Churchill's War in Words transports the reader back to the storm-struck days of the Second World War. Focussing only on words used at the time, it reveals the way that Winston Churchill talked about the conflict in public and in private - and the way that he himself was viewed at the time by family, friends, politicians, military leaders, staff , voters, allies and enemies.Presented in chronological order and accompanied by short year-by-year introductions, the quotations convey afresh the full force of Churchill's oratory, the wit he displayed in the face of often appalling odds, and the hopes and fears that he inspired in those around him. Together they reveal to the modern reader what it was truly like to be locked in a struggle in which victory - or total defeat - was yet to be decided. Together they tell the extraordinary story of Churchill's War in Words.

As a subculture, cloistered monastic nuns live hidden from public view by choice. Once a woman joins the cloister and makes final vows, she is almost never seen and her voice is not heard; her story is essentially nonexistent in the historical record and collective, public history. From interviews conducted over six years, Abbie Reese tells the stories of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, a cloistered contemplative order at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois. Seldom leaving their 25,000-square-foot gated enclosure, members of this community embrace an extreme version of poverty and anonymity-a separation that enables them to withdraw from the world to devote their lives to prayer. This removal, they contend, allows them to have a greater impact on humanity than if they maintained direct contact with loved ones and strangers. Dedicated to God explores individual and cultural identity through oral history interviews with several generations of nuns, focusing on the origins and life stories of the women who have chosen to become members of one of the strictest religious orders. But the narrative is also one of a collective memory and struggle against extinction and modernity, a determination to create community within the framework of ancient rules. The author's stunning photographs of their dual worlds, religious and quotidian, add texture to the narrative. This artistic and ethnographic work highlights the countercultural values and dedication of individuals who, at incredible personal cost, live for love of God and humanity, out of faith in what cannot be seen, and with the belief that they will be rewarded in the afterlife.

The Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been in the news constantly since the U.S. began using it as a prison camp after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. With all the controversy surrounding the torture of suspects at the prison, its precedent-setting prior use as an immigrant detention center for Haitian and Cuban boat people has been largely overlooked. Overcoming Guantanamo is an oral history of the rafter crisis and the camps written by an anthropologist who worked in the camps. More than a straight oral history, the book is a study of group-level trauma and coping. Using a trauma studies perspective along with discourse-oriented models from anthropology, the book discusses examples of the extensive camp artwork as well as the oral history narratives as part of a meaning-making process that necessarily occurs as people recover from trauma. Campisi worked in the Cuban camps for a year as a temporary employee of the Justice Department's mediation service, and then returned to analyze the camps from an anthropological point of view. She conducted life history interviews of twelve of the rafters, which included the process of disenchantment with the Revolution, leaving Cuba, the rafting trip, life on the base, and their initial experiences in Cuban Miami, focusing on life on the base. Their stories are gripping. Some people provided disturbing accounts of military abuses, which is an ancillary reason that Overcoming Guantanamo is important right now: human rights violations that occurred at the prison for terror suspects also occurred in the Cuban and Haitian camps, but few people know about them. All such violations should be taken into account in current debates about the use of the base. While it is important as an oral history, the book's examination of the camp culture also makes it a new contribution to the field of anthropology. Campisi argues that because trauma has cognitive and emotional impacts that require an individual to create new meanings, when people work through individually-traumatic experiences as a group, the new meanings they generate together create new cultural forms. Hence, social trauma can be culturally generative. In these times, that is an important conclusion.

From Loki to Thor, Ragnarok to Beowulf A gripping and truly mesmerising delve into the Norse legends From bestselling books to blockbusting Hollywood movies, the myths of the Scandinavian gods and heroes are part of the modern day landscape. For over a millennium before the arrival of Christianity, the legends permeated everyday life in Iceland and the northern reaches of Europe. Since that time, they have been perpetuated in literature and the arts in forms as diverse as Tolkien and Wagner, graphic novels to the world of Marvel. This book covers the entire cast of supernatural beings, from gods to trolls, heroes to monsters, and deals with the social and historical background to the myths, topics such as burial rites, sacrificial practices and runes.

