Oral History Collection Research Articles

Socialist Modernisation in Mongolia as Narrated after Socialism

AbstractIn this article I introduce our collection of oral histories composed of life histories recorded between 2001 and 2006. First, I discuss some devices implemented in the process of collecting life histories, which was to make oral histories 'polyphonic'. I then suggest that oral history always has a 'dual' tense, in that people talk about 'the past' from the view point of 'the present'. This is illustrated by six cases of statesmen narrating their views about socialist modernisation. Finally, using one of the cases, I demonstrate the co-existence of non-official or private opinions along with official opinions about the socialist period in life-history narratives in the post-socialist period. I call this 'ex-post value'.

Talking Art and Drawing Words: Paper and Oral History Collections in the National Gallery of Australia’s Research Library

Oral and written sources are now commonplace in both library and archival collections. Such sources provide for a wider range of voices to be added to the historical record, and in an artistic context, allow for the capture of at least an element of the creative process. This article discusses the National Gallery of Australia’s James Gleeson oral history collection, related collections of personal papers, and their role as primary sources in the National Gallery’s Research Library. It highlights their uses as evidence for researchers interested in the history of the National Gallery’s art collection.

Oral history in radiography: Listening to pioneers

We explore the professional value of the collection and analysis of oral histories in the history of radiography. Drawing on oral histories collected from radiographers, we analyse accounts of experiences to identify common themes, some of which are of current significance, whilst others have faded from existence. 15 oral histories were collected from radiographers whose combined practice spans the years 1930–1973. The sample consists of 6 male and 9 female radiographers. Themes identified in the oral histories include radiographers as invisible pioneers who worked in professionally unclaimed territory and their dangerous working environment. The oral histories reveal the working world of the radiographer as having encompassed a practice ethos where challenges became an accepted part of work. We gain insight into less observable aspects of the radiographer's role, the difficulties they faced, how they invented techniques and equipment, and how they managed their practice including protecting the public from ionising radiation sources.

Navy Medicine in Vietnam: Oral Histories from Dien Bien Phu to the Fall of Saigon (review)

Reviewed by: Navy Medicine in Vietnam: Oral Histories from Dien Bien Phu to the Fall of Saigon Steven L. Oreck Navy Medicine in Vietnam: Oral Histories from Dien Bien Phu to the Fall of Saigon. By Jan K. Herman. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7864-399-7. Photographs. Appendixes. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 357. $55.00. While trauma care in the civilian environment or the inner city “knife and gun club” has many technical similarities with military or wartime trauma care, there are important differences. The trauma victims in combat are not random or accidental, but are the young healthy victims of deliberate organized violence on a massive scale. Furthermore the caregivers are frequently at great personal risk when they are trying to save life and limb. Lastly there are the “two rules”: In war young people die, and doctors (and other medical personnel) cannot change rule one. These facts shape life for the practitioners of military medicine. In Navy Medicine in Vietnam Jan Herman sets out to use the voices of the personnel of Navy Medicine to tell the story of the role that Navy Medicine played during U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and I feel he succeeds. Only some data is presented in the preface concerning the overall Navy Medicine experience in Vietnam, such as the fact that only 1.5 percent of USMC wounded who made it to a surgical facility died and that almost 14 percent of all corpsmen who served in Vietnam died (Pp. 1, 2). There is no analysis, simply letting the voices of those who served speak for themselves. The oral histories are arranged chronologically, from the refugee lift in 1954 to the refugee evacuation after the fall of Saigon. In a similar catholic fashion, all of the different types (corps) of Navy Medicine are represented, men and women, young and old, careerists and short-timers. From Marine grunt units to fixed medical [End Page 1388] facilities, from hospital ships to aircraft carriers, this sample includes almost all units where navy medical personnel served. As a bonus, there are some oral histories from the wounded, both medical and non-medical. No attempt is made to present a point of view concerning the “big picture” of the Vietnam War. The voices speak for themselves, and the disaffection with the war and cynicism is evident in many of the narratives, especially the later ones. The appendices list the postwar lives of the storytellers, the Medal of Honor citations for corpsmen who were awarded the medal, and the primary infantry weapons of the war. There is also a glossary of medical terms. My concern is with the third appendix and the glossary. The appendix on arms leaves out the Russian DShK 12.7 mm machine gun and the US M2A Browning .50 caliber machine gun, both key weapons, and there are other exclusions as well. Many of the glossary entries appear to have been transcribed directly from a medical dictionary and can be confusing for people not intimate with medical terminology. The technical issues mentioned do not detract from this text. Jan Herman has presented an engaging series of personal accounts of medical personnel trying to save lives in an environment where all factors conspired to end them. For almost any major conflict since the American Civil War one can find well-edited collections of letters and papers of physicians and nurses who served. For Vietnam a classic is Dr. Ronald Glasser’s 365 Days. Navy Medicine in Vietnam is unique in the breadth of the stories being told, both in time and types of medical personnel. For those who want to understand the human element of military medicine, those who deploy to the combat zone to save lives not take them, this is a valuable read. While a collection of short oral histories like this does not give us strategic overview, it does remind us that a military is made up of individuals, and the actions and motives of those individuals count. Steven L. Oreck University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin Copyright © 2009 The Society for Military History

