Oxford Oral History Series – Serie

According to the Oral History Association, the term oral history refers to "a method of recording and preserving oral testimony" which results in a verbal document that is "made available in different forms to other users, researchers, and the public." Ordinarily such an academic process would seem to be far removed from legal challenges. Unfortunately this is not the case. While the field has not become a legal minefield, given its tremendous growth and increasing focus on contemporary topics, more legal troubles could well lie ahead if sound procedures are not put in place and periodically revisited. A Guide to Oral History and the Law is the definitive resource for all oral history practitioners. In clear, accessible language it thoroughly explains all of the major legal issues including legal release agreements, the protection of restricted interviews, the privacy torts (including defamation), copyright, the impact of the Internet, and the role of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). The author accomplishes this by examining the most relevant court cases and citing examples of policies and procedures that oral history programs have used to avoid legal difficulties. Neuenschwander's central focus throughout the book is on prevention rather than litigation. He underscores this approach by strongly emphasizing how close adherence to the Oral History Association's Principles and Best Practices provides the best foundation for developing sound legal policies. The book also provides more than a dozen sample legal release agreements that are applicable to a wide variety of situations. This volume is an essential one for all oral historians regardless of their interviewing focus.

Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union are a peculiarity in the Jewish world. After decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a strong sense of Jewish identity--but one that was almost completely divorced from Judaism. Today, more than ten percent of Jews speak or understand Russian, signaling the importance of an ever-vexing question: why are Russian Jews the way they are? In pursuit of an answer, Anna Shternshis's groundbreaking When Sonia Met Boris draws on nearly 500 oral history interviews on the Soviet Jewish experience with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s. Soviet Jews lived through tumultuous times: the Great Terror, World War II, the anti-Semitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best as they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Shternshis unearths heartbreaking, deeply poignant, and often funny stories of the everyday choices Jews were forced to make as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Shternshis reveals how ethnicity rapidly transformed into a disability, as well as a negative characteristic, for Soviet Jews in the postwar period. That sense of Jewish identity has persisted well into the twenty-first century, influencing the children and grandchildren of Shternshis's subjects, the foundational generation of contemporary Russian Jewish culture. An illuminating work of social and cultural history, When Sonia Met Boris traces the fascinating contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to their very roots.

Over a span of eighteen years, Lady Bird Johnson recorded forty-seven oral history interviews with Michael Gillette and his colleagues. These conversations, just released in 2011, form the heart of Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History, an intimate story of a shy young country girl's transformation into one of America's most effective and admired First Ladies. Lady Bird Johnson's odyssey is one of personal and intellectual growth, political and financial ambition, and a shared life with Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most complicated, volatile, and powerful presidents of the 20th century. The former First Lady recounts how a cautious, conservative young woman succumbed to an ultimatum to marry a man she had known for less than three months, how she ran his congressional office during World War II, and how she transformed a struggling Austin radio station into the foundation of a communications empire. As a keen observer of the Washington scene during the eventful decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, Lady Bird Johnson shares dramatic accounts of pivotal moments in American history. We attend informal dinners at Sam Rayburn's apartment and opulent social events at grand mansions from an earlier age. Her rich verbal portraits bring to life scores of personalities, including First Ladies Edith Bolling Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Pat Nixon. An informal, candid narrative by one of America's most admired First Ladies, this volume reveals how instrumental Lady Bird Johnson's support and guidance were at each stage of her husband's political ascent and how she herself emerged as a significant political force.

The history of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition is one of separation: a country and people newly divided. However, in telling this story, Anindya Raychaudhuri, the son of a partition participant, looks to unity, joining for the first time the public and private memory narratives of this pivotal moment in time. Narrating Partition features in-depth interviews with more than 120 individuals across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the United Kingdom, each reflecting on a direct or inherited experience of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition. Through the collection of these oral history narratives, Raychaudhuri is able to place them into comparison with the literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of partition, and in doing so, examine the ways this event is remembered, re-interpreted, and reconstructed--and the narrator's role in this process. These stories also reflect on the themes of home, family, violence, childhood, trains, and rivers within these public and private narratives. Crucially, Raychaudhuri is the first writer to use oral history in addressing the Bengal/Punjab partition as part of this same event, examining the memorial legacy in both the Bengali and Punjabi communities.

