This is an oral history of a second-generation, urban-born woman who struggles to survive in the poor, Andean city of La Paz. It shows how her identity shifts over time, shaped by the major events in her life. Topics range fron social networks to magical interventions and clairvoyant dreaming.

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.

As Hitler's victorious armies approached Paris, panic gripped the city and the roads heading south filled with millions of French citizens, fleeing for their lives, with scant supplies and often no destination in mind. All hoped, as famed author Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her diary, "not to be taken like a rat in Occupied Paris."
In Fleeing Hitler, historian Hanna Diamond paints a gripping picture of the harrowing escape from Paris, highlighting the hardships people suffered in their desperate flight, and underscoring the impact this exodus had on life under Vichy rule. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Diamond shows how this ordeal became for civilians and soldiers alike the defining experience of the war. She tells how, in the Paris region alone, close to four million people left their homes and fled south, swelling the numbers of refugees until is was impossible to direct the flow of humanity. The result was total chaos with an enormous price to pay in terms of human misery and suffering. Many lost their lives as this vast caravan of predominantly women, children, and the elderly faced truly harsh conditions, and even starvation. Then, after the German offer of peace, as the traumatized population returned home, preoccupied by the desire for safety and bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, they put their faith in Marshall Petain who was able to establish his collaborative Vichy regime largely unopposed, while the Germans consolidated their occupation.
The first time this important story has been told in English, Fleeing Hitler captures in moving detail the devastating flight and early days of occupation after the fall of France.

Memoir, detective work and political history come together in this family biography which springs from a collection of stories passed down by word of mouth. Told on a toboggan in the Austrian mountains, in the back seat of an overloaded mini, on a coal barge in Paris, folding linen in London ... they range from Hungary to Austria, Italy, France, England and South America. These were the tales that shaped our lives and understanding as we grew up, and brought us the adventures of the women who went before us - and the link to a scattered family and 200 years of European turmoil. Rich with the experience of several generations of women, this is the history that so rarely reaches the official record. This is where our story, their stories and history meet.

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.

American Survivors is a fresh and moving historical account of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, breaking new ground not only in the study of World War II but also in the public understanding of nuclear weaponry. A truly trans-Pacific history, American Survivors challenges the dualistic distinction between Americans-as-victors and Japanese-as-victims often assumed by scholars of the nuclear war. Using more than 130 oral histories of Japanese American and Korean American survivors, their family members, community activists, and physicians - most of which appear here for the first time - Naoko Wake reveals a cross-national history of war, illness, immigration, gender, family, and community from intimately personal perspectives. American Survivors brings to light the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that connects, as much as separates, people across time and national boundaries.

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 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.

This is a work of 11 self-contained chapters, one for each day of September before the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, each containing one woman's story. The chapters reflect the broadest spectrum of women in order to reflect, by their differences, the worlds they inhabited and how the attack on 11 September affected their lives. Despite national and international policies aimed at securing equality for women, the sad fact is that throughout the world women have achieved at best an uneven and insecure equality, and in the case of Afghanistan no equality at all. With a new political and social order promised in Afghanistan, dare we hope that the situation will improve? Christopher Hilton has interviewed 11 very different women, some from the West, some from Afghanistan, to find out what the lives of women involved in the dramatic events of 11 September 2001 were like and how the attack changed their lives. In the stories that emerge we hear the voices of women whose ordinary loves were suddenly changed and who became actors in some of the most far-reaching events of the modern world.

Jo-ann Archibald worked closely with Coast Salish Elders and storytellers, who shared both traditional and personal life-experience stories, in order to develop ways of bringing storytelling into educational contexts. Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making.

During the 872-day siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944, civilians endured air raids, bread rations as low as 125 grams, food theft and speculation by opportunistic officials and shadow market traders, and death by starvation. As shocks of total war weaken institutions, desperate survival can compel violation of norms, and personal suffering can shatter long-held beliefs and practices. In Wartime Suffering and Survival, Jeffrey K. Hass uses the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II to explore the social practices and dynamics by which we cope or collapse. Using hundreds of personal accounts from diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents, Hass tells the story of how average Leningraders coped with the nightmares of war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. By exploring the state and shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, death, and suffering, he describes the routines of daily life, the functioning of official institutions, and the development of illegal practices that were made and remade in the interactions of citizens and state agencies coping with new and extreme situations. The key to what Leningraders did and how they survived, Hass argues, is relations to anchors-entities of symbolic and personal significance that tethered Leningraders to each other and shaped practices of empathy and compassion, and of opportunism and egoism. Moving and powerful, Wartime Suffering and Survival goes to the heart of human resilience and fragility and to the core of the human condition-both individual and social.