Secrecy and its fallout at a nuclear weapons plant: A study of Rocky Flats oral histories.

The basis for this study is a large collection of oral histories of persons who were centrally involved in working at, or being impacted by, the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant near Denver, Colorado. The oral histories were collected in collaboration between a library-based volunteer oral history project (the Maria Rogers Oral History Program) and a museum that will preserve the history of the plant (Rocky Flats Cold War Museum). Using just these oral histories as the data source, the issue of secrecy and its ramifications are examined. Secrecy as a national security structure and how it affects workers is explored, including how “compartmentalization” and “need to know” played out in the functioning of the manufacturing plant mass-producing the “pit”—the fission bomb that is the detonator of a thermonuclear weapon. The reactions of community members, including regulators, environmental and peace activists, politicians, and concerned citizens, are examined with reference to the issue of the plant's secr...

Giving voice to the past: digitizing oral history

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the processes and procedures utilized by Jacksonville State University's Houston Cole Library to digitize an oral history collection and provide access to it through the Library's catalog, web presence, and the state‐wide digital repository initiative, Alabama Mosaic (see www.alabamamosaic.org).Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on the Library's experiences in acquiring, digitizing, creating metadata for and making accessible a collection of oral histories.FindingsThe paper describes the obstacles overcome, issues encountered, procedures established, and ramifications of the project.Practical implicationsMany institutions are currently digitizing unique collections as part of repository initiatives, both institutional and collaborative. Effective practices and guidelines must be developed in order to streamline the process and provide the most complete access to these unique collections. The paper provides a practical model to address these issues.Originality/valueThe paper provides common practices for the digitization, creation of metadata, and provision of access for unique oral history collections; it also provides insights into issues that can arise and how best to address them.

Portugueses no meio rural paulista (1900-1950)

This is a qualitative study based on the collection of oral histories of Portuguese immigrants and their descendants arrived in Brazil in the first half of 20 t h century gone to the agricultural zone of the State of Sdo Paulo, as well as on documental material, existing either in official institutions and Portuguese entities or with interviewee families. In a social-anthropological approach, this study focused on different fields: familiar life, work, education, culture, leisure, religion and politics. Its theoretical referencial is the thought of Pierre Bourdieu. These immigrants came from the North of Portugal, in its majority due to the economic difficulties found in the native land and the perspective of a better life in Brazil. They worked initially in coffee plantations, but as time went by a big part of them moved to the urban zone, where they dedicated themselves to the commerce and small industry.

Cataloging Oral Histories: Creating MARC Records for Individual Oral History Interviews

Cataloging oral histories presents many difficulties, especially for catalogers who have primarily worked with published materials and for institutions without funds or staff dedicated to managing oral history collections. Methods for cataloging oral histories can vary widely among institutions. In this article I examine the issues and considerations involved in providing intellectual access to oral history interviews and offer a possible cataloging method to libraries holding unprocessed oral history materials. The cataloging procedures discussed here have worked well from a workflow standpoint as one of the initial steps to create access to oral histories at Columbus State University, a medium-sized academic library.