As a subculture, cloistered monastic nuns live hidden from public view by choice. Once a woman joins the cloister and makes final vows, she is almost never seen and her voice is not heard; her story is essentially nonexistent in the historical record and collective, public history.From interviews conducted over six years, Abbie Reese tells the stories of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, a cloistered contemplative order at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois. Seldom leaving their 25,000-square-foot gated enclosure, members of this community embrace an extreme version of poverty and anonymity-a separation that enables them to withdraw from the world to devote their lives to prayer. This removal, they contend, allows them to have a greater impact on humanity than if they maintained direct contact with loved ones and strangers.Dedicated to God explores individual and cultural identity through oral history interviews with several generations of nuns, focusing on the origins and life stories of the women who have chosen to become members of one of the strictest religious orders. But the narrative is also one of a collective memory and struggle against extinction and modernity, a determination to create community within the framework of ancient rules.The author's stunning photographs of their dual worlds, religious and quotidian, add texture to the narrative. This artistic and ethnographic work highlights the countercultural values and dedication of individuals who, at incredible personal cost, live for love of God and humanity, out of faith in what cannot be seen, and with the belief that they will be rewarded in the afterlife.

The inner life of every White House is veiled in mystery. Only a select few partake in the sensitive discussions of the Oval Office or the casual banter about high policy and low politics conducted over the engine roar of Air Force One. The privilege of the president's confidence depends on the confidentiality of such exchanges while the president's term endures. Inside the Clinton White House, however, provides a front-row seat to that previously unknown history of the 42nd presidency.In the decade after Bill Clinton left the White House, scores of his political advisors, senior White House staff, and cabinet officials recorded oral history interviews with scholars working with the acclaimed Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. The contents of these interviews are published for the first time in this volume, selected and edited by Russell Riley, co-chair of the Oral History Program. The portraite of the Clinton presidency provided here is based on some 400 hours of conversations with more than sixty people. These interviews track Bill Clinton's emergence as a national political figure with the New Democrat movement, take the reader inside the hectic 1992 campaign, and then detail the ups and downs of life inside the Clinton White House as experienced by those who were there. Extended sections of the book are devoted to domestic policy (including reforms of the health care and welfare systems), foreign policy (including military interventions in Haiti and the Balkans), politics in the Clinton years (including impeachment), and the key personalities of the time (including chapters on Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton). These candid spoken accounts--history "with the bark off" in Lyndon Johnson's phrase--add color and nuance to our understanding of Bill Clinton and his administration, sometimes confirming and sometimes upending the conventional wisdom.

During the Vietnam War, the US Air Force secretly trained pilots from Laos, skirting Lao neutrality in order to bolster the Royal Lao Air Force and their own war efforts. Beginning in 1964, this covert project, "Water Pump," operated out of Udorn Airbase in Thailand with the support of the CIA. This Secret War required recruits from Vietnam-border region willing to take great risks--a demand that was met by the marginalized Hmong ethnic minority. Soon, dozens of Hmong men were training at Water Pump and providing air support to the US-sponsored clandestine army in Laos. Short and problematic training that resulted in varied skill levels, ground fire, dangerous topography, bad weather conditions, and poor aircraft quality, however, led to a nearly 50 percent casualty rate, and those pilots who survived mostly sought refuge in the United States after the war. Drawing from numerous oral history interviews, Fly Until You Die brings their stories to light for the first time--in the words of those who lived it.

For Kennedy devotees, as well as readers unfamiliar with the "lion of the Senate," this book presents the compelling story of Edward Kennedy's unexpected rise to become one of the most consequential legislators in American history and a passionate defender of progressive values, achieving legislative compromises across the partisan divide.What distinguishes Edward Kennedy: An Oral History is the nuanced detail that emerges from the senator's never-before-published, complete descriptions of his life and work, placed alongside the observations of his friends, family, and associates. The senator's twenty released interviews reveal, in his own voice, the stories of Kennedy triumph and tragedy--from the Oval Office to the waters of Chappaquiddick. Spanning the presidencies of JFK to Barack Obama, Edward Kennedy was an iconic player in American political life, the youngest sibling of America's most powerful dynasty; he candidly addresses this role: his legislative accomplishments and failures, his unsuccessful run for the White House, his impact on the Supreme Court, his observations on Washington gridlock, and his personal faults.The interviews and introductions to them create an unsurpassed and illuminating volume. Gathered as part of the massive Edward Kennedy Oral History Project, conducted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center, the senator's interviews allow readers to see how oral history can evolve over a three-year period, drawing out additional details as the interviewee becomes increasingly comfortable with the process and the interviewer. Yet, given the Kennedys' well-known penchant for image creation, what the senator doesn't say or how he says what he chooses to include, is often more revealing than a simple declarative statement.

