Had Elizabeth 'Bess' Clements Abell (1933-2020) been a boy, she would likely have become a politician like her father, Earle Clements. Effectively barred from that career because of her gender, she forged her own path by helping family friends Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. As President Johnson's Social Secretary, Abell earned the nickname 'Iron Butterfly' for her graceful but firm leadership of social life in the White House. Afterward, she maintained her importance in Washington D.C., serving as chief of staff to Joan Mondale and co-founding a public relations company. Donald A. Ritchie and Terry L. Birdwhistell draw on Abell's own words and those of others close to her to tell her remarkable story. Focusing on her years working for the Johnson campaign and her time in the White House, this engaging oral history provides a window into Abell's life as well as an insider's view of social life in the nation's capital during the tumultuous 1960s.

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.

"The Welsh in Iowa" is the history of the little known Welsh immigrant communities in the American Midwestern state of Iowa. Dr. Walley's book identifies what made the Welsh unique as immigrants to North America, and as migrants and settlers in a land built on such groups. With research rooted in documentary evidence and supplemented with community and oral histories, "The Welsh in Iowa" preserves and examines Welsh culture as it was expressed in middle America by the farmers and coal miners who settled or passed through the prairie state as it grew to maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work seeks to not only document the Welsh immigrants who lived in Iowa, but to study the Welsh as a distinct ethnic group in a state known for its ethnic heritage.

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."

The Talk of the Town explores everyday communication in a sixteenth-century small town and the role it played in the circulation of information across and within early modern communities. It does so through the lens of the St Gall linen trader Johannes Rutiner (1501-1556/7) and his notebooks, the Commentationes; a little-known source which offers unusual insights into an oral world normally hidden from view. A close reading of Rutiner's notes on hundreds of conversations reveals what the inhabitants of a sixteenth-century town talked about, through which channels such information reached them, and how it was then processed, shared, criticized, contradicted, and employed as a means to forge and strengthen social bonds. By bringing together the histories of sociability and information, reconstructing Ru?tiner's network of informants and probing a broad variety of exchanges-jokes, gossip, news, and tales of the past-Carla Roth rethinks both what constituted valuable information in the sixteenth century and who was able to provide it, and argues that the circulation of information remained inseparably linked to the social dynamics of face-to-face exchanges long into the age of print.

Draws on interviews with more than 350 local residents, including both recent arrivals and descendants of pioneers. Their personal accounts are woven together with information from diaries and other records in the City of Vancouver Archives and carefully chosen published sources to form twelve chapters that explore different aspects of community life. The arts, churches and schools, how people shopped and how they got around, where they lived and relaxed are all described. Read about how this "streetcar suburb" developed from forest and farmland, how it was impacted by world events, and what made it both typical and unique. This is a story of the past century -- from the settlement of the West to the development of a modern world-class city -- brought to life through the experiences of people living in the neighbourhood of Dunbar. It is a reminder that history occurs in the streets of quiet out-of-the-way neighbourhoods as surely as on battlefields and in corporate boardrooms.

""Winter Soldiers "is an immensely valuable contribution to the history of the Vietnam War. It brings to life, through the words of the veterans themselves, the journey each individual made, through the crucible of combat, from warrior to protester."--Howard Zinn

"Stacewicz has captured the simple, rough-hewn elegance of the voices of Vietnam veterans. As in other wars, the ordinary soldier always has the most extraordinary words for history."--Stanley Kutler, editor of "The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War"

"By turns irreverent and painfully sincere, "Winter Soldiers "will transform stereotyped views of both veterans and the antiwar movement."--Marilyn Young

The Vietnam War left an indelible mark on those who took part in it and spawned an antiwar movement more popular than any other in US history. In all that has been written about the war, rarely do the worlds of the Vietnam veteran and the antiwar demonstrator come together. Yet in a small but articulate organization known as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the two made common cause.

"Winter Soldiers "recovers this moving chapter in the history of the Vietnam War era. Bringing together the voices of more than thirty former and current members of the VVAW, oral historian Richard Stacewicz offers an eloquent account of the impact of the war on the lives of individuals and the nation.

