This thesis examines the state-sponsored rise of local patriotism in the post-1961 period, interpreting this as part of the effort to strengthen popular support for and the legitimacy of the Soviet regime during the second phase of de-Stalinization. It shifts the analytical focus away from the Secret Speech of 1956, the time of Khrushchev’s full-scale assault on Stalin and his legacy, to the Twenty-Second Party Congress of 1961, the inauguration of a utopian and pioneering plan to build Communism by 1980. The thesis considers how this famously forward-looking programme gave rise to an institutionalized retrospectivism as Soviet policy makers turned to the past to mobilize popular support for socialist construction. It examines how this process played out in the Russian North West, where Soviet citizens were encouraged to turn inwards to examine their local history and traditions, and to reread these through the lens of Soviet socialism. The thesis takes as a case study the towns of Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda, where the state-sponsored regeneration of local traditions significantly impacted on the self-perception of local communities. In the first part, I look at the strategies for representing and displaying local culture in pubic institutions: the textual treatment and symbolic ordering of urban space in local tourist guides; the heritage movement and the attribution of cultural value to certain objects from the local landscape; and the primary focuses of the exhibitive 'gaze' in local museums. The second part of the thesis shifts the focus from institutionalized culture to popular culture, examining the informal practices and oral traditions that exist alongside the authoritative discourses of social identity in the post-Soviet period. The popular interpretation of public sculpture, the collective imagination of urban space, and the 'common knowledge' of the past as it is articulated in oral narratives are the focuses of discussion.

The Eastern Shore of Virginia is a narrow peninsula separating the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. Residents of the rural counties of Accomack and Northampton County share a strong sense of cultural identity based on geography, rooted in a distinct communal sense of place reinforced by an agricultural lifestyle. Storytelling around dinner tables and on front porches at dusk, speeches at high school graduations, family recipes talked through in a grandmother’s kitchen – it is through oral language that Eastern Shore people have primarily shared the knowledge that sustains their sense of communal identity. Oral knowledge of farming techniques and land use are handed down generation by generation through material lessons in the fields and woods. The most natural and effective research method for understanding Eastern Shore culture and its peoples’ sense of place is the collection of oral histories. The interviews collected for the Eastern Shore Stories project focus on farm life on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the mid-twentieth century, before the widespread use of electricity, tractors, or chemicals. The stories from the interviews seem quaint individually – nostalgic stories of how things used to be – but as a body of interviews, they accrue a weight and a coherence that offer interesting counterpoints to pervasive assumptions about progress and technology. It is those interesting counterpoints that this dissertation explores. This researcher expected to hear about plowing behind a team of mules and scratching out potatoes. She did not expect to hear retired farmers speak of the loneliness of modern farming, of how 2,500 acres used to support fifty families and now barely supports one. What emerged from the collective interviews was a sense that the industrialization of agriculture in this local community has caused unforeseen losses and those losses, however intangible, have been deleterious. Despite this, people from the Eastern Shore struggle to retain a sense of communal identity, defined by geography and familial connections. Their sense of belonging to this particular place persists in the face of rapid technological and cultural changes, creating tension between the place as it was and the place as it evolves in the twenty-first century.