Imagine a workplace where workers enjoyed a well-paid job for life, one where they could start their day with a pint of stout and a smoke, and enjoy free meals in silver service canteens and restaurants. During their breaks they could explore acres of parkland planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs. Imagine after work a place where employees could play over thirty sports, join one of the theater groups or dozens of other clubs. Imagine a place where at the end of a working life you could enjoy a company pension from a scheme you had never contributed a penny to. Imagine working in buildings designed by an internationally renowned architect whose brief was to create a building that "would last a century or two."This is no fantasy or utopian vision of work but just some aspects of the working conditions enjoyed by employees at the Guinness brewery established at Park Royal West London in the mid-1930s. In this book, Tim Strangleman tells the story of the Guinness brewery at Park Royal, showing how the history of one plant tells us a much wider story about changing attitudes and understandings about work and the organization in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on extensive oral history interviews with staff and management as well as a wealth of archival and photographic sources, the book shows how progressive ideas of workplace citizenship came into conflict with the pressure to adapt to new expectations about work and its organization. Strangleman illustrates how these changes were experienced by those on the shop floor from the 1960s through to the final closure of the plant in 2005. This book asks striking and important questions about employment and the attachment workers have to their jobs, using the story of one the UK and Ireland's most beloved brands, Guinness.

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women's Liberation Movement shows why and how feminism's 'second wave' mobilized to demand not just equality but social and gender transformation.Oral history testimonies power the work, tracing the arc of a feminist life from 1950s girlhoods to late life activism today. Peppered with personal stories, the book casts new light on feminist critiques of society and on the lives of prominent and grassroots activists.Margaretta Jolly uses oral history as creative method, making significant use of Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project to animate still-unresolved controversies of race, class, sexuality, disability, and feminist identity.Women activists vividly recall a divisive education system, the unevenness of sexual liberation and the challenges of Thatcherism, Northern Ireland's Troubles and the policing of minority ethnic communities. They illuminate key campaigns in these wider contexts, and talk of the organizational and collaborative skills they struggled to acquire as they moved into local government, NGOs and even the business sector.Jolly provides fresh insight into iconic actions including the Miss World Protest, the fight to protect abortion rights, and the peace protest at Greenham Common. Her accounts of workplace struggles, from Ford and Grunwick to Women Against Pit Closures and Women and Manual Trades, show how socialist ideals permeated feminism. She explores men's violence and today's demands for trans-liberation as areas of continuing feminist concern.Jolly offers a refreshingly jargon-free exploration of key debates and theoretical trends, alongside an appreciation of the joyfully personal aspects of feminism, from families, homes, shopping and music to relationships, health, aging, death and faith. She concludes by urging readers to enter the archives of feminist memory to help map their own political futures. Her work will appeal to general readers, scholars and practitioners alike.

The Land Speaks explores the intersection of two vibrant fields, oral history and environmental studies. Ranging across farm and forest, city and wilderness, river and desert, this collection of fourteen oral histories gives voice to nature and the stories it has to tell. These essays consider topics as diverse as environmental activism, wilderness management, public health, urban exploring, and smoke jumping. They raise questions about the roles of water, neglected urban spaces, land ownership concepts, protectionist activism, and climate change. Covering almost every region of the United States and part of the Caribbean, Lee and Newfont and their diverse collection of contributors address the particular contributions oral history can make toward understanding issues of public land and the environment. In the face of global warming and events like the Flint water crisis, environmental challenges are undoubtedly among the most pressing issues of our time. These essays suggest that oral history can serve both documentary and problem-solving functions as we grapple with these challenges.

The Land Speaks explores the intersection of two vibrant fields, oral history and environmental studies. Ranging across farm and forest, city and wilderness, river and desert, this collection of fourteen oral histories gives voice to nature and the stories it has to tell. These essays consider topics as diverse as environmental activism, wilderness management, public health, urban exploring, and smoke jumping. They raise questions about the roles of water, neglected urban spaces, land ownership concepts, protectionist activism, and climate change. Covering almost every region of the United States and part of the Caribbean, Lee and Newfont and their diverse collection of contributors address the particular contributions oral history can make toward understanding issues of public land and the environment. In the face of global warming and events like the Flint water crisis, environmental challenges are undoubtedly among the most pressing issues of our time. These essays suggest that oral history can serve both documentary and problem-solving functions as we grapple with these challenges.

