Becoming a mother charts the diverse and complex history of Australian mothering for the first time, exposing the ways it has been both connected to and distinct from parallel developments in other industrialised societies. In many respects, the historical context in which Australian women come to motherhood has changed dramatically since 1945. And yet examination of the memories of multiple maternal generations reveals surprising continuities in the emotions and experiences of first-time motherhood. Drawing upon interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, history, psychology and sociology, Carla Pascoe Leahy unpacks this multifaceted rite of passage through more than 60 oral history interviews, demonstrating how maternal memories continue to influence motherhood today. Despite radical shifts in understandings of gender, care and subjectivity, becoming a mother remains one of the most personally and culturally significant moments in a woman's life. -- .

The stories of Kaua'i's ruling chiefs were passed from generation to generation in songs and narratives recited by trained storytellers either formally at the high chief's court or informally at family gatherings. Their chronology was ordered by a ruler's genealogy, which, in the case of the pua ali'i (flower of royalty), was illustrious and far reaching and could be traced to one of the four great gods of Polynesia - Kane, Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa. In these legends, Hawaiians of old sought answers to the questions "Who are we?" "Who are our ancestors and where do they come from?" "What lessons can be learned from their conduct?" Na Pua Ali'i o Kaua'i presents the stories of the men and women who ruled the island of Kaua'i from its first settlement to the final rebellion against Kamehameha I's forces in 1824. Only fragments remain of the nearly two-thousand-year history of the people who inhabited Kaua'i before the coming of James Cook in 1778. Now scattered in public and private archives and libraries, these pieces of Hawai'i's precontact past were recorded in the nineteenth century by such determined individuals as David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and Abraham Fornander. All known genealogical references to the Kaua'i ali'i nui (paramount chiefs) have been gathered here and placed in chronological order and are interspersed with legends of great voyages, bitter wars, courageous heroes, and passionate romances that together form a rich and invaluable resource.

Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913. Supplemented with the interviewees' private documents and working from U.S. and Italian archives, Christa Wirth documents a century of transatlantic migration, assimilation, and later-generation self-identification. Her research reveals how memories of migration, everyday life, and ethnicity are passed down through the generations, altered, and contested while constituting family identities. The fact that not all descendants of Italian migrants moved into the U.S. middle class, combined with their continued use of hyphenated identities, points to a history of lived ethnicity and societal exclusion. Moreover, this book demonstrates the extent of forgetting that is required in order to construct an ethnic identity.

Thousands of young Jews were orphaned by the Nazi genocide in the German-occupied Soviet Union and struggled for survival on their own. This book weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs produced in the former Soviet Union to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews, born after the foundation of the USSR, experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it in a context of social change following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The 1930s, a period when the notion interethnic solidarity and social equality were promoted and a partly lived reality, were formative for a cohort of young Jews. Soviet policies of the time established a powerful framework for the ways in which survivors of the genocide understood, survived, and represent their experience of violence and displacement. The book demonstrates that the young Soviet Jews' struggle for survival, and its memory, was shaped by interethnic relationships within the occupied society, German annihilation policy, and Soviet efforts to construct a patriotic unity of the Soviet population. Age and gender were crucial factors for experiencing, surviving, and remembering the Nazi genocide in Soviet territories, an element that Anika Walke emphasizes by investigating the individual and collective efforts to save peoples' lives, in hiding places and partisan formations, and how these efforts were subsequently erased in the construction of the Soviet war portrayal. Pioneers and Partisans demonstrates how the Holocaust unfolded in the German-occupied Soviet territories and how Soviet citizens responded to it. The book does this work through oral histories of atrocities and survival during the German occupation in Minsk and a number of small towns in Eastern Belorussia such as Shchedrin, Slavnoe, Zhlobin, and Shklov. Following particular individuals' stories, framed within the broader historical and cultural context, this book tells of repeated transformations of identity, from Soviet citizen in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.

