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'Doesn't a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well?' Walter Benjamin asks in 'On the Concept of History'. 'In the voices we hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones? ... If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one'. What does it mean to be in secret agreement with people that came before? To recognise that coming after involves the taking on of certain obligations – for example, to pay tribute, to make amends. This paper examines the role played by the cinema in Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder. Part history, part memoir, Modiano's book investigates the events leading to the deportation of a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl during the Nazi Occupation of France. The author's examination of these events commemorates the lives lost during the Occupation and alerts us to what remains still to be said about these lives. The issue that I address concerns cinema's role in the author's evocation of Dora's afterlife, in other words, its facilitation of a type of writing in which the experience of the present is shaped by the unfinished business of people and events that demand something of us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents author's reaction to Edhem Eldem's response to his article on memoirs of Ottoman military leader Sarkis Torossian. He questions Eldem's viewpoints, stating them to be two-sided and lacking awareness of developments in Torossian debate. Eldem's treatment of Hakan Erdem's book on Torossian debates is discussed.

This essay examines the rhetorical identities of Hillary Clinton’s two political memoirs—Living HistoryandHard Choices. The first spanned her childhood through her years as first lady. The second recounted her tenure as secretary of state. Though both memoirs were written with a past orientation, they also sought to keep alive a future run for the presidency. Situating the two Clinton memoirs in the history of biography, we employ corpus rhetorical methods from the digital humanities to establish thatHard Choicesfeatured a policy wonk identity compared toLiving History’smore personal storyteller identity. This result is not surprising in light of the different segments of life each memoir covered. Adding surprise and insight is the discovery that both memoirs also feature additional Clinton identities that shed light on her strategies for a future presidential run and revealed the identity problems she faced as a woman vying for the presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article mines an early history of modern Lebanon by placing a special focus on the country's Jewish community and examining inter-Lebanese relations where Lebanese Jews take centre stage. Like Lebanon's Christians – Maronites in the main – Lebanon's Jews reveal themselves to have played an important role in the establishment of the Lebanese republic as a ‘confederation of minorities’. But the role of Lebanese Jews was a discreet, low-pitched one, and their ‘voices’ and ‘stories’ seem to have been left out of traditional history books. This article is an attempt at correcting a lacuna of exclusionvis-à-visLebanese Jews, mending their memory and restoring them to their rightful place as a foundational element of modern Lebanese history and socio-cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the royal harem and its functions during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848–96), on the basis of two independent Persian-language sources written by noble Iranian women at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Naser al-Din's daughter, Taj al-Saltana (1884–1936), who in her famous memoirs vividly rendered her early years spent on her imperial father's court, and ‘Lady from Kerman’ (whose identity remains, for the moment, unclear), who authored a latterly published travelogue of pilgrimage to Mecca and the holy Shi'a places in contemporary Iraq held by her in the early 1890s. The second part of the latter account is entirely dedicated to the sojourn in Tehran, where, upon coming back from the sacred journey, the woman was a frequent guest at the royal harem. Both accounts are unique as they are the only known first-hand sources penned by the female insiders of the harem in nineteenth-century Iran. Furthermore, both authors, who actually met each other, describe the same figures and events – which provide an opportunity to compare their relations and augment our knowledge about Iran in the late Naseri period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise untilJourney’s Endand the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contrasts autobiographies and memoirs written during the post-Franco transition period, exploring the political subjectivities of male and female figures who had been active in the Falangist movement. While the male memoirs emphasize thickening individual agency and unfolding autonomy, the female memoirs are more relational—less individualizing, more heteronomous and displaying an intense preoccupation with and anxiety about fidelity, continuity and lineage. The article argues that the emphasis on fidelity in the women writers' accounts is, at least in part, a function of specific political events—the enforced unification of Nationalist forces in 1937—rather than simply arising from an exaltation of tradition and the fetishizing of essentialized gender norms. The burden of loyalty assumed by the female Falangists after the unification process becomes emplotted into the autobiographical self constructed in their memoirs, reminding us that these women were complex political subjects, even if denied such an identity by the State to which they pledged allegiance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using memoirs can be a vital way of supplementing archival evidence or indeed of overcoming a shortage of contemporaneous sources, and they offer insights into the attitudes and motivations of participants as well as how they recorded and remembered events. Memoirs retain an inherent value that must not be ignored, particularly in the study of intelligence liaison which addresses the kinds of personal and cultural aspects which are often especially well illuminated through autobiographical writing. This paper explores some of the theoretical and practical issues associated with the use of memoir material and examines them through the prism of selected autobiographical writings related to Anglo-French intelligence liaison from the Great War up to the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an unpublished memoir about the life of a seven-year-old Moroccan Jewish child in the 1940s in themallah(Jewish quarter) of Casablanca, this article examines the traumatic dimension of a child's memory vis-à-vis the precarious social milieu and the instability of the political street at the time. The article draws a parallel between the deterioration of the protagonist's mental and physical health during 1948 and political and social events relating to the formation of Moroccan national sentiment in Casablanca. It details the contradiction between the official narrative and the ‘homey narrative’, the impact of news and rumours about the war in Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel, and how the formation of a (trans)national politico-religious sentiments among the Jews of Casablanca and Purim festivities coincided with all these events and reflected their uncertainty. The protagonist's mental ‘crisis’ is analysed through concepts used in Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of a ‘body without organs’ known as ‘BwO’, where schizophrenia is not connected to either an Oedipus complex or the libido; instead, it is related to the world's (dis)order and stems from the repressive social, political, and economic conditions of the milieu in which the ‘subject-patient’ is living. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is the first examination of memoirs written by former members of the Russian Provisional Government (RPG) 1917. It is argued that despite difficulties in comparison, when viewed collectively the memoirists can be divided into ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists.’ Moreover, the issues over which the memoirists disagree, which include legitimacy, personality, policy, periodisation, and coalition, challenge existing writing on 1917. Current textbooks seek to explain October and not the RPG. The memoirists help us to address this imbalance. Finally, the ‘optimist’ case suggests the need for a historiographical shift away from dominant negative assessments of the RPG to a more positive appreciation of its accomplishments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contrary to most slave revolts, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) has left a rich archival record that includes documents written by the dominant classes as well as by the people of African descent. Of these, the most notable author was Toussaint Louverture, who during the 1790s wrote hundreds of letters, pamphlets, and proclamations (a few of them in his own hand) in an effort to shape official and public opinion in France and Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Particularly worthy of note is a 21-page memoir that Louverture wrote shortly before his death and that defended his public record as governor of Saint-Domingue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the memoirs written by Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, "One Canada," and how they represent the history of Canadian-American relations between 1961 and 1963. The author compares the history within "One Canada" to archive sources, examines Diefenbaker's recollections of his relationship with the U.S. government and U.S. president John F. Kennedy, and analyzes why historians have not investigated "One Canada" further.