The year 1968 witnessed one of the great upheavals of the twentieth century, as social movements shook every continent. Across the Global North, people rebelled against post-war conformity and patriarchy, authoritarian education and factory work, imperialism and the Cold War. They took over workplaces and universities, created their own media, art and humour, and imagined another world. The legacy of 1968 lives on in many of today's struggles, yet it is often misunderstood and caricatured. Voices of 1968 is a vivid collection of original texts from the movements of the long 1968. We hear these struggles in their own words, showing their creativity and diversity. We see feminism, black power, anti-war activism, armed struggle, indigenous movements, ecology, dissidence, counter-culture, trade unionism, radical education, lesbian and gay struggles, and more take the stage. Chapters cover France, Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland, Britain, the USA, Canada, Italy, West Germany, Denmark, Mexico, Yugoslavia and Japan. Introductory essays frame the rich material - posters, speeches, manifestos, flyers, underground documents, images and more - to help readers explore the era's revolutionary voices and ideas and understand their enduring impact on society, culture and politics today.

Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. For this book, Raleigh has interviewed sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in provincial Saratov. Part of the generation that began school the year the country launched Sputnik into space, they grew up during the Cold War, but in a Soviet Union increasingly distanced from the excesses of Stalinism. In this post-Stalin era, the Soviet leadership dismantled the Gulag, ruled without terror, promoted consumerism, and began to open itself to an outside world still fearful of Communism. Raleigh is one of the first scholars of post-1945 Soviet history to draw extensively on oral history, a particularly useful approach in studying a country where the boundaries between public and private life remained porous and the state sought to peer into every corner of people's lives. During and after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian citizens began openly talking about their past, trying to make sense of it, and Raleigh has made the most of this new forthrightness. He has created an extraordinarily rich composite narrative and embedded it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, "overtaking" America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization. Including rare photographs of daily life in Cold War Russia, Soviet Baby Boomers offers an intimate portrait of a generation that has remained largely faceless until now.

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.

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.

Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide is considered the premier guidebook to oral history, used by professional oral historians, public historians, archivists, and genealogists as a core text in college courses and throughout the public history community. Over the past decades, the development of digital audio and video recording technology has continued to alter the practice of oral history, making it even easier to produce quality recordings and to disseminate them on the Internet. This basic manual offers detailed advice on setting up an oral history project, conducting interviews, making video recordings, preserving oral history collections in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting oral history. Using the existing Q&A format, the third edition asks new questions and augments previous answers with new material, particularly in these areas: 1. Technology: As before, the book avoids recommending specific equipment, but weighs the merits of the types of technology available for audio and video recording, transcription, preservation, and dissemination. Information about web sites is expanded, and more discussion is provided about how other oral history projects have posted their interviews online. 2. Teaching: The new edition addresses the use of oral history in online teaching. It also expands the discussion of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) with the latest information about compliance issues. 3. Presentation: Once interviews have been conducted, there are many opportunities for creative presentation. There is much new material available on innovative forms of presentation developed over the last decade, including interpretive dance and other public performances. 4. Legal considerations: The recent Boston College case, in which the courts have ruled that Irish police should have access to sealed oral history transcripts, has re-focused attention on the problems of protecting donor restrictions. The new edition offers case studies from the past decade. 5. Theory and Memory: As a beginner's manual, Doing Oral History has not dealt extensively with theoretical issues, on the grounds that these emerge best from practice. But the third edition includes the latest thinking about memory and provides a sample of some of the theoretical issues surrounding oral sources. It will include examples of increased studies into catastrophe and trauma, and the special considerations these have generated for interviewers. 6. Internationalism: Perhaps the biggest development in the past decade has been the spreading of oral history around the world, facilitated in part by the International Oral History Association. New oral history projects have developed in areas that have undergone social and political upheavals, where the traditional archives reflect the old regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The third edition includes many more references to non-U.S. projects that will still be relevant to an American audience. These changes make the third edition of Doing Oral History an even more useful tool for beginners, teachers, archivists, and all those oral history managers who have inherited older collections that must be converted to the latest technology.