The Abbey of Evesham in Worcestershire was founded in the eighth century. This history, written by an Evesham monk in the thirteenth century, tells the story from the beginning. Unusually, however, it is also a contemporary history. It describes in detail a great lawsuit in Rome where the writer was present. The story then returns to England and to the monks' attempts to depose their scandalous abbot. This Oxford Medieval Texts edition provides a Latin text with a facing page English translation, a detailed historical introduction, and notes.

The book is based on a series of unique oral histories and interviews with actors who love the stage first and foremost. Editor Joan Jeffri focuses on the experience of actors in their training and career development, and on their relationships to society, culture, and institutions. Although names like Alan Alda are recognizable from other media, these actors all grew up being nourished by the stage. Their stories show that theatre is everywhere in this country--not only on Broadway, but also in churches, in schools, in regions, and in towns. These interviews and a thorough introduction provide a history of the American theatre for almost a century--the Yiddish theatre, the WPA, the start of regional theatre, off- and off-off-Broadway, and the Great White Way--through the voices of those who lived it.

Today, more than 75 years after the Holocaust and World War II, antisemitism remains a poisonous force in European culture and politics, whether cloaked in the garb of reactionary nationalism or manifested in outright physical violence. Nothing New in Europe? provides a sobering look at the persistence of European antisemitism today through fifteen interviews with Jewish Israelis living in Germany, Poland, France, and other countries, supplemented with in-depth scholarly essays. The interviewees draw upon their lived experiences to reflect on anti-Jewish rhetoric, the role of Israel, and the relationship between antisemitism and the persecution of other minorities.

Folktales of Mizoram is a translated collection of sixty-six short stories from northeast India taken up for a critical evaluation. The stories depict a typical Mizo culture in spirit and practice. This study focuses on the transformation of oral literature into written narratives. Folk practices, folk medicine, folk narratives, traditional songs, and received wisdom dominate these stories. A more insightful approach into folk narratives and songs emphasizes the world of new hermeneutics. The land, the culture, the language, the traditions have been remarkably explored through an elegant reading and evaluation of this collection. Antiquity speaks through the folk tales. The spirit of folktales becomes one of unique exploration of hermeneutics in the end.

Our Lives Are But Stories explores the crucial role of personal storytelling in the lives of a unique generation of women -- Jewish women who left the Muslim country of Tunisia to settle in the newly created Israeli state. To this day, the older generation of Tunisian Israelis continues to rely on storytelling as a form of education, entertainment, and socialization. But for women this art has taken on new dimensions, especially as they seek to impart their values to the young. Here Esther Schely-Newman expertly interweaves the personal accounts of the private lives of four Tunisian-Israeli women to analyze the rich complexities of communication. She considers how various approaches to narration reflect storytelling as a cultural phenomenon and highlights the need to understand stories in the contexts in which they are told.

The four narrators grew up in a culture in which women's stories were confined to the private sphere, were usually told to other women, and were supposedly fiction -- or at least metaphors masking their real lives. Forced migration to farming communities in Israel and the shock of being uprooted created new identities for women and new outlets for storytelling. Women narrators increasingly began to tell more openly of their personal lives. Schely-Newman organizes her narrators' accounts by the themes of childhood, marriage, motherhood, immigration, and old age and considers a wide range of factors that shape the narration, including audience, intent, choice of language, and Jewish-Muslim culture. The result is a fascinating blend of analysis, narration, and history.

The prize was great -- not just land, but the riches it held, in the form of diamonds and gold. What became a country called South Africa was, until 1910, a vast and untamed land where great fortunes could be made (and lost); where great battles were fought (and lost); and where great men had their reputations forged, or dashed, or sometimes both.

Martin Meredith's follow-up to his magisterial The State of Africais an equally epic new history of the making of South Africa. Covering the extraordinarily eventful four decades leading up to the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, it covers some of the most iconic tales of imperial history. The Zulus at Rorke's Drift; the Jameson Raid; the diamond and gold rushes at Kimberley and Witwatersrand; the Boer wars; the titanic struggle between the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his Boer rival, Paul Kruger -- DIAMONDS, GOLD AND WARbrings all of these and more together in a stunningly coherent and compelling narrative.