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.

Indigenous peoples have our own ways of defining oral history. For many, oral sources are shaped and disseminated in multiple forms that are more culturally textured than just standard interview recordings. For others, indigenous oral histories are not merely fanciful or puerile myths or traditions, but are viable and valid historical accounts that are crucial to native identities and the relationships between individual and collective narratives. This book challenges popular definitions of oral history that have displaced and confined indigenous oral accounts as merely oral tradition. It stands alongside other marginalized community voices that highlight the importance of feminist, Black, and gay oral history perspectives, and is the first text dedicated to a specific indigenous articulation of the field. Drawing on a Maori indigenous case study set in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book advocates a rethinking of the discipline, encouraging a broader conception of the way we do oral history, how we might define its form, and how its politics might move beyond a subsuming democratization to include nuanced decolonial possibilities.

As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deeply ingrained human connections with the earth are changing. Oral history's proven ability to explore issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality make it a uniquely effective methodology for bringing in new perspectives to our understanding of environments. This book brings together interviews with a global range of activists, farmers, water system managers, victims of catastrophe, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, and foresters, among others whose life experience gives them special insights into human-environmental interaction and adaption. Commentary by oral historians examines how these stories can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. Oral History and the Environment takes what could seem broad and impersonal forces such as climate change and environmentalismLand crystalizes their meaning through personal stories. It overturns narrow historical frameworks bounded artificially by national borders and instead portrays the issues facing our common ecosystems.

As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deeply ingrained human connections with the earth are changing. Oral history's proven ability to explore issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality make it a uniquely effective methodology for bringing in new perspectives to our understanding of environments.This book brings together interviews with a global range of activists, farmers, water system managers, victims of catastrophe, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, and foresters, among others whose life experience gives them special insights into human-environmental interaction and adaption. Commentary by oral historians examines how these stories can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. Oral History and the Environment takes what could seem broad and impersonal forces such as climate change and environmentalismDLand crystalizes their meaning through personal stories. It overturns narrow historical frameworks bounded artificially by national borders and instead portrays the issues facing our common ecosystems.

President Bill Clinton led one of the most influential and consequential White House tenures in recent memory. However, because of the office's traditional climate of confidentiality, many details of his behind-the-scenes activities have remained absent from the written record. How did the administration manage the horrific conflicts in Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans that came to a head shortly after the President took the oath? What motivated the President to place First Lady Hillary Clinton at the helm of the ill-fated Health Security Act of 1993? And how did the President's closest confidantes and aides respond to the outbreak of the devastating scandal that nearly ended his presidency? Inside the Clinton White House offers an intimate perspective on these questions and many more, granting readers unprecedented access to the sensitive Oval Office banter that changed the course of history. Bringing together material from 400 hours of candid conversations with over sixty individuals, respected oral historian Russell L. Riley weaves this illuminating testimony with important contextual information to form an irresistible narrative, taking the reader from Clinton's first potential White House bid in 1988 to the final days of his remarkable and controversial career. Extended sections of the book are devoted to important domestic and foreign policy campaigns, the complicated politics of the President's two terms and impeachment, and portraits of important personalities in the administration, including Vice President Al Gore and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. These forthright and often surprising accounts add a layer of nuance to an iconic figure in America's recent history, as told in the words of the people who knew him best.

The Nazi regime and local collaborators killed 800,000 Belorussian Jews, many of them parents or relatives of young Jews who survived the war. Thousands of young girls and boys were thus orphaned and struggled for survival on their own. This book is the first systematic account of young Soviet Jews' lives under conditions of Nazi occupation and genocide.These orphans' experiences and memories are rooted in the 1930s, when Soviet policies promoted and sometimes actually created interethnic solidarity and social equality. This experience of interethnic solidarity provided a powerful framework for the ways in which young Jews survived and, several decades after the war, represented their experience of violence and displacement.Through oral histories with several survivors, video testimonies, and memoirs, Anika Walke reveals the crucial roles of age and gender in the ways young Jews survived and remembered the Nazi genocide, and shows how shared experiences of trauma facilitated community building within and beyond national groups.Pioneers and Partisans uncovers the repeated transformations of identity that Soviet Jewish children and adolescents experienced, from Soviet citizens in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to a barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.