This study attempts to compose an account of television history in Kuwait, one that focuses on its integration into society and is told from the audience's perspective and experience. This study represents a cultural alternative to the overwhelmingly national, institutional, and biographical focus that accompanies television history works in Kuwait and the Arab world. The narrative is gathered and generated through the individual oral stories of 25 Kuwaitis over the age of 50, who generally represent the six geographical districts of Kuwait. Through their oral stories, the narrators examine the different areas in which television has integrated itself into society from 1957 to 1990. These include television’s succession to cinema, television’s novelty, television’s familiarization into society, television’s domestication, television’s interaction with modernity, and television’s content. The oral stories of the narrators regarding each area reveal a wide range of microscopic topics about living in early Kuwait and television’s integration with it, including the people’s initial “miraculous” conception of the device, television’s relation with Kuwaiti urban growth, and the early economical gap of television ownership in Kuwait. Besides the general exploration, discussing the research areas indicates a somewhat linear narrative of television’s integration into culture, where television was preceded by the cinema technology that had semiotically paved the way for the device, before an abrupt novelty period in which television was settling in an ever-changing Kuwait, followed by a familiarity period in which the device had lost its gimmicky association, interrelated with all the other sociocultural factors of society, and spatially corresponded with both the extinct and the surviving components of the Kuwaiti house. Kuwaiti television had also corresponded with the social, economical, and urban alterations of Kuwaiti modernity, with its content nostalgically reflecting different stages of Kuwaiti cultural life. In the end, an overarching theme could be found in the “foreshortening” of television’s integration journey into Kuwaiti culture, with the narrators using television to express their yearning to the values of yesteryear. Future studies suggest more focus on contextuality, qualitative data, and interdisciplinarity in television history.

Oral history is a method of preserving historical information through in-depth interviews. Because the process requires narrators to use remote recall while sharing their life experiences, it can also be considered a reminiscence-related activity. Before this study, the positive effects on narrators of providing an oral history were noted in the research literature but had not been evaluated through quantitative methods. Based on theoretical constructs of Erikson and Butler, it was hypothesized that participation in oral history interviews would improve the life satisfaction of narrators. Life satisfaction was operationalized and measured using the Life Satisfaction Index Version A (LSIA). The purposes of this study were to evaluate the influence of an oral history intervention on the life satisfaction of community-dwelling elders and to identify participant characteristics associated with change in life satisfaction scores.Sixty community-dwelling, older adults who were free of cognitive impairment and mental illness were recruited from agencies serving the social and recreational needs of elders in Richmond, VA. Participants were randomly assigned to an intervention group or a control group. LSIA scores were collected pretest, posttest, and again at retest, ten weeks after the intervention. Mean LSIA scores from the control and treatment groups were compared for differences at posttest and retest using an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Regression analysis was used to identify participant characteristics associated with improved life satisfaction at posttest and retest. Oral history interviews were conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University students enrolled in a gerontology course. Participants discussed lifetime events with students on three occasions for approximately one hour per session using a researcher-developed interview guide. No statistically significant differences in LSIA scores were found between groups at posttest (p=0.74) or retest (p=0.051) although retest scores may indicate a trend toward improvement. Lower LSIA scores at pretest were associated with positive change in LSIA scores at retest (p=5.001). These results suggest that oral history may not improve life satisfaction immediately but there may be a trend toward improvement given time and that elders least satisfied with their lives at the onset are most likely to show positive change by retest.

Charles University in Prague Faculty of Social Sciences Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism Perception of Media Contents, Status and Role in Czechoslovakia in 1977-1989 Diploma thesis Author: Zbyněk Vlasák Consultant: PhDr. Jakub Končelík, Ph.D. Abstract This thesis called Perception of Media Contents, Status and Role in Czechoslovakia in 1977-1989 analyzes possible principles and circumstances of perceiving the role of the media in a specific environment of the normalisation period using methods of oral history. Furthermore, the thesis examines the function of the media in the everyday life of normalisation households and identifies the sources of images responsible for bipolarization of the outside world and their nature. It also deals with the public view on the importance of free media for the functioning of a democratic society. Last but not least, the thesis tracks the possibility of obtaining information from official, unofficial and foreign media. To be able to conduct the above mentioned analyses, the base of this thesis lie in historiography, several chapters deal with formal and informal pressure exerted on the official media sources and circumstances of foreign media broadcast on the Czechoslovak territory. We do not omit the international context of the period 1977-1989 and...

