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Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice PDF

203 Pages·2018·2.843 MB·English
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HISTORIES OF THE SELF Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It intro- duces students and researchers toscholarlyapproaches todiaries,letters, oralhistory and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of sub- jective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world withinwhichnarratorslived.However,sourcessuchasletters,diaries,memoirsand oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, con- cerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice. Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians. Penny Summerfield is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of numerous publications using a range of genres of personal narrative, notably Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Sub- jectivityin Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998) and Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007). This page intentionally left blank HISTORIES OF THE SELF Personal Narratives and Historical Practice Penny Summerfield Firstpublished2019 byRoutledge 2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN andbyRoutledge 711ThirdAvenue,NewYork,NY10017 RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness ©2019PennySummerfield TherightofPennySummerfieldtobeidentifiedasauthorofthisworkhasbeen assertedbyherinaccordancewithsections77and78oftheCopyright,Designs andPatentsAct1988. Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor utilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,now knownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,orinany informationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwritingfromthe publishers. Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybetrademarksorregistered trademarks,andareusedonlyforidentificationandexplanationwithoutintentto infringe. BritishLibraryCataloguing-in-PublicationData AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Acatalogrecordforthisbookhasbeenrequested ISBN:978-0-415-57618-5(hbk) ISBN:978-0-415-57619-2(pbk) ISBN:978-0-429-48721-7(ebk) TypesetinBembo byTaylor&FrancisBooks For Oliver This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction 1 2 Historians’ uses of letters 22 3 Historians and the diary 50 4 Autobiography, memoir and the historian 78 5 Oral history and historical practice 106 6 Representativeness 135 7 Conclusion 167 Index 187 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to thank the students who took my module on ‘Personal Testimony and Historical Research’ over the years, as well as my PhD students, for their engagement with the issues discussed in this book, and for their courage and crea- tivity in using personal narratives in their projects and dissertations. I would also like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and friends at my own and other universities who have taken an interest in this project. Those at Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, where I was Visiting Professor in 2015, deserve a special mention. Discussions in the corridors, in seminars, and at con- ferences have beeninvaluable,and have opened upto me awealth of research that uses personal narratives in fields far from my own. In particular, I owe a great debt to the following readers of chapters at various stages of development. I am immensely grateful for the time and trouble they took incommentingonmydrafts,andIcanonlyapologiseifIdidn’tmanagetoaddress all their suggestions. They are Lynn Abrams, Hannah Barker, Deborah Bernstein, Joy Damousi, Emma Griffin, Leif Jerram, Aaron Moore, Frank Mort and Julie- Marie Strange. I also want to thank Laura Doan for some lively conversations and especially for help with the title, Sarah Patterson of the Imperial War Museum for tracking down the cover photograph, and Eve Setch at Routledge for her con- fidence in the project from the start. Above all, heartfelt thanks are due to my partner, Oliver Fulton, for his con- structive criticisms, patience, companionship and inspiration. It is to Oliver that I dedicate this book. 1 INTRODUCTION ‘Things happen in your life, you see, you never know what is going to happen’1 Estelle Armitage was born into a business family in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1921. In an oral history interview in 1994 she spoke of a relatively privileged upbringing, with servants in the house and a boarding school education. She also described the complications of colour in her mixed race family: both grandfathers were white, and her father, whom she depicted as ‘slightly coloured … lighter than I’ would not let her walk down the street with a ‘black’ school friend. Estelle’s ambition to becomeanursewasputonholdinSeptember 1939,whentheBritishgovernment declared war on Germany, and she trained as a shorthand typist and book-keeper instead. The arrival of a British Army unit at Up Park Camp in Kingston offered her the chance to become a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the women’s branch of the British Army) with a job as a wages clerk, and then to go to Britain. Succeeding in the selection process, Estelle braved the enemy sub- marines in the Caribbean in August 1943 with a dual purpose in mind: ‘England was your mother country, that sort of feeling … Rule Britannia and all this busi- ness … and I could do my nursing after if I survived.’ This combination of patriotism and desire for self-improvement spurred Estelle on. In the ATS she trained first as a wireless operator and then learned to use a teleprinter, working in code. As the end of the war approached she was given a choice: to go home or to undertake training in the UK. Estelle seized the moment to embark on a three-year course in nursing, followed by midwifery: ‘it was wonderful, that was my goal’. Once she had qualified, with a job as a ‘staff mid- wife’ at Lewisham Hospital in London, she had, by law, to be repatriated, and spent eight months back in Jamaica, but she was determined to return, telling her family, ‘I haven’t got any friends here, they are all in London.’ In particular, Cyril

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