The concept that oral history can give voice to people or allow "hidden voices" to become part of history is one of its most celebrated achievements. However, the standard practice of transcribing or summarizing interviews has meant that oral historians have had to grapple with questions of how to translate the oral into written form. What is lost or gained during this process of mediation? These re-creations can be wonderful and illuminating works of scholarship and art, and this book explores a wide range of the different forms they have taken-from John and Alan Lomax's transcriptions of African American songs for the Federal Writers Project to Svetlana Alexievich's polyphonic novels. Such works can give their subjects the necessary latitude to convey their narratives on their own terms, but there is also, always, the danger that their voices will be distorted or lost during the process of mediation. Sound Writing offers a thorough review of the varying arguments about editing for transcription and publication and reflects on how digital technologies enable much wider access to "raw" oral data. It examines how oral histories are co-created by speakers, the authors who mediate them, and readers, and it brings into sharp focus questions about how memory takes on subjective, narrative form. Finally, it examines the interplay between written literature and sound recordings, or orality, using a diverse range of examples-from the work of William Wordsworth and George Ewart Evans to Studs Terkel, Alex Haley, Luisa Passerini, Amrit Wilson, and Stacy Zembrzycki. As an interdisciplinary study, Sound Writing takes a broad approach to the written word to encompass not only transcriptions and other texts derived from oral history interviews but also literary precursors such as epic poetry and folklore, along with various related textual forms such as biography, autobiography, and blogs. It argues that the recording of oral traditions in print by poets, folklorists, anthropologists, and postcolonial writers is comparable to practices of recording, transcribing, and publishing familiar to oral historians. Literary genres have long influenced oral history narratives, and, in turn, oral history has helped shape literary forms.

Intimate, anecdotal, and spell-binding, Singing Out offers a fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from 1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures, including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near. Together they tell the stories of such musical groups as the Composers' Collective, the Almanac Singers, People's Songs, the Weavers, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Freedom Singers. Folklorists, musicians, musicologists, writers, activists, and aficionados reveal not only what happened during the folk revivals, but what it meant to those personally and passionately involved. For everyone who ever picked up a guitar, fiddle, or banjo, this will be a book to give and cherish. Extensive notes, bibliography, and discography, plus a photo section.

The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was one of the great legislative triumphs of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. In Launching the War on Poverty, forty-nine veterans of this unprecedented legislative effort tell their stories, offering a fascinating inside look at how Community Action, Head Start, the Job Corps, Legal Services, and other efforts went from brainstorming sessions in Washington to real-life programs in low-income neighborhoods throughout the nation. As the interviews reveal the idealism of the 1960s, they also capture the excitement and disappointment, the determination and doubt, the cut-and-thrust of American lawmaking, and the sheer force of the personalities involved. This second edition offers a new introduction that shows how many of these programs survived a volatile beginning to become accepted, permanent elements of domestic policy. In addition, the book now includes transcripts of Johnson's pivotal phone conversations, underscoring the president's determination and resourcefulness, his judgments of personnel and programs, and his sensitivity to political fallout. There is an updated bibliography with a list of web and archival sources on the War on Poverty.

Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholarship aims to challenge memory and fill its gaps. At the same time, scholars often use testimonies uncritically or selectively--mining them to support generalizations. This book is a departure, bringing several scholars together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. Helen "Zippi" Spitzer Tichauer was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. One of the few early arrivals to survive the camp and the death marches, she met her future husband in a DP camp. They moved to New York in the 1960s. Since the end of the war, Zippi devoted many hours to talking with a small group of scholars about her life. Zippi's testimony covers a wide range of human experiences in extremis and spans fifty-odd years. It is thus uniquely suited to raise questions on the meaning and use of survivor testimony. What do we know, sixty years after the Nazi era, about the workings of a death camp? How willing are we to learn from the experiences of a survivor, and how much is our perception preconditioned by standardized images? What are the mechanisms, aims and pitfalls of story-telling? Can survivor testimonies be understood properly without guidance from those who experienced the events? This book, written by established Holocaust scholars who have known Helen Tichauer for years, attempts to approximate survivor testimony and probe the limits of its representation and understanding. Contributors include Atina Grossmann (author, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton, 2007), Konrad Kwiet (co-ed., Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, 2005), Wendy Lower (author, Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memory, Indiana UP, 2007), Nehama Tec (author, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, Yale, 2003, and Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, OUP, 1993). The book will be of interest to both Holocaust scholars and oral historians.

