This book analyzes the spread of American female consumer culture to Italy and its influence on Italian women in the postwar and Cold War periods, eras marked by the political, economic, social, and cultural battle between the United States and Soviet Union. Focusing on various aspects of this culture-beauty and hygiene products, refrigerators, and department stores, as well as shopping and magazine models-the book examines the reasons for and the methods of American female consumer culture's arrival in Italy, the democratic, consumer capitalist messages its products sought to "sell" to Italian women, and how Italian women themselves reacted to this new cultural presence in their everyday lives. Did Italian women become the American Mrs. Consumer? As such, the book illustrates how the modern, consuming American woman became a significant figure not only in Italy's postwar recovery and transformation, but also in the international and domestic cultural and social contests for the hearts and minds of Italian women.

From Moses to Nelson Mandela, speeches have changed the way we see the world and the way the world is shaped. The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches gathers together the world's greatest speeches, bringing together the words of over one hundred men and women. These brilliant and passionate declarations by Socrates, Robespierre, Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth I, Churchill, Washington, Pankhurst, Gandhi and many others provide a vivid glimpse of history in the making while retaining their power to move and inspire today. 'Impeccable. MacArthur prefaces each address with a short but scholarly historical explanation that sets the scene perfectly. An attractive volume' Andrew Roberts, Sunday Times 'Works well not just as an anthology but as a history' Independent on Sunday

For the past ten years, Nancy MacKay's Curating Oral Histories (2006) has been the one-stop shop for librarians, curators, program administrators, and project managers who are involved in turning an oral history interview into a primary research document, available for use in a repository. In this new and greatly expanded edition, MacKay uses the life cycle model to map out an expanded concept of curation, beginning with planning an oral history project and ending with access and use. The book:-guides readers, step by step, on how to make the oral history "archive ready";-offers strategies for archiving, preserving, and presenting interviews in a digital environment;-includes comprehensive updates on technology, legal and ethical issues, oral history on the Internet, cataloging, copyright, and backlogs.

Things We Couldn't Say is the true story of Diet Eman, a young Dutch woman, who, with her fiance, Hein Sietsma, risked everything to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II. Throughout the years that Diet and Hein aided the Resistance--work that would cost Diet her freedom and Hein his life--their courageous effort ultimately saved hundreds of Dutch Jews. Now available in paperback, Things We Couldn't Say tells an unforgettable story of heroism, faith, and--above all--love.

Women make up the vast majority of Protestant Christians in China-a largely faceless majority, as their stories too often go untold in scholarly research as well as popular media. This book writes Protestant Chinese women into the history of twenty-first-century China. It features the oral histories of over a dozen women, highlighting themes of spiritual transformation, politicized culture, social mobility, urbanization, and family life. Each subject narrates not only her own story, but that of her mother, as well, revealing a deeply personal dimension to the dramatic social change that has occurred in a matter of decades. By uncovering the stories of Christian women in China, Li Ma offers a unique window onto the interactions between femininity and Christianity, and onto the socioeconomic upheavals that mark recent Chinese history.

This open access book brings together oral histories that record the experiences of individuals with intellectual disabilities in Shanghai as they participate in their careers. Employees with intellectual disabilities describe their experiences seeking, attaining, and maintaining employment. Their managers, colleagues, and family members also provide keen insight into the challenges and opportunities these individuals have encountered in the process of securing employment. An appendix provides a compilation of employment policies related to people with intellectual disabilities, particularly with respect to Shanghai.

This book presents an innovative method to investigate the history of mathematics education using oral narratives to study different aspects related to the teaching and learning of mathematics. The application of oral history in mathematics education research was first developed as a method in Brazil in the early 2000s as a result of interdisciplinary dialogues between mathematics educators, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, psychologists, artists and philosophers. Since then, this new methodology has attracted the attention of a growing number of researchers. This contributed volume is the first book in English to bring together chapters written by different members of the research group who developed the methodology and to present a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and practical aspects of the use of oral narratives in the study of experiences in mathematics classrooms. Oral History and Mathematics Education will be a useful tool to researchers and educators looking for new methods to study the dynamics of teaching and learning mathematics in the classroom and to develop innovative mathematics teacher education programs. The volume will also be of interest to historians of education since it describes the foundations of both concepts and procedures related to the application of oral history in educational research, always giving examples of studies already conducted and, whenever possible, suggesting possible research exercises.