History, somehow, just isn't as colourful any more.

The five largest southeastern Indian groups - the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles - were forced to emigrate west to the Indian territory (now Oklahoma) in the 1830s. Here, from WPA interviews, are those Indians' own stories of the troubled years between the Civil War and Oklahoma statehood - a period of extraordinary turmoil. During this period, Oklahoma Indians functioned autonomously, holding their own elections, enforcing their own laws, and creating their own society from a mixture of old Indian customs and the new ways of the whites. The WPA informants describe the economic realities of the era: a few wealthy Indians, the rest scraping a living out of subsistence farming, hunting, and fishing. They talk about education and religion - Native American and Christian - as well as diversions of the time: horse races, fairs, ball games, cornstalk shooting, and traditional ceremonies such as the Green Corn Dance.

Here is Gregory, who spent two years in solitary confinement before he was convicted of any crime; here is Ethiop, who was imprisoned for homicide despite the absence of a murder weapon, a motive, or witnesses to his alleged crime; and here is Mazar, a convicted murderer, who writes poetry, speaks three languages fluently, and has a genius I.Q. Their "War Stories," along with the stories of 13 other students in a Western Civilization class, are chronicled here by the teacher who earned their respect and trust while tracing the paths that brought them together behind the walls of a maximum security prison.

Americans are vitally concerned about crime. Politicians call for tougher sentences and larger prisons as the headlines decry the sad state of America's inner cities. Yet, amid this din of strident voices, we seldom hear the testimony of those who can speak most authoritatively about the roots of crime and the efficacy of the criminal justice system. We seldom hear from the convicts and inmates themselves. In this poignant and provocative narrative, a history teacher introduces us to fifteen men in a maximum security prison. The stories told by these prisoners confound the easy categories we employ to judge guilt and innocence: some of the men arouse our indignation, while others compel us to question the workings of the criminal justice system. Some point to the ignorance and prejudice that often lie behind the desire to lock 'em up and throw away the key. Throughout, readers will be confronted with facts from the lives of men who are--sometimes simultaneously--perpetrators and victims of the criminal culture we deplore.

Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of "whiteness" for economic, social, scientific, and political ends. Our story begins in Greek and Roman antiquity, where the concept of race did not exist, only geography and the opportunity to conquer and enslave others. Not until the eighteenth century did an obsession with whiteness flourish, with the German invention of the notion of Caucasian beauty. This theory made northern Europeans into "Saxons," "Anglo-Saxons," and "Teutons," envisioned as uniquely handsome natural rulers. Here was a worldview congenial to northern Europeans bent on empire. There followed an explosion of theories of race, now focusing on racial temperament as well as skin color. Spread by such intellectuals as Madame de Stael and Thomas Carlyle, white race theory soon reached North America with a vengeance. Its chief spokesman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, did the most to label Anglo-Saxons-icons of beauty and virtue-as the only true Americans. It was an ideal that excluded not only blacks but also all ethnic groups not of Protestant, northern European background. The Irish and Native Americans were out and, later, so were the Chinese, Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks-all deemed racially alien. Did immigrations threaten the very existence of America? Americans were assumed to be white, but who among poor immigrants could become truly American? A tortured and convoluted series of scientific explorations developed-theories intended to keep Anglo-Saxons at the top: the ever-popular measurement of skulls, the powerful eugenics movement, and highly biased intelligence tests-all designed to keep working people out and down. As Painter reveals, power-supported by economics, science, and politics-continued to drive exclusionary notions of whiteness until, deep into the twentieth century, political realities enlarged the category of truly American. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People forcefully reminds us that the concept of one white race is a recent invention. The meaning, importance, and realty of this all-too-human thesis of race have buckled under the weight of a long and rich unfolding of events.

