Over a span of eighteen years, Lady Bird Johnson recorded forty-seven oral history interviews with Michael Gillette and his colleagues. These conversations, just released in 2011, form the heart of Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History, an intimate story of a shy young country girl's transformation into one of America's most effective and admired First Ladies.
Lady Bird Johnson's odyssey is one of personal and intellectual growth, political and financial ambition, and a shared life with Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most complicated, volatile, and powerful presidents of the 20th century....

The Velvet Revolution in November 1989 brought about the collapse of the authoritarian communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia, marking the beginning of the country's journey towards democracy. Though members of the elite have spoken about the transition to democracy, the experiences of ordinary people have largely gone untold.

In Velvet Revolutions, Miroslav Vanek and Pavel Mucke examine the values of everyday citizens who lived under so-called real socialism, as well as how their values changed after the 1989 collapse. Based on 300 interviews, Vanek and Mucke give...

The Nazi regime and local collaborators killed 800,000 Belorussian Jews, many of them parents or relatives of young
Jews who survived the war. Thousands of young girls and boys were thus orphaned and struggled for survival on their own. This book is the first systematic account of young Soviet Jews' lives under conditions of Nazi occupation and genocide.

These orphans' experiences and memories are rooted in the 1930s, when Soviet policies promoted and sometimes actually created interethnic solidarity and social equality. This experience of interethnic solidarity provided a powerful...

As a subculture, cloistered monastic nuns live hidden from public view by choice. Once a woman joins the cloister and makes final vows, she is almost never seen and her voice is not heard; her story is essentially nonexistent in the historical record and collective, public history.

From interviews conducted over six years, Abbie Reese tells the stories of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, a cloistered contemplative order at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois. Seldom leaving their 25,000-square-foot gated enclosure, members of this community embrace an extreme version of...

President Bill Clinton led one of the most influential and consequential White House tenures in recent memory. However, because of the office's traditional climate of confidentiality, many details of his behind-the-scenes activities have remained absent from the written record. How did the administration manage the horrific conflicts in Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans that came to a head shortly after the President took the oath? What motivated the President to place First Lady Hillary Clinton at the helm of the ill-fated Health Security Act of 1993? And how did the President's closest...

Soviet Jews lived through a record number of traumatic events: the Great Terror, World War II, the Holocaust, the Famine of 1947, the Doctors' Plot, the antisemitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best as they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Anna Shternshis unearths their everyday life and the difficult choices that they were forced to make as a repressed...

Oral history gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making. Oral history and life stories help to create a truer picture of the past and the changing present, documenting the lives and feelings of all kinds of people, many otherwise hidden from history. It explores personal and family relationships and uncovers the secret cultures of work. It connects public and private experience, and it highlights the experiences of migrating between cultures. At the same time it can bring courage to the old, meaning to...

Oral history gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making. Oral history and life stories help to create a truer picture of the past and the changing present, documenting the lives and feelings of all kinds of people, many otherwise hidden from history. It explores personal and family relationships and uncovers the secret cultures of work. It connects public and private experience, and it highlights the experiences of migrating between cultures. At the same time it can bring courage to the old, meaning to...

The Land Speaks explores the intersections of two vibrant fields, oral history and environmental studies. The fourteen oral histories collected here range North America, examining wilderness and cities, farms and forests, rivers and arid lands. The contributors argue that oral history can capture communication from nature and provide tools for environmental problem solving.

The Land Speaks explores the intersections of two vibrant fields, oral history and environmental studies. The fourteen oral histories collected here range North America, examining wilderness and cities, farms and forests, rivers and arid lands. The contributors argue that oral history can capture communication from nature and provide tools for environmental problem solving.