In "Big Thicket Legacy," Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller present the stories of people living in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Many of the storytellers were close to one hundred years old when interviewed, with some being the great-grandchildren of the first settlers. Here are tales about robbing a bee tree, hunting wild boar, plowing all day and dancing all night, wading five miles to church through a cypress brake, and making soap using hickory ashes.

Shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award. Available for the first time in English!

In this harrowing firsthand account of the Holocaust, survivor Tobias Schiff displays the depths of human suffering, the capacity for hope and renewal, and the impact of starvation on the human mind. Schiff was a teenager when Nazis deported his family to Auschwitz from Antwerp, Belgium, and he spent the next thirty-three agonizing months in numerous concentration camps. This deeply personal memoir-in-verse explores personal faith, identity, memory, and trauma across a lifetime interrupted by suffering. Through his eyes, readers witness the atrocities and struggles that defined his daily existence, feel his tenacity while beaten and starved, and learn what enabled him and others to cling to life while surrounded by death. Schiff's verse challenges dehumanizing narratives and provides an intimate view of the realities of life in Nazi death camps and the long-lasting impact of trauma.

As racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia resurge and continue to pollute the modern era, his pain―imparted through concise, rhythmic verse―serves as a reminder of our collective humanity and a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.

*Highly Commended by the British Records Association for the 2019 Janette Harley Prize* In September 1943, at the height of World War II, the Aegean island of Leros became the site of the most pivotal battle of the Dodecanese campaign as the British tried, in vain, to retain control of the island. Over the course of two short months - from 15 September 1943 to 17 November 1943 - almost 1500 men lost their lives and hundreds more ended up in Prisoner-of-War camps. In this book, Julie Peakman, a modern-day resident of Leros, brings to life the story of the men caught up in the battle based on first-hand interviews and written accounts including diaries, letters and journals. She tells of the preparations of the soldiers leading up to the battle, the desperate hand-to-hand fighting, and the suffering endured from continual bombings. She also shows the extent of the men's despair at the allied surrender, the many subsequent daring escapes as well as the terrible years of incarceration for those who were captured and imprisoned. Many of the heart-rending accounts of the battle are told here for the first time, providing a unique eyewitness take on this forgotten corner of World War II.

Living in the shadow of state is not a dark, static and silent world. It was the world in full radiance, involving multiple process of reenactment to life, lifeways and relationship. If state and history demonized the hill people as the 'pest' and 'nuisance' to civilization, and the hill practices as the 'relics' of the 'primitive', the hillmen's narratives celebrated them as their core cultural collective. Against State, Against History is a radical reevaluation of the dominant civilizational narratives on the 'tribe' and attempts to recast their history in the light of recent historiography that presents the hillmen as state evading population. Bringing together both conventional and oral narratives, and from the counter-perspectives of the margin, the book explores the conditions in which section of valley population escaped to the hills, their migration history, how they reenact their space, society, culture and economy in the hills. Their physical dispersion in the highland terrain, choosing an independent village polity, defended by trained warriors, fortressed at the top of hills, connected by repulsive pathways, following jhum economy, and adopting a pliable social, cultural, ethnic and gender formations, are their counter cultural collective at the margins of state. They were reenacted to prevent state control and the emergence of domination relations in the hills. This process is understood as unstate involving the process of disowning state and becoming an egalitarian society where freedom of individuals was located at the core of their cultural collective.

The story of how the British shaped sport, and how sport shaped the British.

Sport is an enduring element of British life and culture. In all its variety, it touches on so many significant aspects of past and present: national identity, class, gender, the relationship between country and town, the rise of commerce, the evolution of ethical debate. Our sporting arenas have witnessed triumphs and heartbreaks that have become part of the national narrative.

For a country so obsessed with the invention, playing and watching of sport, the story of how it has come to reflect us remains untold. David Horspool tracks each game as a driver of social change: horse-racing''s obsession with blood and money turned an aristocratic pastime into a national sport; boxing promoted opportunity for ethnic minorities, while simultaneously enforcing a regime of discrimination; golf rehearsed a perennial battle over Britain''s landscape; the football fan created an exuberant, often troubled culture at the centre of British life; and the Empire and Commonwealth Games emerged as an unexpected response to the end of the imperial story.

The history of Britain in sport is a history of popular heroes and pantomime villains - independence fighters, suffragettes, Jewish bare-knuckle boxers - all sharing and contesting loyalties, passions, winning and losing. More Than a Game captures these seminal stories, revealing how sport cemented its place as the ultimate theatre of Britain''s past, and its present.

This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators - those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a 'genealogical nationalism' as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.