Richard Stacewicz teaches history at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Drawn from the rich archives of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this collection brings together twenty-nine oral histories from people of varying ages and occupations who participated in civil rights activism at the grassroots level. These highly personal narratives convey the real sense of fear and the risk of bodily danger people had to overcome in order to become the movement's foot soldiers. The stories offer testimony as to how policing was carried out when there were no cameras, how economic terrorism was used against activists, how experiences of the movement differed depending on gender, and how youth participation was fundamental to the cause. Participants in the struggle ranged from teachers, students of all ages, and domestic workers to elderly women and men, war veterans, and a Black Panther leader. This volume demonstrates the complexity and diversity of the spirit of resistance at a formative moment in American history.

Although historians today turn increasingly to oral tradition as a source of data on the history of non-literate peoples, Paul Irwin cautions them against uncritical use of such evidence. In an attempt to determine how much historians can learn about the past from oral traditions, he studies those of Liptako, now a part of Upper Volta hut in the nineteenth century an emirate in one of West Africa's great imperial systems.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Oral history is inherently about memory, and when oral history interviews are used \u0022in public,\u0022 they invariably both reflect and shape public memories of the past. Oral History and Public Memories is the only book that explores this relationship, in fourteen case studies of oral history's use in a variety of venues and media around the world. Readers will learn, for example, of oral history based efforts to reclaim community memory in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa; of the role of personal testimony in changing public understanding of Japanese American history in the American West; of oral history's value in mapping heritage sites important to Australia's Aboriginal population; and of the way an oral history project with homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio became a tool for popular education. Taken together, these original essays link the well established practice of oral history to the burgeoning field of memory studies.

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.

Oral history gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making. Oral history and life stories help to create a truer picture of the past and the changing present, documenting the lives and feelings of all kinds of people, many otherwise hidden from history. It explores personal and family relationships and uncovers the secret cultures of work. It connects public and private experience, and it highlights the experiences of migrating between cultures. At the same time it can bring courage to the old, meaning to communities, and contact between generations. Sometimes it can offer a path for healing divided communities and those with traumatic memories. Without it the history and sociology of our time would be poor and narrow. In this fourth edition of his pioneering work, fully revised with Joanna Bornat, Paul Thompson challenges the accepted myths of historical scholarship. He discusses the reliability of oral evidence in comparison with other sources and considers the social context of its development. He looks at the relationship between memory, the self and identity. He traces oral history through its own past and weighs up the recent achievements of a movement which has become international, with notably strong developments in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, South Africa and the Far East, despite resistance from more conservative academics. This new edition combines the classic text of The Voice of the Past with many new sections, including especially the worldwide development of different forms of oral history and the parallel memory boom, as well as discussions of theory in oral history and of memory, trauma and reconciliation. It offers a deep social and historical interpretation along with succinct practical advice on designing and carrying out a project, The Voice of the Past remains an invaluable tool for anyone setting out to use oral history and life stories to construct a more authentic and balanced record of the past and the present.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Exploring the developments that have occurred in the practice of oral history since digital audio and video became viable, this book explores various groundbreaking projects in the history of digital oral history, distilling the insights of pioneers in the field and applying them to the constantly changing electronic landscape of today.

In this compelling collection of oral histories, more than seventy-five peacemakers describe how they say no to war-making in the strongest way possible--by engaging in civil disobedience and paying the consequences in jail or prison. These courageous resisters leave family and community and life on the outside in their efforts to direct U.S. policy away from its militarism. Many are Catholic Workers, devoting their lives to the works of mercy instead of the works of war. They are homemakers and carpenters and social workers and teachers who are often called "faith-based activists." They speak from the left of the political perspective, providing a counterpoint to the faith-based activism of the fundamentalist Right.

In their own words, the narrators describe their motivations and their preparations for acts of resistance, the actions themselves, and their trials and subsequent jail time. We hear from those who do their time by caring for their families and managing communities while their partners are imprisoned. Spouses and children talk frankly of the strains on family ties that a life of working for peace in the world can cause.

The voices range from a World War II conscientious objector to those protesting the recent war in Iraq. The book includes sections on resister families, the Berrigans and Jonah House, the Plowshares Communities, the Syracuse Peace Council, and Catholic Worker houses and communities.

The introduction by Dan McKanan situates these activists in the long tradition of resistance to war and witness to peace.