After the Interview: The Interpretive Challenges of Oral History Video Indexing

Digital audio and video are opening up new ways of working directly and easily with audio and video interviews. New digital tools have recently appeared that offer direct access to the audio and video “content” of oral history collections. There are many broader implications of these changes to the theory and practice of oral history. First, and foremost, digital oral history promises a move away from transcription. Recorded interviews were quickly transcribed and the original audio and video source was either set aside or (once) discarded altogether. With the loss of the orality of the source at such an early stage, the power of oral history to put a face and a name to history was muted. Analogue audio and video cassettes were ponderous to use and, as a result, underutilized. This paper documents the creation of a fully-indexed digital video database of oral history interviews relating to the displacement of paper workers in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario. It describes the challenges involved with the development of new interpretative technologies from a humanities standpoint and emphasizes the need to adapt nascent indexing software to oral historical practice, rather than the reverse. Such video-indexing may be an alternative to the time-consuming practice of transcription and, more importantly, it allows for the examination of data – body language, facial expression, and intonation – which traditional transcripts tend to ignore. Likewise, indexing makes specific portions of interviews – the discussion of a labour dispute from various perspectives, for example – more easily accessible.

Unlocking Audio

Currently, Flanders lags behind many other European regions with regard to disclosing its oral history collections. Despite recent attempts undertaken by cultural heritage institutions to make Flemish audio collections more accessible over the Internet, the widespread distribution of these historical sound materials has yet to be realized. Based on discussions with stakeholders, the authors of this article map the current situation in Flanders regarding the preservation and dissemination of spoken word collections. Furthermore, we critically assess the technological and, in particular, the organisational feasibility of an innovative disclosure application by means of a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. With our findings, we hope to inspire cultural heritage and archive institutions to digitise and open up their audio-visual collections. We hope as well to provide food for thought about possible opportunities and pitfalls for similar archiving projects.

Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU by Harvey Schwartz

and seasonal round unfolded in a landscape of rimrock and sage, and thedesert panorama from their Steens Mountain homestead encompassed a view greater than some New England states. Homesteading theAmerican West is often viewed as the rush to theGreat Plains in the years immediately after the Civil War. Less well known is the homestead era of the early twentiethcentury in the High Desert of eastern California and Nevada, eastern Oregon and southeastern Idaho. Even today,this isarguably themost remote and empty landscape in the United States outside ofAlaska. It is therefore not surprising that it still offered land and opportunity to Ben O'Keeffe and his family when they started their small sheep outfit on the southern slope of SteensMountain in 1930. McVicker's memories of her childhood are a valuable addition to the catalog of literature that chronicles the West's homestead era. At firstglance, the accounts of the chores to be done, of tending to livestock, and of the one room school and meager collection of build ings thatmade up the nearby community of Fields might seem to cover no new ground, but there is in factmuch new ground to be discovered here by readers. Child ofSteensMountain is a rare view of an Irish immigrant fatherand his familyper severing through isolation and adversitywith a self-sufficient drive thatwould do credit to settlers inColonial America but takesplace in theyears of theGreat Depression. Stories of the school children of Fields helping build a rock home for the school teacher and theO'Keeffe familyhauling their daily water a quarter of amile inbuckets are juxtaposed with family frustrationswith theTaylor Grazing Act and the challenges ofWorld War II gas rationing in a landscape of vast distances. The unique story resultingfrom the time frame of McVicker's account isenhanced byher vivid and affectionatedescriptions of the High Desert landscape and cast of characters that made up her childhood world; to paraphrase a famous movie line: "we aren't in Kansas anymore!" She describes the family's summer sheep camp inhigh aspen fringed meadows and lakesof the Steens aswell as the ancient playas of theAlvord Desert and Harney Basin. Visitors to theO'Keeffe home andmembers of the communities of Fields and Burns range from immigrant Irish and Basque herders to buckaroos, miners, Civilian Conservation Corps kids, and a few hardy fellow home steaders. Child ofSteens Mountain isan enjoyable and informativeview into the lives of one family and their desert community, living the final days of a way of life little changed from the region'snineteenth century frontierera, in the process of being changed foreverby themid twentiethcentury.Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker's personal perspective on this timeof transition on theOregon High Desert should be well received by thepublic interested in thehistory of the SteensMountain country. Itwould be a valuable tool for teacherswho seek toperson alize the experience of theGreat Depression in the region and an excellent companion for travelers exploring that corner of Oregon's outback. Robert G. Boyd High DesertMuseum SOLIDARITY STORIES:ANORAL HISTORY OF THE ILWU by Harvey Schwartz University ofWashington Press, Seattle, 2009. Photographs, notes, index. 352 pages. $50.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. Few unions have been as primary to the labor history of the West Coast as the International Longshoremen's andWarehousemen's Union (ILWU). One thinksof the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for radicalism and trag 638 OHQ vol. no, no. 4 edy, the InternationalWoodworkers Associa tion fortheorganization of a key sectorof the western economy, and lately, the teachers' and public employee unions forthedevelopment of realpolitical power on behalf of its workers. But no union compares to the ILWU forconsistent color and aggressiveness in the narrative of Pacific coast labor-management relationsof the twentieth century. Its foremost leader,Harry Bridges (1901-1990), stillbestrides the region's laborhistory,and theunion's violent coastwide strikeof 1934 still stands out as a landmark of industrial conflict in the West. For these reasons, thisbook on the ILWU by Harvey Schwartz, curator of the ILWU's own oral history collection, is important. Its titlespeaks toboth its strengthand weakness. Although ithas a clear organization with the narratives grouped by port, itis,like most oral histories, a collection of somewhat random reminiscences, as it in fact purports...

