scholarly journals The Memories of Displaced Children: Flight Experience in the Life Stories of Exiled Latvians

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 22-50
Author(s):  
Maija Krūmiņa

This article explores how Latvian children who were displaced during the Second World War came across their displacement and how they compose the narratives of this childhood experience. Their life story interviews have been preserved in the Latvian National Oral History Archive. Recorded testimonies convey the migration experience in an intense way by vividly depicting the psychological, emotional, and material circumstances that children faced and by revealing common themes relevant to them at the time of the displacement.

Author(s):  
Ian Vellins

This chapter discusses the Jewish community during the difficult wartime years, when many families suffered the tensions of absent fathers in the armed services and children removed through evacuation. The latter was in the event relatively short-lived and children returned to their schools which were soon reopened. The remarkable story of the Kindertransport is reviewed and life stories given of successful relocation to Leeds. The reception given to those fleeing from Nazi persecution was not always wholly welcoming. The impact of rationing is discussed and the difficulties both housewives and servicemen had in keeping to their kosher dietary rules.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL MERCHANT

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the use of interviews with scientists by members of two disciplinary communities: oral historians and historians of science. It examines the disparity between the way in which historians of science approach autobiographies and biographies of scientists on the one hand, and the way in which they approach interviews with scientists on the other. It also examines the tension in the work of oral historians between a long-standing ambition to record forms of past experience and more recent concerns with narrative and personal ‘composure’. Drawing on extended life story interviews with scientists, recorded by National Life Stories at the British Library between 2011 and 2016, it points to two ways in which the communities might learn from each other. First, engagement with certain theoretical innovations in the discipline of oral history from the 1980s might encourage historians of science to extend their already well-developed critical analysis of written autobiography and biography to interviews with scientists. Second, the keen interest of historians of science in using interviews to reconstruct details of past events and experience might encourage oral historians to continue to value this use of oral history even after their theoretical turn.


Author(s):  
James A. Baer

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to show how the ebb and flow of Spanish anarchist migrations to Argentina helps explain the development of both a transnational anarchist ideology and related organizations that connect these two countries. It follows the lives, careers, ideas, influence, and travel of dozens of individuals who moved between these two countries in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. The life stories of individual immigrants allow us to explore their movements and understand how supranational links influenced the growth of the anarchist movements in Spain and Argentina. This study encompasses the period between 1868, when the ideas of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin first became known in Spain, and the end of the Spanish Civil War, after which the regime of Generalíssimo Francisco Franco and the Second World War effectively ended the relationship between these two countries' anarchist movements. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 584-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Fox

Despite extensive scholarship on British documentary in the period from 1929 to 1950, the role of female documentary film-makers has received relatively little attention, partly due to their fragmented and partial ‘archival trace’. Combining neglected materials in the BECTU oral history project, the personnel records of the GPO Film Unit, and the personal papers of leading female documentarists, this article challenges the standard narrative of wartime opportunity and postwar decline that tends to characterise the examination of women's employment more broadly in this period. It uses women's experience in documentary film production to offer a more complex explanation of the effect of war within a wider chronological framework and within the context of workflow, labour patterns, training and networks within the industry itself. It examines female documentarists’ own accounts, through oral histories, to suggest that such sources should be ‘read against the light’ to offer insights into the memory of the Second World War, contending that the place of gender in defining individual careers both during and after the conflict remains contested, a site of the continued struggle for professional recognition, achievement and identity.


Author(s):  
Alison Chand

This chapter begins by discussing important theories of masculinity underlying the arguments in the book, before defining the policy of reservation in Second World War Britain and its implications. The geographical boundaries of the study are also defined here, with the areas understood as being incorporated into ‘Glasgow’ and ‘Clydeside’ discussed. The chapter also defines the notions of ‘lived’ and ‘imagined’ subjectivities, which centrally underpin the arguments made in the book, before considering the methodologies used in conducting the research involved, primarily oral history. The chapter moves on to look at uses of oral testimonies in previous historical research before examining the different kinds of oral testimony used for this study, including those held in existing oral history archives and newly conducted oral history interviews. Finally, the chapter examines other primary source materials used in this research, including cultural materials such as newspapers, novels and films.


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