In this compelling collection of oral histories, more than seventy-five peacemakers describe how they say no to war-making in the strongest way possible--by engaging in civil disobedience and paying the consequences in jail or prison. These courageous resisters leave family and community and life on the outside in their efforts to direct U.S. policy away from its militarism. Many are Catholic Workers, devoting their lives to the works of mercy instead of the works of war. They are homemakers and carpenters and social workers and teachers who are often called "faith-based activists." They speak from the left of the political perspective, providing a counterpoint to the faith-based activism of the fundamentalist Right.

In their own words, the narrators describe their motivations and their preparations for acts of resistance, the actions themselves, and their trials and subsequent jail time. We hear from those who do their time by caring for their families and managing communities while their partners are imprisoned. Spouses and children talk frankly of the strains on family ties that a life of working for peace in the world can cause.

The voices range from a World War II conscientious objector to those protesting the recent war in Iraq. The book includes sections on resister families, the Berrigans and Jonah House, the Plowshares Communities, the Syracuse Peace Council, and Catholic Worker houses and communities.

The introduction by Dan McKanan situates these activists in the long tradition of resistance to war and witness to peace.

Historian David La Vere has culled from the Indian-Pioneer Histories housed in the Indian Archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City a wealth of vivid detail about life among the former Texas Indian peoples. The oral histories that make up this collection were gathered during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration. From the 112 bound volumes that resulted, Dr. La Vere has gathered all the material pertinent to the Indians who came from Texas into an exceptional picture of the details of daily life-war and raiding, hunting and planting, foodways dress, parties and spiritual practices, education, health, and housing. La Vere has edited the narratives to group excerpts topically. Under farming, for example, he gives this report from a Wichita man: "We raise corn, pumpkin, sweet potato. I don't know where we got corn, probably given to my people four hundred years ago. Other Indians didn't know how to work, to raise corn and pumpkins. They would have to get this from Wichitas." A Caddo woman describes in great detail the three general styles of dress for Caddo women, and a Caddo-Delaware woman tells about the different woods and dyes used in making baskets. A white man living in Comanche Territory details how the Comanches tanned hides by "working the animal's] brains over them." Children's games and adults' dance rituals all are described in the words of those who played, danced, and watched them. La Vere sets the stage for this ethnographic detail with a lively, readable history of the succession of peoples who lived in Texas from the Paleo-Indians until the present. It is a clear overview of the basic social structures of the tribes and the relations among tribes and, later, of the Indians with the Europeans who came to the region. Accompanied by dramatic and poignant photographs from Oklahoma archives, the gift that comes through these pages is an immediacy of observation and impression that re-inspires the historical imagination about life among the first Texans. DAVID LA VERE is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has published a previous book on the Caddo Indians. His Ph.D. is from Texas A&M University.

The Horrific Tragedies of Central Africa in the 1990s riveted the attention of the world. But these crises did not occur in a historical vacuum. By peering through the mists of the past, David Newbury presents case studies illustrating the significant advances in our understanding of the precolonial histories of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo that have taken place since decolonization. Based on both oral and written sources, the essays compiled in ""The Land beyond the Mists"" are important both for their methods - viewing history from the perspective of local actors - and for their conclusions, which seriously challenge colonial myths about the area.

" "Tell me about the war" -- these words launched a ten-year project in oral history by a husband-and-wife team. Howard Hoffman fought in World War II from Cassino to the Elbe as a mortar crewman and a forward observer. His war experiences are of intrinsic interest to readers who seek a foot soldier's view of those historic events. But the principal purpose of this study was to explore the bounds of memory, to gauge its accuracy and its stability over time, and to determine the effects of various efforts to enhance it. Alice Hoffman, a historian, initiated the study because she recognized the critical role of memory in gathering oral history; Howard Hoffman, the subject, is an experimental psychologist. Alice's tape-recorded interviews with her husband over a period of ten years are the basic material of the study, which compares the events as recounted in the first phase of the interviews with later accounts of the same experiences and with the written records of his company as well as the memories of fellow soldiers and the evidence of photographs and other documents. This engrossing story of World War II breaks new ground for practitioners of oral history. The Hoffmans' findings indicate that a subset of human memory exists that is so permanent and resistant to change that it can properly be labeled "archival." In addition to describing some of the circumstances under which archival memories are formed, the Hoffmans describe the conditions that were found to influence their storage and retrieval.