The Embers of Hiroshima: From Author to Subject in a Transnational Oral History Collaboration

This paper examines an international oral history collaborationinvolving the "translation" of the American book, Atomic Fragments:A Daughter's Questions, by Mary Palevsky, into the Japanesedocumentary film, Memories of the Trinity Bomb, directed byYoshihiko Muraki. The author utilized oral history and personalnarrative to chronicle her inquiry into the legacy of the atomicbomb in the lives of its creators. Japanese scholar, KayokoYoshida, translated Palevsky's summary of Atomic Fragments intoJapanese for Muraki, working with the filmmaker throughout theprocess. For the film, the author conducted interviews withManhattan Project scientists and was interviewed in sites ofpersonal and historical significance. This paper explores themethodological challenges underlying three essential featuresof this transnational project: the transformation of audience,from American to Japanese; the transformation of medium, frombook to film; the transformation of identity,from researcherand author of a book to subject of a film.     

Site Management: An Application to Wadilmeluk (the Valley of the Kings)

‘Value has always been the reason underlying heritage conservation. It is self‐evident that no society makes an effort to conserve what it does not value.’ ¹ 1. de la Torre and Mason, Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage, 3–4. However, assessing the value of a cultural heritage asset as a representative sample of our tangible and intangible heritage for present and future generations is a difficult concept to deal with. It is, therefore, the aim of the researchers to help the conservation decision process by attempting to make an assessment of the values attributed to the cultural heritage assets of one of the most notable heritage sites in Egypt: the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.     

Chicanas in Charge: Texas Women in the Public Arena

Chicanas in Charge is a collection of individual profiles ofsignificant women in Texas politics and activism from the 1940sto the present. The book is arranged in four parts—"Adelitas:Warrior Trailblazers," "The Chicano Movement Activists," "Puentesy Lazos: The Hispanic Connectors," and "Twenty-first CenturyEntorchas/Torchbearers." Each part features a short introductionthat identifies the period's historical zeitgeist, identifiessimilar themes in the women's stories, and points out uniqueaspects of the leaders followed by from five to eight individualprofiles. The profiles of each woman are somewhat concise: they includea sketch of the background     

Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project

With the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal in 2008,Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’Project takes on a meaningful and significant role in the recoveryand interpretation of the Federal Writers’ Project. Itprovides an opportunity for us to think about the historiographyof oral history. Hirsch's essential question deserves an answer:"Who do oral historians want for ancestors? And why?" (142). Seventy-five years ago, in 1933, the newly elected presidentFranklin D. Roosevelt and his administration addressed the nationalcrisis of the Great Depression by creating the innovative "alphabetagencies" and programs, a series of     

The Face of Decline: the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century

The term "deindustrialization" did not come into popular usageuntil the late 1970s as American heavy industry went into aprecipitous decline and the industrial heartland became the"rust belt." For the people of the anthracite coal mining regionof eastern Pennsylvania, deindustrialization came much earlieras Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht graphically demonstrate inThe Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in theTwentieth Century (2005). This work joins a growing body ofliterature that examines the rise, decline, and fall of communitiesimpacted by the slow erosion of heavy industry. Recent workssuch as Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's RustBelt (2003) by Steven High,     

Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History

Melissa Walker, an associate professor of history at ConverseCollege, author of All We Knew Was To Farm: Rural Women in theUpcountry South, 1919–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2000), winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prizefrom the Southern Association for Women Historians, presentsan intellectual tour de force in Southern Farmers and TheirStories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History, part of the NewDirections in Southern History Series from the University ofKentucky     

The Italian American Experience In New Haven: Images and Oral Histories

Anthony V. Riccio's lavish new coffee table book, The ItalianAmerican Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories,provides a fascinating look at the experiences of Italian immigrantsand their children in one east coast community. The field ofimmigration history has certainly benefited from the wealthof oral histories collected from immigrants and their descendants.Ranging from Al Santoli's New Americans, an Oral History: Immigrantsand Refugees in the U. S. Today (1988) to works such as La Merica:Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (1985)     

Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak out

At the outset of Ask & Tell, Estes recalls the debates thatproduced the 1993 "don’t ask, don’t tell" policyprohibiting "homosexual conduct or activity in the armed forces"of the U.S. and laments the silenced voices of those most directlyaffected by the policy: gay and lesbian service members. Inresponse, Estes, an associate professor of history at SonomaState University, enlists oral history as an ally in the on-goingcampaign to allow gay men and lesbians in the U.S. to serveopenly in the armed forces. He argues "that historically, thesilence concerning gays in the     

The Architects of Integration: Research,Public Policy,and the Institute of Race Relations in Post-imperial Britain

