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In recent decades, oral history has matured into an established field of critical importance to historians and social scientists alike. Handbook of Oral History captures the current state-of-the-art, identifies major strands of intellectual development, and predicts key directions for future growth in theory, research, and application.
The industrial expansion of the twentieth century brought with it a profound shift away from traditional agricultural modes and practices in the American South. The forces of economic modernity—specialization, mechanization, and improved efficiency—swept through southern farm communities, leaving significant upheaval in their wake. In an attempt to comprehend the complexities of the present and prepare for the uncertainties of the future, many southern farmers searched for order and meaning in their memories of the past. In Southern Farmers and Their Stories, Melissa Walker explores the ways in which a diverse array of farmers remember and recount the past. The book tells the story of th...
In 1916, in front of a crowd of ten to fifteen thousand cheering spectators watched as seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington, a retarded black boy, was publicly tortured, lynched, and burned on the town square of Waco, Texas. He had been accused and convicted in a kangaroo court for the rape and murder of a white woman. The city’s mayor and police chief watched Washington’s torture and murder and did nothing. Nearby, a professional photographer took pictures to sell as mementos of that day. The stark story and gory pictures were soon printed in The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the fledgling NAACP, as part of that organization’s campaign for antilynching legislation. Even in the vast b...
Part III and IV of Handbook of Oral History, now available in paper for classroom use.
Gathered here are parts I and II of the Handbook of Oral History, which set the benchmark for knowledge of the field. The eminent contributors discuss the history and methodologies of a field that once was the domain of history scholars who were responding to trends within the academy, but which has increasingly become democratized and widely used outside the realm of historical research. This handbook will be both a traveling guide and essential touchstone for anyone fascinated by this dynamic and expanding discipline.
Rural women comprised the largest part of the adult population of Texas until 1940 and in the American South until 1960. On the cotton farms of Central Texas, women's labor was essential. In addition to working untold hours in the fields, women shouldered most family responsibilities: keeping house, sewing clothing, cultivating and cooking food, and bearing and raising children. But despite their contributions to the southern agricultural economy, rural women's stories have remained largely untold. Using oral history interviews and written memoirs, Rebecca Sharpless weaves a moving account of women's lives on Texas cotton farms. She examines how women from varying ethnic backgrounds--German,...
According to conventional wisdom, theological liberals led the Southern Baptist Convention to reject segregation and racism in the twentieth century. That's only half the story. Liberals criticized segregation before mainstream Southern Baptists. They created racially integrated ministry opportunities. They pressed the Southern Baptist Convention to reject segregation. Yet historians have discounted the role of conservative theology in the convention's shift away from racial segregation and prejudice. This book chronicles how conservative theology proved remarkably compatible with efforts toward racial justice in America's largest Protestant denomination between 1954 and 1995. At times conservative theology was even a catalyst for rejecting racial prejudice. Efforts to eradicate racism and segregation were, in fact, least successful when they appealed to the social gospel or appeared to draw from liberal theology.
Over the course of World War II, Orange, Texas’s easternmost city, went from a sleepy southern town of 7,500 inhabitants to a bustling industrial city of 60,000. The bayou community on the Sabine became one of the nation’s preeminent shipbuilding centers. In They Called It the War Effort, Louis Fairchild details the explosive transformation of his native city in the words of the people who lived through it. Some residents who lived in the town before the war speak of nostalgia for the time when Orange was a small, close-knit community and regret for the loss of social cohesiveness of former days, while others speak of the exciting new opportunities and interesting new people that came. I...
Between the Civil War and the turn of the last century, Southern Baptists gained prominence in the religious life of the South. As their power increased, they became defenders of the racial, political, social, and economic status quo. By the beginning of this century, however, a feisty tradition of dissent began to appear in Southern Baptist life as criticism of the center increased from both the left and the right. The popular belief in a doctrine of "once saved, always saved" led progressive Baptists to claim that moderates, once saved, did not address the serious social and political problems that faced many in the South. These Baptist dissenters claimed that they could not be "at ease in...
The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. This migration of approximately five million people helped improve the financial prospects of black Americans, who, in the next generation, moved increasingly into the middle class. Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children, two groups largely overlooked in the story of this event. She also utilized existing oral histories with migrants and southerners in leading archives. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, and in thoughtful scholarly analysis of...