This open access book is unique in presenting the first oral history of individuals with an intellectual disability and their families in China. In this summary volume and the two accompanying volumes that follow, individuals with an intellectual disability tell their life stories, while their family members, teachers, classmates, and co-workers describe their professional, academic, and family relationships. Besides interview transcripts, each volume provides observations and records in real time the daily experiences of people with an intellectual disability. Drawing on the methodologies of sociology and oral history, the summary volume provides an unprecedented account of how people with intellectual disabilities in China understand themselves while also examining pertinent issues of public policy and civil society that have ramifications beyond the field of disability itself.

This open access book contains the oral histories that were inspired by the work of the Special Olympics in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of its founding. The foreword and prefatory materials provide an overview of the Special Olympics and its growth in the People's Republic of China. The sections that follow record interview transcripts of individuals with intellectual disabilities living in Shanghai. In addition to chronicling the involvement of these individuals and their families in the Special Olympics movement, the interview transcripts also capture their daily lives and how they have navigated school and work.

The Second World War is famed for being the conflict that changed the face of warfare, and it is the last that changed the face of the world. In addition to remembering those who passed away in those dark days of war, a sincere debt of gratitude is owed to all those now in their twilight years who gave all that they had for King and Country. In this new and revised second edition, Gary Bridson-Daley presents forty-three of over a hundred interviews he conducted with veterans over recent years, adding to the history books the words and the original poetry of those who fought and supported the war effort to ensure freedom, peace and prosperity for generations to come. From each corner of the British Isles and every armed service, from Dam Buster George 'Johnny' Johnson through to riveter Susan Jones: heroes, all.

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People's Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin's Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy. Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert. A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China-now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.

In Walking Along Paul Goble has pulled together six of his best Iktomi stories and compiled them into a compendium of trouble, disaster, fun, and examples from which to learn. Iktomi is the Lakota name for the American Indian Trickster who appears in the stories of peoples all over the North American continent. He is famous for getting into mischief, causing trouble, and never learning the lessons handed out to him. These timeless stories and Goble's dramatic illustrations combine to snare readers in Iktomi's waiting net and lead them on a journey of adventure with the troublesome trickster. Albert White Hat, Sr., has contributed a Foreword in which he explains the history of Iktomi and the American Indian tradition of oral history.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century Reading prospered from the canal, the railway, brewing and biscuit making, but massive population growth in the middle years of the nineteenth century brought with it many problems. Coley Talking lifts the lid on a dark aspect of Reading's, and England's, history. Memories, photographs, maps and archives, tell the story of how life was lived in one of its poorest communities. All the symptoms of extreme poverty - workhouses, chronic disease, insanitary back-to-back housing - are revealed in shocking, 'this is what life was like' detail. But change was on the way: ragged schools, sanitation, the work of socialist councillors Harry and Lorenzo Quelch, and the early days of the local Labour party, together with a strong and resilient community spirit all played their parts. Through the microcosm of Coley we are shown the transformations brought about by slum clearance, the NHS, state education and the work of trade unions, and can appreciate the initiatives which make life better today.

"Reporting the Blitz" takes a fresh look at the home front during World War Two, using local newspaper archives from around the country to throw light on some relatively neglected aspects of those years. It explores the unspoken attitudes and values of those wartime communities; the ways in which local firms sought sometimes unexpected business opportunities from the hostilities; how officialdom and the local media sought to jolly the community along, and to keep bad news from them. It looks at the bumblings of wartime bureaucracy and the extraordinary extent to which the wartime government assumed the trappings of a dictatorship. It sees how people attempted to have fun and looks at the communities' attempts to conjure normality out of the most abnormal of situations. It explores how people managed to travel in the extraordinary circumstances of war (or how they managed, if they could not). It tells individual tales of heroism, greed, stupidity, eccentricity and tragedy, many of them not previously drawn upon for accounts of the period.