ABSTRACT

This article traces the evolution of the field of race relations by exploring the thinking of Philip Mason, a former agent of the Indian Civil Service who built a second career as the elder statesman of this emerging discipline in Britain. Mason led the well-funded Institute of Race Relations, an independent organisation that brought together academics, public policy analysts, and journalists to address concerns about the integration of black and Asian migrants in Britain from the 1950s. Mason brought his imperial expertise to bear on the new discipline, and imagined the new subject in light of a wide range of shifting international concerns: imperial race relations, the decline of the British Empire, the Cold War, and the persistence of racially-divided states like South Africa and the United States. To address these anxieties, race relations experts suggested that race relations studies should be comparative across several different imperial and post-colonial locales, building towards a master project that would provide suggestions on mollifying racial tensions across the globe. Using the United States as a key referent, Mason and others ushered in a transitional era, moving the discipline from a paternalistic and superior approach to formerly colonised subjects to articulations of liberal inclusion and cultural integration. Tracing the life of the Institute, and Mason's influence on policy and subsequent anti-racist organisations, reveals how the early assumptions of the field positioned Britain's integration problem as temporary, indeterminate, and aided by the imperial, post-imperial, and transatlantic similarities they examined.     

Renewing the Countryside: Wisconsin

New York's junior senator Hillary Clinton, around this timelast decade, gave a speech entitled "It Takes a Village to Raisea Child," which became a book, It Takes a Village and OtherLessons Children Teach Us (1994). As I read Renewing the CountrysideWisconsin—both the profiles of the local, regional, andcommunity businesses and organizations and the afterword explaininghow Wisconsin's contribution to the      

Turkey's Modernization: Refugees From Nazism and Ataturk's Vision

In an era when Turkey is known more for its mediocre recordon human rights and freedom of speech, Arnold Reisman's Turkey'sModernization brings light to a lesser known phase of Turkishhistory, where Turkey, as a young republic, had opened its doorsto Jewish scholars escaping Nazi Europe. In fact, the storyof Jewish scholars taking refuge in the newly established TurkishRepublic has been a long neglected topic, a subject matter discussedmore as "popular knowledge" than "scholarly analysis." In thatregard, Reisman's book is an important contribution becauseit fills that gap with its rich visual     

Recovering a "Lost" Story Using Oral History: The United States Supreme Court's Historic Green v. New Kent County, Virginia, Decision

Abstract In 1965, New Kent County, located just east of Richmond,Virginia, became the setting for the one of the most importantschool desegregation cases since Brown v. Board of Education.Ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate butequal" unconstitutional, both public schools in New Kent, theGeorge W. Watkins School for blacks and the New Kent Schoolfor whites, remained segregated. In 1965, however, local blacksand the Virginia State NAACP initiated a legal challenge tosegregated schools, hoping to initiate desegregation where theprocess had yet to begin and to accelerate the process in areaswhere token desegregation was the norm. In 1968, the U.S. SupremeCourt decision in Charles C. Green v. the School Board of NewKent County forced New Kent County and localities across thestate and nation to fulfill the promise of Brown. While thecase has been part of the court records since it was decidedin 1968, it has remained largely unknown to the general publicand many scholars of the era. This article is an attempt touse the tool of oral history to present the people and the storybehind Green v. New Kent County and to add another piece tothe puzzle that was school desegregation in this country.     

Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience

Intellectual cross-pollination between oral history and anthropologyis a long tradition. Editor and contributor Waterson arguesthat the influence of oral history on life narrative researchin anthropology intensified during the 1980s but needs freshemphasis. A primary goal in Southeast Asian Lives is to promotethe thoughtful use of oral history life narratives, especiallyto explore the influence of twentieth-century dramatic historicalchanges on individual lives and cultures. Her "Introduction:Analyzing Personal Narratives" is a useful and thought-provokingsurvey of theoretical issues on oral narratives, especiallyfor anyone doing cross-cultural     

Red Brick in the Land of Steady Habits: Creating the Univeristy of Connecticut, 1881-2006

At first blush, the opportunity to read the history of a universityfrom which you did not graduate, for which you do not work,or near which you do not live, may not sound all that appealing.However, to dismiss Bruce M. Stave's Red Brick in the Land ofSteady Habits: Creating the University of Connecticut, 1881–2006would be a mistake of considerable proportions, for not onlyis the volume enlightening with regard to higher education inthe United States over the course of the twentieth century,it is also the proverbial "good read." Stave,     

