Celebrating Israel--past, present, and future

"A singular achievement that captures Israel's past, present, and future with compelling words and vivid photographs....More than a handsome volume, the Strobers have made an extraordinary contribution to understanding today's Middle East."
--Rabbi A. James Rudin, Senior Interreligious Advisor, American Jewish Committee

"Deborah and Gerald Strober have done it once again. Israel at Sixty is a fine oral history about a brilliant and noble moment in Jewish history--and human history."
--Ben J. Wattenberg, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Based on the authors' extensive interviews with Israelis and others throughout the world who have participated in the many events encompassing the Jewish state's sixty years of nationhood and who represent a broad spectrum of views, Israel at Sixty offers a balanced, comprehensive understanding of this constantly changing nation. Through the medium of oral history, combined with extensive background and factual data, this exquisite commemorative volume re-creates the most important moments of Israel's past through the eyes of those who lived it, and looks forward to new challenges that await this vibrant and dynamic nation in the future.

Britain and the world were shocked in October 1966 by live television pictures coming from a small mining village in Wales. They showed a human tragedy unfolding after thousands of tons of coal waste fell from a mountainside onto its primary school and surrounding houses. The majority of the 144 people killed were children under 12. After more than 50 years the survivors of that disaster -- among the worst in Britain's peacetime history -- still live with painful memories and all-too-real after effects. In this first ever oral history of the tragedy, people who were there tell their stories, some speaking publicly for the first time. Built around 27 extensive interviews, Surviving Aberfan is a story of official neglect and betrayal, horror and great sadness. But it also demonstrates how courage, hope and effort can rebuild a devastated community and move forward.

From the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the coming of Napoleon ten years later, the commemoration of the dead was a recurring theme during the French Revolution. Based on extensive research across a wide range of sources, this book is the first comprehensive study of the cultural politics of commemoration in Revolutionary France. It examines what remembrance meant to the people who staged and attended ceremonies, raised monuments, listened to speeches and purchased souvenirs in memory of the Revolution's dead. It explores the political purposes these commemorations served and the conflicts they gave rise to while also examining the cultural traditions they drew upon. Above all, it asks what private ends did the Revolution's rites of memory serve? What consolation did commemoration bring to those the dead left behind, and what conflicts did this relationship between the public and the private dimensions of remembrance give rise to?

Drawing on the work of scholars and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Gloria Anzaldua, and Trinh Minh-ha, these essays advocate oral history and oral history-based performance as means to challenge and expand upon traditional ways of transmitting historical knowledge. The contributors' central concerns are performative aspects of oral history itself and the theatrical or classroom "re-performance" of oral history. The essays detail classroom and public pedagogies, community-based interventions, processes of developing interview-based performances, and the ethical and political implications of oral history as an embodied form of representation. The essays collected in this volume present the most current scholarship straddling the rich intersection between oral history and performance, and together suggest ways for scholars and performers to use oral history to challenge more traditional modes of knowledge.

As a child, Stacey Zembrzycki listened to her baba's stories about Sudbury's small but polarized Ukrainian community and about what it was like growing up ethnic during the Depression. According to Baba discloses with honesty and respect what happened when Stacey tried to capture the community's experiences through oral history research. Baba looms large in the narrative, wrestling authority in the interview process away from her granddaughter and then eventually coming to share it. Together, the two women lay the groundwork not only for an insightful and deeply personal social history of Sudbury's Ukrainian community but also for truly collaborative oral history research and writing.

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.

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.