Based on previously classified documents and on interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens, The Firm is the first comprehensive history of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. Focusing on Gransee and Perleberg, two East German districts located north of Berlin, Gary Bruce reveals how the Stasi monitored small-town East Germany. He paints an eminently human portrait of those involved with this repressive arm of the government, featuring interviews with former officers that uncover a wide array of personalities, from devoted ideologues to reluctant opportunists, most of whom talked frankly about East Germany's obsession with surveillance. Their paths after the collapse of Communism are gripping stories of resurrection and despair, of renewal and demise, of remorse and continued adherence to the movement. The book also sheds much light on the role of the informant, the Stasi's most important tool in these out-of-the-way areas. Providing on-the-ground empirical evidence of how the Stasi operated on a day-to-day basis with ordinary people, this remarkable volume offers an unparalleled picture of life in a totalitarian state.

Over the last several decades, videotestimony with aging Holocaust survivors has brought these witnesses into the limelight. Yet the success of these projects has made it seem that little survivor testimony took place in earlier years. In truth, thousands of survivors began to recount their experience at the earliest opportunity. This book provides the first full-length case study of early postwar Holocaust testimony, focusing on David Boder's 1946 displaced persons interview project. In July 1946, Boder, a psychologist, traveled to Europe to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps and what he called "shelter houses." During his nine weeks in Europe, Boder carried out approximately 130 interviews in nine languages and recorded them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. Likely the earliest audio recorded testimony of Holocaust survivors, the interviews are today the earliest extant recordings, valuable for the spoken word (that of the DP narrators and of Boder himself) and also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder wire recorded at various points through the expedition. Eighty were eventually transcribed into English, most of which were included in a self-published manuscript of more than 3,100 pages. Rosen sets Boder's project in the context of the postwar response to displaced persons, sketches the dramatic background of his previous life and work, chronicles in detail the evolving process of interviewing both Jewish and non-Jewish DPs, and examines from several angles the implications for the history of Holocaust testimony.Such postwar testimony, Rosen avers, deserves to be taken on its own terms--as unbelated testimony--rather than to be enfolded into earlier or later schemas of testimony. Moreover, Boder's efforts and the support he was given for them demonstrate that American postwar response to the Holocaust was not universally indifferent but rather often engaged, concerned, and resourceful.

The Velvet Revolution in November 1989 brought about the collapse of the authoritarian communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia, marking the beginning of the country's journey towards democracy. Though members of the elite have spoken about the transition to democracy, the experiences of ordinary people have largely gone untold. In Velvet Revolutions, Miroslav Vanek and Pavel Mücke examine the values of everyday citizens who lived under so-called real socialism, as well as how their values changed after the 1989 collapse. Based on 300 interviews, Vanek and Mücke give voice to everyone from farmers to managers, service workers to marketing personnel, manual laborers to members of the armed forces. Compelling and diverse, the oral histories touch upon the experience - and absence - of freedom, the value of family and friends, the experience of free time, and perceptions of foreign nations. Data from opinion polls conducted between 1970 and 2013 factor into the book's analysis, creating a well-rounded view of the ways in which popular thoughts, trends, and attitudes changed as Czech society transitioned from communism to democracy. From this rich foundation, Velvet Revolutions builds a multi-layered view of Czech history before 1989 and during the subsequent period of democratic transformation.

Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union are a peculiarity in the Jewish world. After decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a strong sense of Jewish identity--but one that was almost completely divorced from Judaism. Today, more than ten percent of Jews speak or understand Russian, signaling the importance of an ever-vexing question: why are Russian Jews the way they are? In pursuit of an answer, Anna Shternshis's groundbreaking When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin draws on nearly 500 oral history interviews on the Soviet Jewish experience with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s. Soviet Jews lived through tumultuous times: the Great Terror, World War II, the anti-Semitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Shternshis unearths heartbreaking, deeply poignant, and often funny stories of the everyday choices Jews were forced to navigate as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Shternshis reveals how ethnicity rapidly transformed into a disability, as well as a negative characteristic, for Soviet Jews in the postwar period, and shows how it was something they needed desperately to overcome in order to succeed. That sense of self has persisted well into the twenty-first century, and has impacted the Jewish identities of the children and grandchildren of Shternshis's subjects, the foundational generation of contemporary Russian Jewish culture. An illuminating work of social and cultural history, When Sonia Met Boris traces the fascinating contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to their very roots.