'Pomorze' or 'Preussen'? Polish Perspectives on Early Modern Prussian History

The attitudes of Polish historical scholarship towards the historyof early modern Prussia has been deeply marked by the partitionsof Poland and the anti-Polish coalition between Prussia, Russiaand Austria, which denied Poland its own statehood for wellover a century. In contrast to nineteenth-century German ‘Landesgeschichte’,which focused on local research and archival resources, historiansfrom Poland have usually opted to stay more within patternsof national history-writing. When the Polish state was reconstitutedafter the First World War, hostilities built up between Germanand Polish historical schools on Prussia, expressed in the NationalDemocratic-influenced myl zachodnia (Western thought) on thePolish side, and a not less expansionist Ostforschung on theother side of the border. It was only after the catastropheof the Second World War, the redrawing of national borders ineast central Europe, and under the influence of Marxist historicalconcepts in the People's Republic of Poland that nationalistapproaches as well as the ‘black legend’ of thePrussia's past were temporarily suppressed and finally replacedby a more research-led scholarship. During the second half ofthe twentieth century, Polish historiography was in fact muchquicker and more thorough than its German counterpart to forgethe history of Prussia into a major academic subject. Sincethe 1980s, if not earlier, an extremely fruitful dialogue hasdeveloped between scholars—a dialogue which does not alwayspenetrate journalistic and public awareness, as recent polemicssurrounding the controversially planned ‘Centre for Expulsions’in Berlin have shown.     

In Our Own Voices: a Guide to Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women

The valuable oral history guidebook, In Our Own Voices: A Guideto Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women,opens with this quote by Nen Lederkremen, "Without roots wecannot grow." The Jewish Women's Archive, an organization thatwas founded in 1995, has done an excellent job in enabling AmericanJewish women to record their roots. The Jewish Women's Archivefelt that women's contributions had been missing from the accountof the American Jewish experience. To rectify this, they pioneeredthe use of community-based oral history projects with Jewishwomen in Boston,     

Fotografie als Wissenschaft

Photography as Science: In 1908 the English physicist Arthur Mason Worthington published A Study of Splashes, a treatise on the physical behaviour of falling drops. The photographic experiments were performed by means of an electric spark „in absolute darkness”︁. Worthington's experimental practice dealt with two different areas of knowledge production: an area the operator could perceive control from the outside and a corresponding black-box where the photographic recording itself took place. The paper discusses the epistemic challenges of this specific shift from imperceptible events to their photographic representations. It shows to what extent the information revealed by the photographic apparatus had to be converted, for it did not speak for itself. Thus, Worthington's work went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination.     

Innovative Trends in Women's and Gender Studies of the National Socialist Era

The text is less a review of the new literature than a reflectionon significant and innovative current trends in the historiographyon women and gender in the National Socialist era. The firstpart deals with various women's activities within milieus andprofessions, including their room for manoeuvre: midwives, socialworkers, female Nazi functionaries, and female auxiliary workersof the Nazi Wehrmacht. The second part of the article addressesspecific features of biopolitics, targeted not only againstJews but also against asocial women, homosexuals and prostitutes.It also looks at visual images of bodies. Although the Nazistried to create strongly determined binaries to categorize ‘we’and ‘the others’ in the arts and other propagandamaterial, there existed, in fact, a broad spectrum of body images,especially among media stars. A third trend in the history ofthe Third Reich deals not only with the politics of exclusionbut also of inclusion, as found in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft(national community), a concept that had many facets, such asthe Volksfamilie, comradeship and home front. And it was themedia that had the task of ‘translating’ this conceptto the people in many appealing ways. The fourth part considersthe gendering of memories after 1945 and the dominance of malenarratives and points of view. The four parts of the articleare intended to contribute to intersectional history and thehistory of social engineering.     

Regoverning markets: a place for small-scale producers in modern agrifood chains? * B. Vorley, A. Fearne and D. Ray (Eds)

The international expansion of supermarkets and concomitanttransformation of food production and distribution systems hasemerged as an issue of global importance during the past decade.As such, the purported globalization of food retailing has drawnincreasing attention from geographers and economists alike,who have identified a host of profound implications for producers,consumers, suppliers, domestic competitors and workers in bothdeveloped and developing countries. The salience of the ‘supermarketrevolution’ within developing countries is further highlightedby the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report Agriculturefor Development that focuses specifically on the barriers impedingparticipation of small-scale agricultural producers in globalcommodity chains and potential opportunities for improving rurallivelihoods. Like the 2008 World Development Report, Regoverning Markets:A Place for Small-scale Producers in Modern Agrifood Chains?attempts to understand how     

Book reviews

S. Schafer, The Political Criminal: The Problem of Morality and Crime, Free Press, New York, 1974, pp. 179, $8.95.

Audrey Williamson, Thomas Paine: His Life. Work and Times, London, George Allen & Unwin. 1973, pp. 296, $14.40.

Anthony Clunies Ross and John Langmore, eds, Alternative Strategies for Papua New Guinea, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1973, pp. viii + 263, $5.95.

Frank Stevens, Aborigines in the Northern Territory Cattle Industry, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974, pp. xiv + 226, $7.95.

K. Lindgren, H. H. Mason and B. L. J. Gordon, The Corporation and Australian Society, Law Book Co., Sydney, 1974, pp. v + 334, $14.50.

J. R. Davis and P. Spearritt, Sydney at the Census: 1971 A Social Atlas, Urban Research Unit, ANU, Canberra, 1974.