A Forest of Time is the first introduction for undergraduates and graduates, Western and Indian history buffs, and general readers to the notion that American Indian societies had vital interests in interpreting and transmitting their own ways for themselves. Through separate discussions of legends and oral histories, creation stories and folktales, it illustrates how various Indian peoples related and commented upon their changing times. Drawing upon his own varied research as well as sampling the latest in scholarship from ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore and Indian Studies, Dr. Nabokov offers dramatic examples of how native peoples put rituals and material culture, landscape, prophecies, and even the English language to the urgent task of keeping the past alive and relevant. Throughout these lively chapters, we also witness the American Indian historical imagination deployed as a coping skill and survival strategy. This book surveys the latest integrating ideas while offering a useful bibliography that opens up, and demands that we engage with, alternative chronicles for America's multi-cultural past. Peter Navokov is Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures and American Indian Studies Program at UCLA. He is the author of several books, including Native American Architecture, (Oxford, 1991, co-author Robert Easton) which won the American Institue of Architects honor award and the Bay Area Book Reviewer Association Award. His book Native American Testimony (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978) was named the American Library Association's Best Book for Young Adults and Library School Journal Best Book 1978 in addition to receiving the Carter G. Woodson Award. His work as a journalist in 1967 earned him prizes from the Albuquerque Press Association and the New Mexico Press Association.

A Forest of Time is the first introduction for undergraduates and graduates, Western and Indian history buffs, and general readers to the notion that American Indian societies had vital interests in interpreting and transmitting their own ways for themselves. Through separate discussions of legends and oral histories, creation stories and folktales, it illustrates how various Indian peoples related and commented upon their changing times. Drawing upon his own varied research as well as sampling the latest in scholarship from ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore and Indian Studies, Dr. Nabokov offers dramatic examples of how native peoples put rituals and material culture, landscape, prophecies, and even the English language to the urgent task of keeping the past alive and relevant. Throughout these lively chapters, we also witness the American Indian historical imagination deployed as a coping skill and survival strategy. This book surveys the latest integrating ideas while offering a useful bibliography that opens up, and demands that we engage with, alternative chronicles for America's multi-cultural past. Peter Navokov is Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures and American Indian Studies Program at UCLA. He is the author of several books, including Native American Architecture, (Oxford, 1991, co-author Robert Easton) which won the American Institue of Architects honor award and the Bay Area Book Reviewer Association Award. His book Native American Testimony (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978) was named the American Library Association's Best Book for Young Adults and Library School Journal Best Book 1978 in addition to receiving the Carter G. Woodson Award. His work as a journalist in 1967 earned him prizes from the Albuquerque Press Association and the New Mexico Press Association.

In the time of the Troubles, when bombs blew through the night and soldiers prowled down the roads, Henry Glassie came to the Irish borderland to learn how country people endure through history. He settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh, and listened to the old people. For a decade he heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world. In their view, their world was one of love, defeat, and uncertainty, demanding the virtues of endurance: faith, bravery, and wit. Glassie's task in this book is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop and clear the stage, so that Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle, Peter Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and their neighbors can tell their own tale, which explains their conditions and converts them into a tragedy of conflict and a comedy of the absurd. It gathers the saints and warriors, and celebrates the stars whose wit enabled endurance in days of violence and deprivation. With patience and respect, Glassie describes life in a time and a place exactly like no other, and yet Ballymenone is like a thousand other places where people work on the land during the day and tell their own tales at night, forgotten, while the men of power fill the newspapers and history books by sending poor boys out to be killed. The Stars of Ballymenone is an integrated analysis of the complete repertory of verbal art from a rural community where storytelling and singing of quality remained a part of daily life.

Oral histories of Mexican farm workers in the Philadelphia region.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Incredibly evocative and compelling." - The Washington Post "The most moving and chilling oral history you will read." - The Times "Astonishing book about an astonishing, terrifying atrocity, relived in real time by those who were there. I read it in one sitting & was utterly gripped from start to finish." - Piers Morgan "The most vivid portrait of 9/11 I've ever read."- Mike Morell, former deputy director of the CIA ** Updated 20th Anniversary edition with additional content ** The Only Plane in the Sky is the first comprehensive oral history of 9/11, deftly woven and told in the voices of ordinary people grappling with extraordinary events. It begins predawn, where we meet airport staff who unknowingly usher terrorists onto their flights. From a secret bunker beneath the White House, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice watch for incoming planes on radar. At the Pentagon, officials feel a violent tremor as they come under attack. We hear the stories of the father and son working on separate floors in the North Tower; the firefighter who rushes there to search for his wife; the phone operator who keeps her promise to share a passenger's last words with his family; the chaplain who stays on the scene to perform last rites, losing his own life when the Twin Towers collapse. In New York, first responders confront a scene of unimaginable chaos. At the Pentagon generals break down and weep when they are barred from rushing into the burning building to try and rescue their colleagues. Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, declassified documents and interviews from nearly five hundred people, award-winning historian Garrett Graff skilfully tells the story of the day that changed all of our lives - as it was lived. The Only Plane in the Sky is a unique, profound, and searing exploration of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives, 20 years ago.