The country is bankrupt, the gap between rich and poor is widening, the church has retreated from the inner cities, and even in the more affluent suburbs, many young people see the church as irrelevant - out of touch. No, it's not 2012. It's 1938. And a man called George MacLeod, and a group of like-minded friends and colleagues, have a vision of how to put the church with its message of 'good news to the poor' right back at the centre of life. To make it speak again to ordinary people. If the rest of the church had followed their example, maybe 2012 would have looked very different. This is their story. Please God it's not too late to listen.

Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.

For too long, Africa’s history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.

In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history – from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story.

The result is a gripping new account of Africa: an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

History students read a lot. They read primary sources. They read specialized articles and monographs. They sometimes read popular histories. And they read textbooks. Yet students are beginners, and as beginners they need to learn the differences among various kinds of readings - their natures, their challenges, and the unique expectations one needs to bring to each of them. Reading History is a practical guide to help students read better. Uniquely designed with the author's engaging explanations in the margins, the book describes primary sources across various genres, including documents of practice, treatises, and literary works, as well as secondary sources such as textbooks, articles, and monographs. An appendix contains tips and questions for reading primary or secondary sources. Full of practical advice and hands-on training that allows students to be successful, Reading History will cultivate a wider appreciation for the discipline of history.

An introduction about the Women's Land Army in the First and Second World Wars is followed by reminiscences, recorded recently by the editor, of ten ex-Land Girls. It is co-published by NMS Enterprises Limited - Publishing and the European Ethnological Research Centre (EERC) an independent unit within Celtic & Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Virgil Richardson blazed his own unique trail through the twentieth century: a co-founder of Harlem's American Negro Theater, 1930s radio personality, World War II pilot, and expatriate for most of his life. In Flight, this remarkable man tells his story in his own vivid words. Educated in Texas, Richardson set out for New York City in 1938 to build a career on the stage. Just when he was on the brink of success as an actor, World War II broke out and he was drafted into the army. After overcoming numerous obstacles, Richardson became a Tuskegee cadet in 1943, and later saw action flying over the battlefields of Europe. Upon returning to the racially divided U.S., he decided to move to Mexico, where he encountered a society quite different from the one he had left behind. Compellingly told and historically fascinating, this is the story of a determined individual unwilling to accept the limited options of Jim Crow America.

'An extraordinary book . . . vivid and heart-breaking' The Jewish Chronicle Through the discovery of a precious friendship album which belonged to 12-year-old Alie, a Jewish schoolgirl in Amsterdam, Claudia Carli has traced and preserved the lives of an entire class of girls, most of whom did not survive the War. Alie and her friends are brought touchingly and vividly to life, along with their writings, in this extraordinary book. Their everyday hopes, pleasures and longings are offset by the constant fear of a knock on the door, a missing friend from class, a family member taken away. Alie and her mother were to die in Sobibor in 1943. Alie's sister Gretha survived Auschwitz and kept her promise to her sister to preserve the friendship album so long as she hoped to live. This book will sit alongside Anne Frank's diary and The Cutout Girl as a unique window into occupied Amsterdam and the girls who will now never be forgotten.

This oral history of London's East End spans the period after World War I to the upsurge of prosperity at the beginning of the 1960s--a time period which saw fresh waves of immigrants in the area, the Fascist marches of the 1930s, and its spirited recovery after virtual obliteration during the Blitz. Piers Dudgeon has listened to dozens of people who remember this fiercely proud quarter to record their real-life experiences of what it was like before it was fashionable to buy a home in the Docklands. They talk of childhood and education, of work and entertainment, of family, community values, health, politics, religion, and music. Their stories will make you laugh and cry. It is people's own memories that make history real and this engrossing book captures them vividly.

This title provides a collection of oral histories that reveal the loss of cultural continuity, identity, shifts in family responsibilities, gender roles and fractured relationships between generations. It shows how these are just some of the challenges people face as they attempt to rebuild lives and communities.

Of the 400,000 German-speaking Jews that escaped the Third Reich, about 16,000 ended up in Shanghai, China. This groundbreaking volume gathers 20 years of interviews with over 100 former Shanghai refugees. It offers a moving collective portrait of courage, culture shock, persistence, and enduring hope in the face of unimaginable hardships.

Immigrants from Pakistan, Egypt, India, and Palestine who were racially profiled and detained following the September 11 attacks tell their personal stories in a collection which explores themes of transnationalism, racialization, and the global war on terror, and explains the human cost of suspending civil liberties after a wartime emergency.