A Few Good Women, 1969–1974. An Oral History Collection Experienced through an Online Curriculum for Grades 6–12

A Few Good Women, 1969–1974. An Oral History Collection Experienced through an Online Curriculum for Grades 6–12

Public Diplomacy in the U.S. Supreme Court: The Warren Years—Part II

Public Diplomacy in the U.S. Supreme Court: The Warren Years—Part II Theodore M. Vestal (bio) Theodore M. Vestal Theodore M. Vestal is a professor of political science and teaches at the School of International Studies at Oklahoma State University. ENDNOTES 1. Leo Katcher, Earl Warren: A Political Biography (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), pp. 356, 405. The Warrens traveled to Canada for a two-week wedding trip in 1925. They stayed in “the grand old Empress Hotel in Victoria,” British Columbia. “The island, with its flowers and shrubbery, was beautiful, but the weather was atrocious.” There was a constant downpour for several days. The newlyweds entertained themselves by attending “a British trial.” Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1977), pp. 65–66. 2. Carey McWilliams, “The Education of Earl Warren,” The Nation, 12 October 1974, p. 326, quoted in Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief, Earl Warren and His Supreme Court (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 489. 3. Katcher, pp. 263–64; Christine L. Compston, Earl Warren: Justice for All (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 145. 4. Ed Cray, Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 219. 5. Warren, Memoirs, pp. 262–63; John D. Weaver, Warren: The Man, The Court, The Era (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), p. 187; Cray, p. 248. Warren sat in a choir seat at Westminster Abbey and noticed Prime Minister Nehru sitting opposite him. 6. Warren, Memoirs, pp. 265–69; Cray, p. 249; Schwartz, pp. 1–7; Katcher, p. 301. 7. Consul General Ben Franklin Dixon, oral history interview, Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, American Memory, Library of Congress (CD-ROM, 2000) (hereafter Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection). 8. W.H. Lawrence, “Churchill Urges Patience in Coping with Red Dangers,” New York Times, June 27, 1954, p. 1. 9. “Warren on Vacation,” New York Times, June 15, 1955, p. 2. 10. “Finnish Press Spurns Red Peace Assembly,” New York Times, June 24, 1955, p. 9; “Warren Arrives in Norway,” New York Times, June 28, 1955, p. 7; Box 796, Address, Swedish-American celebration, Stockholm, Sweden, July 5, 1955, Earl Warren Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter EWPLC). 11. “Adenauer Entertains Warren,” New York Times, July 15, 1955, p. 2. 12. “C.J. Warren in Berlin,” New York Times, July 17, 1955, p. 3; “Warren Back from Europe,” New York Times, August 8, 1955, p. 8. 13. “San Juan Opens Courts Building,” New York Times, February 5, 1956, p. 79. 14. “Puerto Rico U. Gives Degree to Warren,” New York Times, February 6, 1956, p. 13. 15. Box 797, Address, dedication of U.S. Supreme Court law building, San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 4, 1956, EWPLC. See also Box 808, Address, first general session, Round Table Conference on Administration of Justice, Supreme Court Building, San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 5, 1962. 