"Highly recommended read." - SharedTroubles "What Ken is creating is something historians will be using centuries from now."- The Pathfinder Magazine This is the second oral history of the Northern Ireland troubles, following on from A Long, Long War (Helion, 2008), again told from the perspective of the ordinary British soldier. This book looks deeper into the conflict, with new contributors providing revealing stories of the troubles from the back streets of the Ardoyne to the bandit country of South Armagh. In researching this subject Ken Wharton, a former soldier, is now known and trusted by those who served and they are keen for their part in Britain's forgotten war to now be made public. For the first time, he tells the stories of the 'unseen victims'; the loved ones who sat and dreaded a knock at the door from the Army telling them that their loved one had been killed on the streets of Northern Ireland. There are more first hand accounts from the Rifleman, the Private, the Guardsman, the Driver, the Sapper and the Fusilier on the street as they recall the violence, the insults and the shock of seeing a comrade dying in front of them. There is an explosive interview with a soldier who killed an IRA gunman fresh from the murder of two Royal Artillerymen. Building on the huge success of Ken's first book, this second volume will provide plenty of new material for the reader to reconsider afresh the role of Britain's soldiers in Northern Ireland and the fate that so many suffered.

For the first time ever Roland Huntford presents each man's full account of the race to the South Pole in their own words. In 1910 Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen set sail for Antarctica, each from his own starting point, and the epic race for the South Pole was on. December 2011 marks the centenary of the conclusion to the last great race of terrestrial discovery. For the first time Scott's unedited diaries run alongside those of both Amundsen and Olav Bjaaland, never before translated into English. Cutting through the welter of controversy to the events at the heart of the story, Huntford weaves the narrative from the protagonists' accounts of their own fate. What emerges is a whole new understanding of what really happened on the ice and the definitive account of the Race for the South Pole.

A SUNDAY TELEGRAPH AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF SWEDEN'S AUGUST PRIZE WINNER OF THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE 'Osebol is a magnificent success; it is hard to imagine it better ... Kapla is a magician ... mesmerizing' Sara Wheeler, TLS 'A simple, pared-back and down-to-earth masterpiece' James Rebanks 'We listen to them like something caught on the wind ... so moving and so strangely beckoning' Nicci Gerrard, Observer '[Among] the year's most pleasing books' Rishi Dastidar, Guardian, Books of the Year 'Engrossing and humbling and quietly revelatory' Max Porter 'Fascinating ... I was riveted' Lydia Davis 'Like standing outside an open window on a warm summer evening and listening to a piece of contemporary history' Lanstidningen 'What a wonderful book . . . You want to move into it' Expressen Near the river Klaralven, snug in the dense forest landscape of northern Varmland, lies the secluded village of Osebol. It is a quiet place: one where relationships take root over decades, and where the bustle of city life is replaced by the sound of wind in the trees. In this extraordinary and engrossing book, an unexpected cultural phenomenon in its native Sweden, the stories of Osebol's residents are brought to life in their own words. Over the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady relocations to the cities have seen the village's adult population fall to roughly forty. But still, life goes on; heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth, while new arrivals come from near and far. Marit Kapla has interviewed nearly every villager between the ages of 18 and 92, recording their stories verbatim. What emerges is at once a familiar chronicle of great social metamorphosis, told from the inside, and a beautifully microcosmic portrait of a place and its people. To read Osebol is to lose oneself in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world.