The diploma thesis named "The czech immigration to Chile after the year 1948: Three case studies" focuses on the emigration of the citizens of former state of Czechoslovakia to various countries of Latin America. In the case of this paper namely to Chile - a country that accepted together with other countries of the region, specifically Argentina and Brasil, a significant number of the emigrants from the post-war Europe. The main emphasis is placed on the czech immigration to this latin-american country after the year 1948, which implies the period after the so called coup d'état in Czechoslovakia which finished the division of the european continent into the "capitalist" western part of Europe cooperating with the United States of America and the communist eastern part under the supremacy of the Soviet union. There was a lot of people that had chosen to cross the ocean and emigrate from the the middle- and eastern european countries, where the rapid and sometimes violent changes took place. The case studies of three czech families (Platovský, Sklenář and Reichmann) which came from different social, economic and religious background, prove that whatever the "origin" was, the czech families did not get lost in their new countries (in this case in Chile) thanks to their diligence and skills, and they...

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This paper seeks to insert the voices of students into the historical discussion of public school integration in New Orleans. While history tends to ignore the memories of children that experienced integration firsthand, this paper argues that those memories can alter our understanding of that history. In 1963, Benjamin Franklin High School was the first public high school in New Orleans to integrate. Black students knowingly made sacrifices to transfer to Ben Franklin, as they were socially and politically conscious teenagers. Black students formed alliances with some white teachers and students to help combat the racist environment that still dominated their school and city. Ben Franklin students were maturing adolescents worked to establish their identities in this newly integrated, intellectually advanced space. This paper explores the way in which students – of differing racial, socio-economic, religious, educational, and political upbringings – all struggled to navigate self and space in this discordant society.

In South Louisiana in the late 1950s, Ville Platte native Floyd Soileau joined a network of independent recording companies across the United States that provided an opportunity for local entrepreneurs and artists to profit from the global music industry. This paper analyzes the album covers of Floyd Soileau’s Cajun recording label, Swallow Records, during the 1960s-1970s. This period overlaps with a movement to subvert a negative regional identity among Louisiana Cajuns that is often referred to as the Cajun revival. Through a consideration of album covers as objects of business strategy and creative expression, as well as oral histories with individuals who worked with Swallow Records, this paper argues that Floyd Soileau shaped the perception of Cajun music and people through the channels of the global music industry. On the album covers of Swallow Records, Floyd Soileau marketed a Cajun identity that was rural, white, masculine, and French-speaking, and became an accidental facilitator of the social and political goals of leaders in the Cajun revival.

Orientador: Lídia Maria Possas / Banca: Paulo César Garcez Marins / Banca: Célio Losnak / Banca: Paulo Eduardo Teixeira / Banca: Heloisa Pait / Resumo: Durante a formação e ocupação de uma cidade surgem fronteiras. Linhas físicas e sociais, visíveis e invisíveis, são construídas, desconstruídas, ultrapassadas, alteradas, diluídas durante o tempo, que também não é único, meramente cronológico, mas socialmente configurado. Tal perspectiva abre um leque de possibilidades de interpretação sobre o "fenômeno urbano". Neste caso, a partir de relatos de antigos(as) moradores(as), o objetivo é identificar relações de sociabilidade, percepções espaciais e modos de apropriação de lugares da cidade, principalmente vinculados a formas de distinção socioespacial, durante o período em que uma linha férrea dividiu o núcleo urbano de Garça, município da "Alta Paulista", entre o final da década de 1920 e meados da década de 1970 / Abstract:During the formation and occupation of a city, boundaries arise. Physical and social lines, visible and invisible, are constructed, deconstructed, overcome, changed, watered down over time, which is not unique, merely chronological, but socially configured. This perspective opens up a range of possible interpretations of the "urban phenomenon". In this case, from accounts of former residents, the goal is to identify relationships of social, spatial perceptions and ways of appropriation of places in the city, mostly linked to socio-spatial forms of distinction, during the period in which a railroad tracks divided the urban core of Garça, a city of "Alta Paulista", between the late 1920s and mid-1970s / Doutor