effort. The story emerges through the authentic voices of the 'ordinary' participants and reveals their experiences and attitudes as well as their personal memories of the heroes who have traditionally been the protagonists in the story - pilots Douglas Bader, Johnnie Johnson, Adolf Galland, and war leaders Hugh Dowding and Winston Churchill. This title is compiled from new interviews with the surviving veterans with special access through The Battle of Britain Fighter Association. The summer of 2010 marks the 70th anniversary of the conflict.

This text tells the story of the lives of migrant black African men who work in the South African gold mines, recounted from their own point of view and, as much as possible, in their own words. Dunbar Moodie examines the operation of local power structures and resistances, changes in production techniques, the limits and successes of unionization, and the nature of ethnic conflicts at different periods and on different terrains of struggle. He treats his subject thematically and historically, examining how notions of integrity, manhood, sexuality, work, power, solidarity, and violence have all changed over time, especially with the shift to a proletarianized work-force on the mines in the 1970s.;Moodie integrates analyses of individual life-strategies with theories of social change, illuminating the ways in which these play off each other in historically significant ways. He shows how human beings (in this case, African men) build integrity and construct their own social order, even in situations of apparent total repression.

The spoken word is an invaluable asset which strengthens human experience of the past and adds vigor to the documentation of historical accounts. This series presents major events in American history through the rich personal testimonies of those who were there.

Each volume includes:

-- A preface illuminating historical background and research details

-- A collection of oral testimonies selected from a range of rare and hard-to-find sources

-- A concluding analytical chapter

-- Notes, bibliography and an index

-- Illustrations