The Life of Ten Bears is a remarkable collection of nineteenth-century Comanche oral histories given by Francis Joseph "Joe A" Attocknie. Although various elements of Ten Bears's life (ca. 1790-1872) are widely known, including several versions of how the toddler Ten Bears survived the massacre of his family, other parts have not been as widely publicized, remaining instead in the collective memory of his descendants. Other narratives in this collection reference lesser-known family members. These narratives are about the historical episodes that Attocknie's family thought were worth remembering and add a unique perspective on Comanche society and tradition as experienced through several generations of his family. Kavanagh's introduction adds context to the personal narratives by discussing the process of transmission. These narratives serve multiple purposes for Comanche families and communities. Some autobiographical accounts, "recounting" brave deeds and war honors, function as validation of status claims, while others illustrate the giving of names; still others recall humorous situations, song-ridicules, slapstick, and tragedies. Such family oral histories quickly transcend specific people and events by restoring key voices to the larger historical narrative of the American West.

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.

"The Dust of Life" is a collection of vivid and devastating oral histories of Vietnamese Amerasians. Abandoned during the war by their American fathers, discriminated against by the victorious Communists, and ignored for many years by the American government, they endured life in impoverished Vietnam. Their stories are sad, sometimes tragic, but they are also testimonials to the strength of human resiliency.

Robert S. McKelvey is a former marine who served in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now a child psychiatrist, he returned to Vietnam in 1990 to begin the long series of interviews that resulted in this book. While allowing his subjects to speak for themselves, McKelvey has organized their narratives around themes common to their lives: early maternal loss, the experience of prejudice and discrimination, coping with adversity, dealing with shattered hopes for the future, and, for some, adapting to the alien environment of the United States.

While unique in many respects, the Vietnamese Amerasian story also illustrates themes that are tragically universal: neglect of the human by-products of war, the destructiveness of prejudice and racism, the pain of abandonment, and the horrors of life amidst extreme poverty, hostility, and neglect.

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.

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.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice-and tones of voice especially-from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. Indeed, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.

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.

Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new "Sky Train," she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders.

As she uncovers stories of Tibetan women's courage, resourcefulness, and spiritual strength in the face of loss and hardship since the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, and observes the changes wrought by the controversial new rail line in the futuristic "new Lhasa," Sam comes to embrace her own capacity for letting go, for faith, and for acceptance. Her glimpse of Tibet's past through the lens of the women - a visionary educator, a freedom fighter, a gulag survivor, and a child bride - affords her a unique perspective on the state of Tibetan culture today - in Tibet, in exile, and in the widening Tibetan diaspora.

Gracefully connecting the women's poignant histories to larger cultural, political, and spiritual themes, the author comes full circle, finding wisdom and wholeness even as she acknowledges Tibet's irreversible changes.

Canyon Sam is a San Francisco writer, performance artist, and Tibet activist. Her one-woman show "The Dissident" was critically acclaimed in the "Village Voice" and the "Boston Globe." This is her first book.

"Canyon Sam's "Sky Train" powerfully moves the heart, as it brings to life deep truths about our world today, about Tibet, the land and people and especially its outstanding women. Just as important is the author's own revelatory discovery of 'Tibet' as a compassionate, wise, and down to earth state-of-mind essential to the survival of the whole world. Words cannot express how wonderful is this honest, generous, and perceptive book." - Robert Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University

"Years ago following her ancestral roots to China, but finding instead Tibet as a spiritual home, Canyon Sam made a miracle of a journey. Now in "Sky Train" she guides the reader on a life-changing adventure back to Tibet after more than twenty years and an epoch of cataclysmic change to produce a miracle of a book." - Maxine Hong Kingston, author of "The Woman Warrior"

"A book that is sure to illuminate a Tibet so many of us have been longing to know." - Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple"

"Through the experiences of older Tibetan women, the author offers a captivating journey spanning half a century and several countries. "Sky Train" conveys women's lessons of community-building, generosity, faith, and determination. A beautiful, moving, riveting book." - Valerie Matsumoto, UCLA

"This book about the Dharma of connection, of companioning, of compassion, has strengthened my own devotion." - Sylvia Boorstein, author of "Happiness Is an Inside Job: Practicing for a Joyful Life"

"It is Canyon Sam's love for Tibet - its culture and its people - that makes this book so special. An important work . . . poignant and inspiring." - Sharon Salzberg, author of "Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness"

For more about the author, go to http: //www.canyonsam.com/skytrain.html