Oral History and Public MemoriesPaula Hamilton, Linda Shopes Oral history is inherently about memory, and when oral history interviews are used "in public," they invariably both reflect and shape public memories of the past. Oral History and Public Memories is the only book that explores this relationship, in fourteen case studies of oral history's use in a variety of venues and media around the world. Readers will learn, for example, of oral history based efforts to reclaim community memory in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa; of the role of personal testimony in changing public understanding of Japanese American history in the American West; of oral history's value in mapping heritage sites important to Australia's Aboriginal population; and of the way an oral history project with homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio became a tool for popular education. Taken together, these original essays link the well established practice of oral history to the burgeoning field of memory studies. |
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92nd Infantry Division Aboriginal African American Albanian Albanian migrants apartheid Archives Cape Town Center Chilkoot Trail CHOHP Cleveland collective Colombia conflict context cultural heritage Dalmatian day labor defined difficult discussion displaced District Six ethnic exhibit experience field final find first five fortress gender Greek gumdiggers gumfields historians homeless identified identity immigrants individual Infantry influence internment Inuvialuit Japanese American kauri gum Kosovo land landscape Langa Latino lives Maori meaning Medellín military museum narrative narrators office officers official oral history oral history interviews oral history project Ottoman Parks Canada participants past people’s political present public memory queer Latino racial record reflect residents role sacrifice Seddülbahir Seddülbahir and Kumkale shared shelter significant Singapore Singapore’s social specific stories Tarara Teresita tion Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Turkish unhoused University Press village visitors voices women workshop World World War II Yukon Zealand
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Page ix - Oral history in particular may be seen as a 'powerful tool for discovering, exploring and evaluating the nature of the historical memory - how people make sense of their past, how they connect individual experience and its social context, how the past becomes part of the present, and how people use it to interpret their lives and the world around them