Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans

Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans

Author: Sharon D. Raynor

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1000818764

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Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans focuses predominantly on conducting oral history with men and women of recent wars and military conflicts. The book provides a structured methodology for building interest and trust among veterans to conduct interviews, design oral history projects, and archive and use these oral history interviews. It includes background on the evolution of veterans oral history, the nuts and bolts of interviewing, ethical guidelines, procedures, and the overall value of veterans oral history. The methodology emphasizes how memory evolves over the years - when a veteran becomes more distant from the events of war, the experiences become individualized and personalized for each veteran based on location, time, place, and purpose of their service. The book also aims to improve understanding of the personal, ethical, and psychological issues involved in listening compassionately to veterans’ stories that may contain issues of trauma, gender, socio-economics, race, dis/ability, and ethnicity. Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans is an invitation to community scholars, students, oral historians, and families of veterans to actively participate in the oral history process and to embrace methodology that may help with designing and conducting oral history projects and interviewing war veterans.


Chinese Comfort Women

Chinese Comfort Women

Author: Peipei Qiu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0199373914

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During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate. Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive. The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by these women and the conditions that caused them.


What Was Asked of Us

What Was Asked of Us

Author: Trish Wood

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Published: 2007-11-02

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0316023205

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In this modern-day successor to the Vietnam classic Everything We Had, award-winning investigative reporter Trish Wood offers a gritty, authentic, and uncensored history of the war in Iraq, as told by the American soldiers who are fighting it.


South Vietnamese Soldiers

South Vietnamese Soldiers

Author: Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-03-21

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1440832420

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Published on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, this book brings to life the experiences and memories of South Vietnamese soldiers-the forgotten combatants of this controversial conflict. South Vietnam lost more than a quarter of a million soldiers in the Vietnam War, yet the histories of these men-and women-are largely absent from the vast historiography of the conflict. By focusing on oral histories related by 40 veterans from the former Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces, this book breaks new ground, shedding light on an essentially unexplored aspect of the war and giving voice to those who have been voiceless. The experiences of these former soldiers are examined through detailed firsthand accounts that feature two generations and all branches of the service, including the Women's Armed Forces Corps. Readers will gain insight into the soldiers' early lives, their military service, combat experiences, and friendships forged in wartime. They will also see how life became worse for most in the aftermath of the war as they experienced internment in communist prison camps, discrimination against their families on political grounds, and the dangers inherent in escaping Vietnam, whether by sea or land. Finally, readers will learn how veterans who saw no choice but to leave their homeland succeeded in rebuilding their lives in new countries and cultures.


Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home

Author: Philip F. Napoli

Publisher: Hill and Wang

Published: 2014-08-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780809031535

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Featured in the NY Emmy-nominated documentary New York City's Vietnam Veterans (CUNY-TV) A collection of heartrending oral histories that topples assumptions about the people who served in Vietnam The Vietnam War was a defining event for a generation of Americans. But for years, misguided and sometimes demeaning clichés about its veterans have proliferated widely. Philip F. Napoli's Bringing It All Back Home strips away the myths and reveals the complex individuals who served in Southeast Asia. Napoli was one of the chief researchers for Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, and in the spirit of that enterprise, his oral histories recast our understanding of a war and its legacy. Napoli introduces a remarkable group of young New Yorkers who went abroad with high hopes only to find a bewildering conflict. We meet a nurse who staged a hunger strike to promote peace while working at a field hospital; a paratrooper whose experiences on the battlefield left him with emotional scars that led to violence and homelessness; a black soldier who achieved an unexpected camaraderie with his fellow servicemen in racially tense times; and a university administrator who helped to create New York City's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some of Napoli's soldiers became active opponents of the war; others did not. But all returned with a powerful urge to understand the death and destruction they had seen. Overcoming adversity, a great many would go on to lead ambitious lives of public service. Tracing their journeys from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to the banks of the Mekong, and back to the most glamorous corporations and meanest homeless shelters of New York City, Napoli reveals the variety and surprising vibrancy of the ex-soldiers' experiences. "For almost everyone the time in Vietnam was the most exciting and the most alive time of your life," one veteran recalls. He adds: "I still have this little trick . . . When I lie down and go to sleep, if there's something bothering me, I say, 'You're warm, you're dry, and there is no one shooting at you.'"