Sarah Elliott Novacich explores how medieval thinkers pondered the ethics and pleasures of the archive. She traces three episodes of sacred history - the loss of Eden, the loading of Noah's ark, and the Harrowing of Hell - across works of poetry, performance records, and iconography in order to demonstrate how medieval artists turned to sacred history to think through aspects of cultural transmission. Performances of the loss of Eden blur the relationship between original and record; stories of Noah's ark foreground the difficulty of compiling inventories; and engagements with the Harrowing of Hell suggest the impossibility of separating the past from the present. Reading Middle English plays alongside chronicles, poetry, and works of visual art, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England considers how poetic form, staging logistics, and the status of performance all contribute to our understanding of the ways in which medieval thinkers imagined the archive.

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.

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. Scholarship aims to challenge memory and fill its gaps. At the same time, scholars often use testimonies uncritically or selectively-mining them to support generalizations. This book is a departure, bringing several scholars together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. 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. They moved to New York in the 1960s. Since the end of the war, Zippi devoted many hours to talking with a small group of scholars about her life. Zippi's testimony covers a wide range of human experiences in extremis and spans fifty-odd years. It is thus uniquely suited to raise questions on the meaning and use of survivor testimony. What do we know, sixty years after the Nazi era, 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 story-telling? Can survivor testimonies be understood properly without guidance from those who experienced the events? This book, written by established Holocaust scholars who have known Helen Tichauer for years, attempts to approximate survivor testimony and probe the limits of its representation and understanding. Contributors include Atina Grossmann (author, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton, 2007), Konrad Kwiet (co-ed., Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, 2005), Wendy Lower (author, Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memory, Indiana UP, 2007), Nehama Tec (author, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, Yale, 2003, and Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, OUP, 1993). The book will be of interest to both Holocaust scholars and oral historians.

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.

Crowley interviews long-time residents of the Central Area, a historically redlined neighborhood that was one of the few places nonwhites could buy homes. Residents tell stories of working with the Black Panthers, becoming activists in the 1960s, and of building a thriving culture around church, music, and food. The neighborhood is going through rapid gentrification today, and many of these residents have been or will be displaced.

World War II could not have been fought and won without the crucial role played by the U.S. Merchant Marine. Crewed by civilian seamen in peacetime, and carrying much of the nation's ocean-borne commerce, the Merchant Marine is often considered the "fourth arm of defense" in wartime. And, as such, it provided the vital logistical support for beachheads in all theaters of operation around the world during the war. The 20 Merchant Marine veterans of World War II featured in this oral history served in all theaters of war, and most had at least one ship - some two - torpedoed, bombed, shelled or mined out from under them. Some became prisoners of the Japanese for the duration, working on the infamous River Kwai Bridge. Many spend time in lifeboats or on flimsy rafts under extremely harsh conditions after the loss of a ship. And one - Donald Zubrod - endured 42 days in a lifeboat with several others before their eventual rescue very close to death's door. Credited during the war for often paying for their service "with some of their own blood" as they brought bombs, bullets, and butter to others, American merchant mariners actually suffered a loss rate that was a close second to only the Marine Corps during the conflict. Yet, their role still remains little known and understood. The collection of eye-witness accounts will go a long way to helping set the record straight at long last.

In 1946, after a series of stormy strikes and a mass occupation at Ford Motor Company's plant in Dagenham, Essex, thousands of workers came together in a new branch of the Transport and General Workers Union. Later, in the early 1980s, a band of dedicated workplace activists brought branch 1/1107 to explosive life with support for a number working-class causes, from equal opportunities to the stunningly effective boycott of parts for South Africa. "Notoriously Militant," which takes as its title a tabloid journalist's verdict on the branch, covers the history of Ford's Dagenham plant--and its roots in Henry Ford's early U.S. activities--from 20th-century shop-floor struggles to the 21st-century fight against plant closure. Based on original research and oral history, this study offers a primer for activists and analysts on the confrontation between worker militancy and the rigors of "Fordism." This book is a lively look at working-class history as made daily by so-called "ordinary" workers, the links between basic workplace struggles and revolutionary conflict, the pressures towards "cooperation" between union and management, and the interweaving of gender and ethnicity issues with the class-based structures of a major industrial workplace.