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Oral histories
Historians recognize that history books often lack some crucial details about important events, details that can be properly captured through the accounts of people who were actually there. This book, which supports elementary social studies curricula, focuses on oral histories, including what they are, why they're essential to the historical record, and how readers can record them for themselves.
Book
Iron Age Myth and Materiality
Iron Age Myth and Materiality: an Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400-1000 considers the relationship between myth and materiality in Scandinavia from the beginning of the post-Roman era and the European Migrations up until the coming of Christianity. It pursues an interdisciplinary interpretation of text and material culture and examines how the documentation of an oral past relates to its material embodiment.
While the material evidence is from the Iron Age, most Old Norse texts were written down in the thirteenth century or even later. With a time lag of 300 to 900 years from the archaeological evidence, the textual material has until recently been ruled out as a usable source for any study of the pagan past. However, Hedeager argues that this is true regarding any study of a society's short-term history, but it should not be the crucial requirement for defining the sources relevant for studying long-term structures of the longue durée, or their potential contributions to a theoretical understanding of cultural changes and transformation. In Iron Age Scandinavia we are dealing with persistent and slow-changing structures of worldviews and ideologies over a wavelength of nearly a millennium. Furthermore, iconography can often date the arrival of new mythical themes anchoring written narratives in a much older archaeological context.
Old Norse myths are explored with particular attention to one of the central mythical narratives of the Old Norse canon, the mythic cycle of Odin, king of the Norse pantheon. In addition, contemporaneous historical sources from late Antiquity and the early European Middle Age - the narratives of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, and Paul the Deacon in particular - will be explored. No other study provides such a broad ranging and authoritative study of the relationship of myth to the archaeology of Scandinavia.
eBook
What is oral history?
An introduction to the concept of oral history, which is history that is not written down, but spoken and often passed down through generations.
Book
Britain’s ‘brown babies
This book recounts a little-known history of the estimated 2,000 babies born to black GIs and white British women in the second world war. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girl-friends. Nearly half of the children were given up to children’s homes but few were adopted, thought ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. The book will present the stories of over fifty of these children, their stories contextualised in terms of government policy and attitudes of the time. Accessibly written, with stories both heart-breaking and uplifting, the book is illustrated throughout with photographs.
eBook
Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place
Hawaiian legends figure greatly in the image of tropical paradise that has come to represent Hawai'i in popular imagination. But what are we buying into when we read these stories as texts in English-language translations? Cristina Bacchilega poses this question in her examination of the way these stories have been adapted to produce a legendary Hawai'i primarily for non-Hawaiian readers or other audiences.With an understanding of tradition that foregrounds history and change, Bacchilega examines how, following the 1898 annexation of Hawai'i by the United States, the publication of Hawaiian legends in English delegitimized indigenous narratives and traditions and at the same time constructed them as representative of Hawaiian culture. Hawaiian mo'olelo were translated in popular and scholarly English-language publications to market a new cultural product: a space constructed primarily for Euro-Americans as something simultaneously exotic and primitive and beautiful and welcoming. To analyze this representation of Hawaiian traditions, place, and genre, Bacchilega focuses on translation across languages, cultures, and media; on photography, as the technology that contributed to the visual formation of a westernized image of Hawai'i; and on tourism as determining postannexation economic and ideological machinery.In a book with interdisciplinary appeal, Bacchilega demonstrates both how the myth of legendary Hawai'i emerged and how this vision can be unmade and reimagined.
eBook
\First, Do No Harm\: Tread Carefully Where Oral History, Trauma, and Current Crises Intersect
The nature of oral history fieldwork changes when it is conducted during the course of an ongoing, long-term crisis like COVID-19. One must ask what the role of the oral history practitioner is, if any, in crisis events. In what follows, I discuss this and strategies for undertaking COVID-19 projects based on my experience as director for the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at Louisiana State University Libraries and on models for crisis-centered oral histories. I also discuss what project managers must take into consideration with regard to the sustainability of crisis oral history projects during our current period of increasing change and political unrest.
Journal Article
World Trade Center responders in their own words: predicting PTSD symptom trajectories with AI-based language analyses of interviews
Oral histories from 9/11 responders to the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks provide rich narratives about distress and resilience. Artificial Intelligence (AI) models promise to detect psychopathology in natural language, but they have been evaluated primarily in non-clinical settings using social media. This study sought to test the ability of AI-based language assessments to predict PTSD symptom trajectories among responders.
Participants were 124 responders whose health was monitored at the Stony Brook WTC Health and Wellness Program who completed oral history interviews about their initial WTC experiences. PTSD symptom severity was measured longitudinally using the PTSD Checklist (PCL) for up to 7 years post-interview. AI-based indicators were computed for depression, anxiety, neuroticism, and extraversion along with dictionary-based measures of linguistic and interpersonal style. Linear regression and multilevel models estimated associations of AI indicators with concurrent and subsequent PTSD symptom severity (significance adjusted by false discovery rate).
Cross-sectionally, greater depressive language (
= 0.32;
= 0.049) and first-person singular usage (
= 0.31;
= 0.049) were associated with increased symptom severity. Longitudinally, anxious language predicted future worsening in PCL scores (
= 0.30;
= 0.049), whereas first-person plural usage (
= -0.36;
= 0.014) and longer words usage (
= -0.35;
= 0.014) predicted improvement.
This is the first study to demonstrate the value of AI in understanding PTSD in a vulnerable population. Future studies should extend this application to other trauma exposures and to other demographic groups, especially under-represented minorities.
Journal Article