Family Oral History Across the World

Family Oral History Across the World

Author: Mary Louise Contini Gordon

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1000986209

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Family Oral History Across the World presents a process for memorializing family histories, bringing together established oral history standards, exploratory research, and narrative data analysis. Based on and using a prequestionnaire and over 40 recorded interviews with people from across six continents, the analysis system used in the book presents material from these interviews that brings alive the experience of the family history journey. One of the guiding principles is to encourage readers to interview family members, but also others outside the family unit, and to produce a family history in whatever format works. The book illustrates this through the inclusion of many unusual formats and stories uncovered. The book is divided into a number of themes that emerged through the analysis of numerical questionnaire and narrative interview data. Parts I, II, and III cover changing family demography, case studies, and factors such as memory, emotion, and ethics. Part IV offers a pliable process and practice guide with input and examples from interviews. It also discusses developing approaches to presenting oral histories from both oral historians and other interviewers and writers, such as journalists. With case studies as well as example guidelines and templates, this volume is ideal both for academics interested in family history as well as professional genealogists and families themselves.


Student-Centered Oral History

Student-Centered Oral History

Author: Summer Cherland

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-23

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1040022111

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Student-Centered Oral History explores the overlaps of culturally relevant teaching, student-centered teaching, and oral history to demonstrate how this method empowers students, especially those from historically underrepresented communities. With tangible tools like lesson plans and reflection sheets, available to download as eResources from the book's website, each interactive chapter is applicable to classrooms and age groups across the globe. Educators from all levels of experience will benefit from step-by-step guides and lesson plans, all organized around guiding questions. These lessons coach students and educators from start to finish through a student-centered oral history. Background research, historical context, cultivating a culture of consent, analysis, promotion, and gratitude are among the many lessons taught beyond writing questions and interviewing. With a specific focus on the ethics influencing a teacher’s role as guide and grader of a student-centered oral history, this book also highlights successful approaches across the world of students and teachers discovering oral history. These examples reveal how student-centered oral history empowers academic achievement, radicalizes knowledge, develops relationships, and promotes community engagement. This book is a useful tool for any students and scholars interested in oral history in an educational setting.


The Women with Silver Wings

The Women with Silver Wings

Author: Katherine Sharp Landdeck

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1524762814

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The thrilling true story of the daring female aviators who helped the United States win World War II--only to be forgotten by the country they served. When Japanese planes executed a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Cornelia Fort was already in the air. At twenty-two, Cornelia had escaped Nashville's debutante scene for a fresh start as a flight instructor in Hawaii. She and her student were in the middle of their lesson when the bombs began to fall, and they barely made it back to ground that morning. Still, when the U.S. Army Air Forces put out a call for women pilots to aid the war effort, Cornelia was one of the first to respond. She became one of just over 1,100 women from across the nation to make it through the Army's rigorous selection process and earn her silver wings. In The Women with Silver Wings, historian Katherine Sharp Landdeck introduces us to these young women as they meet even-tempered, methodical Nancy Love and demanding visionary Jacqueline Cochran, the trailblazing pilots who first envisioned sending American women into the air, and whose rivalry would define the Women Airforce Service Pilots. For women like Cornelia, it was a chance to serve their country--and to prove that women aviators were just as skilled and able as men. While not authorized to serve in combat, the WASP helped train male pilots for service abroad and ferried bombers and pursuits across the country. Thirty-eight of them would not survive the war. But even taking into account these tragic losses, Love and Cochran's social experiment seemed to be a resounding success--until, with the tides of war turning and fewer male pilots needed in Europe, Congress clipped the women's wings. The program was disbanded, the women sent home. But the bonds they'd forged never failed, and over the next few decades, they came together to fight for recognition as the military veterans they were--and for their place in history.


It's My Country Too

It's My Country Too

Author: Jerri Bell

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-07-01

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1612348319

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This inspiring anthology it the first to convey the noteworthy experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words-from the Revolutionary War to the present wars in the Middle East. Serving with the Union Army during the Civil War as a nurse, scout, spy, and soldier, Harriet Tubman tells what it was like to be the first American woman to lead a raid against an enemy, freeing some 750 slaves. Busting gender stereotypes, Inga Fredriksen Ferris's describes how it felt to be a woman marine during World War II. Heidi Squier Kraft recounts her experiences as a lieutenant commander in the navy, deployed to Iraq as a psychologist to provide mental health care in a combat zone. In excerpts from their diaries, letters, oral histories, military depositions and testimonies, as well as from published and unpublished memoirs-generations of women reveal why and how they chose to serve their country, often breaking with social norms and at great personal peril.