Parliament is Britain's most important political institution, yet its workings remain obscure to academics and the wider public alike. MPs are often seen as 'out of touch' or 'all the same' and their individual motivations, achievements and regrets remain in the background of party politics. In this book, Emma Peplow and Priscila Pivatto draw on the History of Parliament Trust's collection of oral history interviews with postwar British MPs to highlight their diverse political experiences in Parliament. Featuring extracts from a collection of interviews with over 160 former MPs who sat from the 1950s until the 2000s, The Political Lives of Postwar British MPs gives a voice to those MPs' stories. It explores why they became interested in politics, how they found their seat and fought election campaigns, what it felt like to speak in the chamber and how their class or gender dictated their experiences at Westminster. In the process, readers will be given rare glimpse into the spaces inhabited by MPs, the political rivalries and friendships and the rising and falling of their careers. With accounts from MPs of all political stripes, from the well-known like David Owen and Ann Taylor to those who sat for just a few years such as Denis Coe; from old political families like Douglas Hurd to those like Maria Fyfe who felt themselves outsiders, this book provides deep insight into the political lives of MPs in our age.

Jonny Garrett, cofounder of the YouTube sensation Craft Beer Channel, travels in search of the deeper cultural impact of brewing—how it has become one of the world’s most important inventions and shaped our lives for millennia.

What’s the oldest and most consumed alcoholic beverage on earth? Beer, of course. And it might just be one of our more important inventions.

Since its creation thirteen thousand years ago, our love of beer has shaped everything from religious ceremonies to advertising, and architecture to bioengineering. The people who built the pyramids were paid in ale; the first fridge was built for beer, not food; bacteria was discovered while investigating sour beer; Germany’s beer halls hosted Hitler’s rise to power; and brewer’s yeast may yet be the answer to climate change.

In The Meaning of Beer, award-winning beer writer Jonny Garrett tells the stories of these incredible human moments and inventions, taking readers to some of the best-known beer destinations in the world—Munich and Oktoberfest, Carlsberg Brewery’s historic laboratory, St. Louis and the home of Budweiser—as well as those lesser known, from a five-thousand-year-old brewery in the Egyptian desert to Arctic Svalbard, home to the world’s most northerly pub.

Ultimately, this is not a book about how we made beer, but how beer made us.

This title uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

This book explores the experiences of 'Indo-Mozambicans,' citizens and residents of Mozambique who can trace their origins to the Indian subcontinent, a region affected by competing colonialisms during the twentieth century. Drawing from ethnographic interviews, the author illustrates why migration developed as both an identity marker and a survival tool for Indo-Mozambicans living in Maputo, in response to the series of independence movements and prolonged period of geo-political uncertainty that extended from 1947 to 1992. A unique examination of post-colonialism, the book argues that four pivotal moments in history forced migratory patterns and ethnic identity formations to emerge among Indo-Mozambicans, namely, the end of the British empire in India and the subsequent partition of India and Pakistan in 1947; the end of the Portuguese empire in India, with the annexation of Goa, Daman and Diu in 1961; the independence of Mozambique from Portugal in 1975; and the civil war of Mozambique from 1977 to 1992. Framing these historical markers as trigger points for shifts in migration and identity formation, this book demonstrates the layered experiences of people subject to Portuguese colonialism and highlights the important perspective of those 'left behind' in migration studies.

Angela Zusman offers an informative guidebook with step-by-step directions for planning and implementing intergenerational oral history projects, using youth to interview elders. An expert on these programs, Zusman uses her experiences and those of other oral historians to show how community projects are organized, youthful historians located and trained, interviews conducted, and the project archived for future community needs. Included are a variety of sample documents and case studies designed to ease the process for the uninitiated.

A sweeping history of the Mississippi River―and the centuries of human meddling that have transformed both it and America.

The Mississippi River lies at the heart of America, an undeniable life force that is intertwined with the nation’s culture and history. Its watershed spans almost half the country, Mark Twain’s travels on the river inspired our first national literature, and jazz and blues were born in its floodplains and carried upstream.