16. “San Juan Opens Courts Building,” New York Times, February 5, 1956, p. 79. 17. Warren, Memoirs, pp. 321–31; Box 801, Address, Law Society dinner, Guildhall, London, England, July 31, 1957, EWPLC. As a condition for his attending the ABA meeting, Warren succeeded in getting Vice President Richard Nixon “disinvited.” Cray. p. 340. 18. “Warren Honored in Visit to Dublin,” New York Times, August 2, 1957, p. 7; Cray, pp. 339–41. De Valera would be the guest of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington in 1964. 19. Did international travel and exposure to other ways of approaching legal questions effect Warren’s writing of opinions on the Court? According to Viki C. Jackson, “[s]ensitivity to international democratic norms was a marked feature in the Warren Court’s jurisprudence.” Viki C. Jackson, “The Early Hours of the Post-World War II Model of Constitutional Federalism: The Warren Court and the World,” in Harry N. Scheiber, ed., Earl Warren and the Warren Court: The Legacy in American and Foreign Law (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 186; see Schwartz, pp. 313–19. 20. Richard Amper, “Warren Pleads for Moral Unity,” New York Times, September 16, 1957, p. 22; Schwartz, pp. 287–88. 21...

Speech by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs to the Military Chaplains

I am honored to be here today, and grateful for this chance to ask for your help in several areas. My wife advised ‘‘Don’t preach, and don’t tell priest and rabbi jokes, and don’t drone on’’. With that encouragement, I can not resist the story of the guest sermon by the bishop, who with great dignity removed his watch and placed it on the pulpit, leading a girl to ask her mother, ‘‘What does that mean?’’ Her answer: ‘‘absolutely nothing’’. And I can not help but acknowledge some of the difficulties chaplains face: First, that of bringing troops to God, even sailors: an old sailor who had adopted a thirst in the Navy, and was now living in a park, approached a priest and asked, ‘‘Father, what causes arthritis?’’ Eager to redeem the soul, the priest answered, ‘‘Liquor, women, gambling, and Godlessness, my son. Why do you ask?’’ Sailor: ‘‘Well, this newspaper says the Pope has arthritis’’. So, proselytizing has its perils, as all of you know. There’s also some risk in ‘‘dilute chaplaincy’’, which sees the Bible as only a collection of oral histories and moral lessons, dismissing the miracles. Faced with such a teacher one little girl insisted Jonah had indeed been swallowed by a whale, adding, ‘‘If you don’t believe me I will ask Jonah when I get to Heaven’’, to which the teacher rejoined, ‘‘And if Jonah went to Hell...?’’ The little girl answered, ‘‘Then you ask him’’. Finally, there is the risk that civilians may not understand warrior humor and the tough love that is a tool in the chaplain’s kit. An example is the story of Chaplain Murphy and his assistant Staff Sergeant Rock, who found themselves delayed by a foursome that had lots of trouble finding the balls they hit. On complaining, and learning that these were firefighters who had been blinded in a fire, the priest offered to hold a special service and dinner. The sergeant said, ‘‘Yes sir, but why can’t these guys play at night?’’

