Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West PDF Author: Jessie L. Embry
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816599270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Nurses, show girls, housewives, farm workers, casino managers, and government inspectors—together these hard-working members of society contributed to the development of towns across the West. The essays in this volume show how oral history increases understanding of work and community in the twentieth century American West. In many cases occupations brought people together in myriad ways. The Latino workers who picked lemons together in Southern California report that it was baseball and Cinco de Mayo Queen contests that united them. Mormons in Fort Collins, Colorado, say that building a church together bonded them together. In separate essays, African Americans and women describe how they fostered a sense of community in Las Vegas. Native Americans detail the “Indian economy” in Northern California. As these essays demonstrate, the history of the American West is the story of small towns and big cities, places both isolated and heavily populated. It includes groups whose history has often been neglected. Sometimes, western history has mirrored the history of the nation; at other times, it has diverged in unique ways. Oral history adds a dimension that has often been missing in writing a comprehensive history of the West. Here an array of oral historians—including folklorists, librarians, and public historians—record what they have learned from people who have, in their own ways, made history.

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West PDF Author: Jessie L. Embry
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816599270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nurses, show girls, housewives, farm workers, casino managers, and government inspectors—together these hard-working members of society contributed to the development of towns across the West. The essays in this volume show how oral history increases understanding of work and community in the twentieth century American West. In many cases occupations brought people together in myriad ways. The Latino workers who picked lemons together in Southern California report that it was baseball and Cinco de Mayo Queen contests that united them. Mormons in Fort Collins, Colorado, say that building a church together bonded them together. In separate essays, African Americans and women describe how they fostered a sense of community in Las Vegas. Native Americans detail the “Indian economy” in Northern California. As these essays demonstrate, the history of the American West is the story of small towns and big cities, places both isolated and heavily populated. It includes groups whose history has often been neglected. Sometimes, western history has mirrored the history of the nation; at other times, it has diverged in unique ways. Oral history adds a dimension that has often been missing in writing a comprehensive history of the West. Here an array of oral historians—including folklorists, librarians, and public historians—record what they have learned from people who have, in their own ways, made history.

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West PDF Author: Jessie L. Embry
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816530173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
"The essays in this volume are case studies of the importance of oral history in understanding community and work in the American West"--Provided by publisher.

Oral History Collections

Oral History Collections PDF Author: Ruth McMullin
Publisher: New York : Bowker
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description


The North American West in the Twenty-First Century

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Brenden W. Rensink
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496230434
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
This edited volume takes stories from the "modern West" of the late twentieth century and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with and unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s.

Doing What the Day Brought

Doing What the Day Brought PDF Author: Mary Logan Rothschild
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816533008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"I've seen many changes during the years," says Irene Bishop, "from horse and buggy to automobiles and planes, from palm leaf fans to refrigeration. . . . They talk about the good old days but I do not want to go back. I'd like to go back about twenty years, but not beyond that. Life was too hard." Drawing on interviews with twenty-nine individuals, Doing What the Day Brought examines the everyday lives of women from the late nineteenth century to the present day and demonstrates the role they have played in shaping the modern Arizona community. Focusing on "ordinary" women, the book crosses race, ethnic, religious, economic, and marital lines to include Arizona women from diverse backgrounds. Rather than simply editing each woman's words, Rothschild and Hronek have analyzed these oral histories for common themes and differences and have woven portions into a narrative that gives context to the individual lives. The resulting life-course format moves naturally from childhood to home life, community service, and participation in the work force, and concludes with reflections on changes witnessed in the lifetimes of these women. For the women whose lives are presented here, it may have been common to gather dead saguaro cactus ribs to make outdoor fires to boil laundry water, or to give birth on a dirt floor. Their stories capture not only changes in a state where history has overlooked the role of women, but the changing roles of American women over the course of this century.

Indian Voices

Indian Voices PDF Author: Alison Owings
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813549655
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A contemporary oral history documenting what Native Americans from 16 different tribal nations say about themselves and the world around them.

We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here

We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here PDF Author: William J. Bauer Jr.
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807895368
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The federally recognized Round Valley Indian Tribes are a small, confederated people whose members today come from twelve indigenous California tribes. In 1849, during the California gold rush, people from several of these tribes were relocated to a reservation farm in northern Mendocino County. Fusing Native American history and labor history, William Bauer Jr. chronicles the evolution of work, community, and tribal identity among the Round Valley Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that enabled their survival and resistance to assimilation. Drawing on oral history interviews, Bauer brings Round Valley Indian voices to the forefront in a narrative that traces their adaptations to shifting social and economic realities, first within unfree labor systems, including outright slavery and debt peonage, and later as wage laborers within the agricultural workforce. Despite the allotment of the reservation, federal land policies, and the Great Depression, Round Valley Indians innovatively used work and economic change to their advantage in order to survive and persist in the twentieth century. We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here relates their history for the first time.

Hidden Treasures of the American West

Hidden Treasures of the American West PDF Author: Patricia Loughlin
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826338020
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The stories of two women historians and one anthropologist of the 1930s and '40s and their work in Oklahoma and the Southwest.

Calamity

Calamity PDF Author: Karen R. Jones
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252129
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
A fascinating new account of the life and legend of the Wild West’s most notorious woman: Calamity Jane Martha Jane Canary, popularly known as Calamity Jane, was the pistol-packing, rootin’ tootin’ “lady wildcat” of the American West. Brave and resourceful, she held her own with the men of America’s most colorful era and became a celebrity both in her own right and through her association with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. In this engaging account, Karen Jones takes a fresh look at the story of this iconic frontierswoman. She pieces together what is known of Canary’s life and shows how a rough and itinerant lifestyle paved the way for the scattergun, alcohol-fueled heroics that dominated Canary’s career. Spanning Canary’s rise from humble origins to her role as “heroine of the plains” and the embellishment of her image over subsequent decades, Jones shows her to be feisty, eccentric, transgressive—and very much complicit in the making of the myth that was Calamity Jane.

Oral History and Public Memories

Oral History and Public Memories PDF Author: Paula Hamilton
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592131425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
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.