In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of this wild and unruly river, and the centuries of efforts to control it. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded “the great river” with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. The river was ever-changing, and Indigenous tribes embraced and even depended on its regular flooding. But the expanse of the watershed and the rich soils of its floodplain lured European settlers and American pioneers, who had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer.

Centuries of human attempts to own, contain, and rework the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson’s expansionist land hunger through today’s era of environmental concern, have now transformed its landscape. Upholt reveals how an ambitious and sometimes contentious program of engineering―government-built levees, jetties, dikes, and dams―has not only damaged once-vibrant ecosystems but may not work much longer. Carrying readers along the river’s last remaining backchannels, he explores how scientists are now hoping to restore what has been lost.

Rich and powerful, The Great River delivers a startling account of what happens when we try to fight against nature instead of acknowledging and embracing its power―a lesson that is all too relevant in our rapidly changing world.

After the Restoration, parliamentarians continued to identify with the decisions to oppose and resist crown and established church. This was despite the fact that expressing such views between 1660 and 1688 was to open oneself to charges of sedition or treason. This book uses approaches from the field of memory studies to examine 'seditious memories' in seventeenth-century Britain, asking why people were prepared to take the risk of voicing them in public. It argues that such activities were more than a manifestation of discontent or radicalism - they also provided a way of countering experiences of defeat. Besides speech and writing, parliamentarian and republican views are shown to have manifested as misbehaviour during official commemorations of the civil wars and republic. The book also considers how such views were passed on from the generation of men and women who experienced civil war and revolution to their children and grandchildren. -- .

While the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended in the nineteenth century, slave raiding and dealing and the extensive use of slave labor continued into the twentieth century in many parts of Africa. Using primary oral sources such as songs, proverbs, names, and everyday sayings as a basis for critical reflection, the overriding aim of this book is to shift emphasis from conventional historical methodology by exploring previously neglected oral sources. Bringing such sources into the academic conversation proffers new insights relating to victims' responses and adjustments to slave raiding and trafficking in the late nineteenth century northern Ghana.

Lochmaben is situated in the 'debatable lands' on the main route into Scotland north from Carlisle. The area has historic connections to the family of Robert the Bruce. This close-knit community has lost several of its basic amenities in recent years but the recent community buyout of the Castle Loch has been a great success with many volunteers coming together. 'Lochmaben Voices', a project to collect the memories of the town's residents by recording interviews with them, was set up in 2011. The eldest interviewee was born in the 1920s and the youngest in 2000s and the transcriptions reflect the various accents heard in the region. For this book, three broad categories were identified: Lochmaben, both as a physical place and a community; personal recollections of living in the town; memories of the town during the Second World War, including military connections.

Of the 400,000 German-speaking Jews that escaped the Third Reich as refugees, approximately 16,000 ended up in Shanghai, China, as part of one of the more remote enclaves within the Jewish diaspora. The stories of the Shanghai Jews contain extremes of the suffering and endurance that defined the refugee experience. Nobody wanted to go to China, and because Shanghai was the last choice of refugees, those who went there had nowhere else left to go. They had endured every stage of escalating Nazi persecution, including the mass arrests during Kristallnacht, the real beginning of the Holocaust. This groundbreaking oral history volume is based on 20 years of interviews with over 100 former Shanghai refugees. It offers a moving and at times astonishing collective portrait of courage, culture shock, persistence, and enduring hope in the face of unimaginable hardships.

Twenty women from the Dingle gaeltacht look back on their lives and the changes they have witnessed from childhood to the present day. The accounts they give are intimate, recalling their personal lives but their memories and experiences extend beyond the personal. Collectively, they provide a commentary on the changing face of Ireland. These women, who are familiar with the hedge schools and the famine from the first hand accounts of their grandparents, now connect with their grandchildren on their mobile phones. In their youth, healing relied on the use of herbs and such traditional healers as the bonesetter; today they have medical centres and home help. They have seen the arrival of radio, television, flush toilets and the page-three pin-up; new-found affluence and political, clerical and local scandal. They have taken much in their stride, and their vitality and resourcefulness continue to glow.