Bowlby’s children: The forgotten revolution in Australian children’s nursing

Children's hospitals are vastly different today from fifty years ago. Although there have been dramatic changes in treatment and environment, the biggest contrast for patients is the involvement of parents and family in the nursing and care of the children. This change is largely due to the work of two men from Great Britain, Dr John Bowlby and James Robertson, whose research findings changed the way children were nursed to include consideration of their psychological alongside physical needs. This caused a revolution in the nursing of children that spread throughout Australasia. Bowlby and Robertson's work is largely forgotten now, but it forms the basis for the current policy of nursing children within the context of the family. This paper includes excerpts from an Australian oral history collection of twenty-six narratives from former child patients, parents and nurses and the personal papers of Dr Bowlby.

Using teacher stories to reveal quality educational practice: An Eastern Cape experience

Abstract The University of Fort Hare Distance Education Project set out to improve qualifications of primary teachers in rural and township schools in the Eastern Cape of the Republic of South Africa. At the culmination of an 11-year AUSAid collaboration between the University of Fort Hare and University of South Australia a research project to reveal quality educational practice was undertaken. Using oral histories as the methodology, teacher stories were gathered through a sequence of interviews and classroom observations. This collection of oral histories constitutes the basis for the paper. Its research focus has been the science and mathematics practices of eight teachers who typify the many hundreds who participated in the project. This paper explores the use of oral history as a methodology for documenting quality educational practice.

Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out. By Steve Estes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv, 280 pp. $29.95, isbn 978-0-8078-3115-1.)

An old slogan from the early gay rights movement claimed, “we are everywhere.” In Ask and Tell, Steve Estes provides proof of that statement through his comprehensive look at the experiences of gay men and lesbians in the military—from the meeting at the Oder River of American and Russian forces in World War II (“they were hugging and kissing us. Of course I loved that” [p. 12]) to the first West Point recruits after the passage of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” (derided as “Clinton's Queen Berets” [p. 125]) to participation in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. A collection of oral histories, Ask and Tell is an outgrowth of the author's involvement with the Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. Perhaps because all interview subjects are named and on the record, there is a heavy emphasis on the experience of white officers. Although fairly inclusive in terms of class, sex, and age, Estes's only African American interviewee is a straight-identified member of President Bill Clinton's commission on gays in the military. Estes does a better job with issues of gender, highlighting the complicated relationship between the integration of women and sexual minorities into the military, since all military women were initially perceived as “whores or dykes.” He provides an instructive appendix with examples of how the interviews were edited for publication, an interesting tool for those who teach oral history.

A Treasure for Historical Studies: Research Materials of Chinese Oral History at Columbia University

The rich Chinese oral history collections at Columbia University mainly consist of the Chinese Oral History Project collection, the China Missionaries Project collection, the Academia Sinica Institute of Modern History Oral History collection, and the Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang, or Peter H. L. Chang) Oral History collection. This article intends to provide essential information on what is available, how to navigate through the multitudes of the collections, and how to communicate requests for access to Columbia libraries. It offers as an updated, comprehensive, consistent overview of Chinese oral history collections at Columbia for better access by users and librarians alike, particularly for Chinese-language users in Taiwan and China.

Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation. By Elizabeth Jacoway. (New York: Free Press, 2007. xvi, 477 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-7432-9719-6.)