For Kennedy devotees, as well as readers unfamiliar with the "lion of the Senate", this book presents the compelling story of Edward Kennedy's unexpected rise to become one of the most consequential legislators in American history and a passionate defender of progressive values, achieving legislative compromises across the partisan divide.What distinguishes Edward Kennedy: An Oral History is the nuanced detail that emerges from the senator's never-before published, complete descriptions of his life and work, placed alongside the observations of his friends, family, and associates. The senator's twenty released interviews reveal, in his own voice, the stories of Kennedy triumph and tragedy--from the Oval Office to the waters of Chappaquiddick. Spanning the presidencies of JFK to Barack Obama, Edward Kennedy was an iconic player in American political life, the youngest sibling of America's most powerful dynasty; he candidly addresses this role: his legislative accomplishments and failures, his unsuccessful run for the White House, his impact on the Supreme Court, his observations on Washington gridlock, and his personal faults.The interviews and introductions to them create an unsurpassed and illuminating volume. Gathered as part of the massive Edward Kennedy Oral History Project, conducted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center, the senator's interviews allow readers to see how oral history can evolve over a three-year period, drawing out additional details as the interviewee becomes increasingly comfortable with the process and the interviewer. Yet, given the Kennedys' well-known penchant for image creation, what the senator doesn't say or how he says what he chooses to include, is often more revealing than a simple declarative statement.

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women's Liberation Movement shows why and how feminism's 'second wave' mobilized to demand not just equality but social and gender transformation.Oral history testimonies power the work, tracing the arc of a feminist life from 1950s girlhoods to late life activism today. Peppered with personal stories, the book casts new light on feminist critiques of society and on the lives of prominent and grassroots activists.Margaretta Jolly uses oral history as creative method, making significant use of Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project to animate still-unresolved controversies of race, class, sexuality, disability, and feminist identity.Women activists vividly recall a divisive education system, the unevenness of sexual liberation and the challenges of Thatcherism, Northern Ireland's Troubles and the policing of minority ethnic communities. They illuminate key campaigns in these wider contexts, and talk of the organizational and collaborative skills they struggled to acquire as they moved into local government, NGOs and even the business sector.Jolly provides fresh insight into iconic actions including the Miss World Protest, the fight to protect abortion rights, and the peace protest at Greenham Common. Her accounts of workplace struggles, from Ford and Grunwick to Women Against Pit Closures and Women and Manual Trades, show how socialist ideals permeated feminism. She explores men's violence and today's demands for trans-liberation as areas of continuing feminist concern.Jolly offers a refreshingly jargon-free exploration of key debates and theoretical trends, alongside an appreciation of the joyfully personal aspects of feminism, from families, homes, shopping and music to relationships, health, aging, death and faith. She concludes by urging readers to enter the archives of feminist memory to help map their own political futures. Her work will appeal to general readers, scholars and practitioners alike.

While the Naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is well-known for its infamous prison camp, few people are aware of its prior use as an immigrant detention center for Haitian and Cuban refugees. Beginning in August 1994, the United States government declared that thousands of Cubans who had launched themselves into the Florida Straits on rickety rafts were "illegal refugees" and sent them to join over fifteen thousand Haitians already being held on Guantánamo after fleeing a violent coup in Haiti.Escape to Miami recounts the gripping stories of the rafters who were detained in Guantánamo during the 1994-1996 Cuban Rafter Crisis. After working in the camps for a year as an employee of the U.S. Justice Department, Elizabeth Campisi conducted life history interviews with twelve of the rafters, chronicling their departures from Cuba, their rafting trips, life on the base, and their initial experiences in Cuban Miami. Through these remarkable narratives, the book details the ways in which the rafters used creative expression, such as performance and artwork, to cope with the traumas they experienced in the camp. Campisi explores these coping mechanisms, showing that, when people work through individually-traumatic experiences as a group, the new meanings they create during that process can come together to change existing cultures or create new ones.Vivid and engaging, Escape to Miami gives voice to the untold stories of Guantánamo. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in policy, Latin American history, and human rights.