This oral history collection brings together extended interviews with fifteen women, illuminating the part that gender roles play in ensnaring women in cycles of domestic abuse and homelessness and highlighting the physical stresses. It also challenges liberal myths about homeless people, and homeless women in particular.

"This groundbreaking book collects black women's personal recollections of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South. Using first-person narratives, collected through oral history interviews, the book emphasizes women's role in their families and communities, treating women as important actors in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of the segregated South. By focusing on the commonalities of women's experiences, as well as the ways that women's lives differed from the experiences of southern black men, Living with Jim Crow analyzes the interlocking forces of racism and sexism"--Provided by publisher.

Max Arthur, bestselling author of the hugely popular Forgotten Voices series, recaptures the day-to-day lives of working people in the Edwardian era. The Edwardian era is often eclipsed in the popular imagination by the Victorian age that preceded it and World War I that followed. In this wonderful work, Max Arthur redresses this imbalance, combining oral history and images from the rediscovered Edwardian Mitchell and Kenyon film footage to give voice to the forgotten figures who peopled the cities, factories and seasides of Britain. This extraordinary period was fuelled by a relentless sense of progress and witnessed the invention of many of the technologies we now take for granted. The extremes of this upstairs-downstairs world prompted a huge upsurge in political activity, and the Edwardian age saw the rise of socialism and the emergence of the suffragette movement. These years are made all the more poignant by our knowledge that World War I was imminent and this time of optimistic development would be brutally cut short. This exciting work draws together the experiences of people from all walks of life, capturing the first generation that were able to record their lives on film and imbuing them with an emotional immediacy.

Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholars, despite their aim to challenge memory and fill its gaps, often use testimonies uncritically or selectively-mining them to support generalizations. This book represents a departure, bringing Holocaust experts Atina Grossmann, Konrad Kwiet, Wendy Lower, Jurgen Matthaus, and Nechama Tec together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. Born in Bratislava at the end of World War I, Helen "Zippi" Spitzer Tichauer was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. One of the few early arrivals to survive the camp and the death marches, she met her future husband in a DP camp, and they moved to New York in the 1960s. Beginning in 1946, Zippi devoted many hours to talking with a small group of scholars about her life. Her wide-ranging interviews are uniquely suited to raise questions on the meaning and use of survivor testimony. What do we know today about the workings of a death camp? How willing are we to learn from the experiences of a survivor, and how much is our perception preconditioned by standardized images? What are the mechanisms, aims, and pitfalls of storytelling? Can survivor testimonies be understood properly without guidance from those who experienced the events? This book's new, multifaceted approach toward Zippi's unique story combined with the authors' analysis of key aspects of Holocaust memory, its forms and its functions, makes it a rewarding and fascinating read."

The extraordinary true story of a courageous school principal who saw the dangers of Nazi Germany and took drastic steps to save those in harm’s way.

In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England.

As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives.

Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021*** During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe' - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight. Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it. The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

This volume of selected oral histories features the voices of Americans who lived through some of the most critical events shaping the nation's history since the Civil War. This first-of-a-kind compilation allows students, scholars, and other readers to explore the connections and disconnections between individual stories and broader historical themes by understanding how history plays out in individual lives. Comprised of oral history interviews drawn from some of the country's major collections, "Speaking History "presents a remarkable array of diverse American voices. Included here are fascinating, often moving accounts of everything from slavery to protest movements, world wars to work and leisure, forming a detailed mosaic of American life in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Supplemented with valuable historical context, this book demonstrates how oral history interviews can bring the past to life by linking individual experiences to larger historical narratives.

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Based upon interviews with a wide-range of former German Army and SS soldiers, these unique personal episodes vividly depict the extraordinary circumstances of the Third Reich's final days as armies closed in from all sides. Le Tissier's interviews link the brutality of combat with the humanity of the desperate battles.

Women were at the forefront of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, with the Arab Spring protests providing an unprecedented opportunity to make their voices heard. But these women also faced an intense backlash from Egypt's patriarchal authorities, with female activists subjected to sexual violence and intimidation by the regime and even fellow protestors. Centered on the testimonies of four women who each played a significant role in the protests, this book provides unique insight into women's experiences during the Egyptian Revolution, and into the methods of resistance these women developed in response to sexual violence. In the process, Hamzeh casts new light on the relationship between gendered and state violence, and argues that women's resistance to this violence is reshaping gender relations in Egypt and the wider Arab world.