Elizabeth Jacoway's Turn Away Thy Son provides a passionate and riveting account of the crisis of Little Rock, one of the nation's more notorious school desegregation conflicts, from multiple perspectives within the community. Each chapter is organized around a key personality in the saga, which began with nine students trying to attend Central High School and ended with the reopening of Little Rock's public schools after a two year federal and state standoff. Jacoway combines biography with social and political history to support not only her contention that “white fear of miscegenation” was the foundation for the massive resistance to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but also her argument that racism will continue to be a guiding force in the United States until white people come to terms with that fear (p. xiii). She draws her analysis from key autobiographies, biographies, document and oral history collections, as well as from her own extensive primary research, oral history interviews, and critique of the secondary literature. Yet Jacoway's thesis does not propel her narrative, instead it merely splashes on the deck occasionally until she returns more forcefully to it in the afterword. This limitation, however, does not detract from the value of Jacoway's work which, from an “insider” perspective, provides a unique analysis of class and gender conflicts among white southerners and how those intragroup dynamics shaped opposition to desegregation. In particular, being a native of the area with family ties to several white power brokers, Jacoway is able to gain insight into the complicated forces that shaped the motives and behaviors of several characters in the story, such as an upper-class white matriarch who organized white women to push for the reopening of the public schools, and the son of a confederate and school board member who supported token desegregation in an effort to prevent full-scale desegregation. For example, Jacoway exposes the tensions between the interests of esteemed white business leaders, politicians, journalists, working-class parents, staunch segregationist school leaders, and fired white teachers, revealing the complex relationships among those in Arkansas who were prepared to end public education to save segregation and those who were not. Jacoway also sheds light on the struggles of the African American plaintiffs, the physical and emotional trauma experienced by the Little Rock Nine in their daily life at school, and on forward-thinking civil rights leaders who, at times, grudgingly took the back seat to white leaders in hopes of achieving some progress toward desegregation. Digging under the surface politics allows Jacoway to question traditional interpretations of the Little Rock crisis, enhancing our appreciation for the importance of this civil rights struggle a half century later.

Nursing History: Blurring Disciplinary Boundaries

When we examine the history of nursing, we take into consideration the broad components that affected its development: the labor market and labor laws, political issues of the day, the economy, religious and secular institutions and their influences on each other, gender relationships, and technological and scientific developments. We cannot just look at what happened, but rather we also need to explain how and why it occurred. At the same time, the complexities of health care and the knowledge explosion of the twenty-first century will bring new challenges to graduates of nursing and the health professions. This compels us as historians of nursing to develop, and to teach our students to develop, new ways of thinking about issues. This article argues for a broad historical approach that takes an interdisciplinary view into consideration as we do our work in nursing history. Indeed, there is great potential for interdisciplinary study. Anne Marie Rafferty, Jane Robinson, and Ruth Elkan point out that nursing history recognizes the inescapable social, political, economic, and cultural factors influencing nursing.1 In this way, nursing history is linked to the social sciences and the humanities. It also has connections to anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism, ethnic studies, American studies, and women's studies. In his book, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Georg G. Iggers argues that the concept of unified historical development on which a grand of history can be based, with its confidence in progress, has broken down. Instead, historical narratives have found forms of expression that look more at power relationships, gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, and ideology. Invisible in the grand narrative are women's contributions, played out today in women's history, gender history, and feminist history.2 These disciplines all have implications for nursing. For example, to understand why women compose the major nursing workforce and why so many immigrants found nursing attractive, it is important to study women's and immigration history. At the same time, historians of nursing can provide valuable insights for other disciplines regarding how women negotiated in a male-dominated health care system and created opportunities to expand their autonomy and the nursing profession over time. Ethnic and immigration history can help us understand not only the lives of immigrant nurses but also the ways that different ethnic groups have been marginalized. This includes looking at the underlying links between immigration and public health. When historians study public health nursing, they can examine how society received immigrants in the past. Amidst the huge changes that immigration brought, nativist fears linked certain diseases to specific immigrants.3 Did Irish, Filipino, Japanese, or other immigrant nurses to the United States face these social prejudices? Historians of immigration have variously described the immigrant experience. Did immigrant nurses go through an uprootedness and alienation, as Oscar Handlin portrayed early immigrant experiences?4 Or a transplantation, as John Bodnar described? To Bodnar and others, immigrants brought their own institutions that aided them in fashioning a life for themselves.5 Finally, ethnic and immigration history help us understand changes in migrations and their global connections to the world. Another area of scholarship includes oral histories about nurses' work. Women's history, anthropology, and sociology have also seen the collection of oral histories as important to their disciplines. Using strategies from cultural history that involve greater attention to language, Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, assert that in analyzing the production of oral histories, the fields of speech communication and linguistics can be used. …