In 1947 the Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg held a memoir contest. Sixty-four memoirs were submitted, and most of them are still preserved in Oseredok's archives. All extant submissions were examined in order to determine what they had to say about the Holocaust. Altogether twenty-five memoirs concerned World War II, and of these fourteen made at least some mention of the Holocaust. This body of memoirs is the earliest collection of Ukrainian memoirs of World War II that I am aware of, the closest in time to the events of the Holocaust. Already then, however, Ukrainians had become quite defensive about their behaviour towards the Jews; this perhaps explains why close to half the memoirs about the war omitted the fate of the Jews altogether and why the memoirs that do mention the Holocaust say almost nothing about Ukrainian involvement. The memoirists did, however, reproduce the image of Jews as agents of communism, particularly active in the organs of repression. The majority of the 1947 memoirs nonetheless indicated horror at and disapproval of the murder of the Jews by the Germans. Perhaps characteristically, the account expressing the strongest such feelings was written by an older man from outside Western Ukraine. Conversely, the most outright expression of lack of sympathy with the Jews came from a man twelve years younger and from Galicia. Although the latter felt pity for some individual Jews he knew and gave them alms, he expressly stated that he had no sympathy with them as a group, as "a nation that had done so much evil to my nation." Perhaps this is a case that corresponds to the phenomenon noted by Jan Gross in Fear, that individuals hate whom they have injured: this memoirist served in the civil administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Memoir of Robert Blincoe," told by Blincoe, a former child cotton mill apprentice, to John Brown, a radical journalist, is presented. It examines the relationship of the memoir to print networks and labor practices in nineteenth century Great Britain. The author also considers concepts of modernity and trust and comments on the relationship between masters and apprentices.

This article focuses on cultural encounters by Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, uniquely positioning travel accounts from autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs together with oral histories. A study of individual movements from South Africa to India provides new dimensions to a historiography which has prioritised immigration from India to South Africa and to travel literatures focused on movement from the metropole to the periphery. The narratives are read for what they reveal about identity and the impact of travel. The article argues that there are perceptible differences in masculine and feminine tellings with the latter paying more attention to the domestic and the personal. There is also a difference in the accounts of those who moved by choice and those who were forced into exile. The encounters with India vary from strong identification to isolation and discomfort. Travel sharpened an awareness of being from Africa in India, thereby providing a new definition of self. The narratives are suggestive of how Indians in India respond to the diaspora. Oral histories about dance and music point to how relocation in an Indian group area led to greater cultural activity. These draw Cape Town more closely into twentieth-century Indian Ocean cultural circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Falklands War has been described and experienced as disproportionately traumatic. The war was the first following the consolidation of the diagnostic for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as the measurement for the traumatic nature of combat. Whilst a variety of different disciplines and literatures have explored the traumatic nature of warfare, the experiences and accounts of Falklands veterans have been key to the popularization of the PTSD model, as well as to campaigns around the treatment and rehabilitation of ex-combatants. Ex-combatants' Falklands memoirs share a number of explanations of trauma with the wider literature. However, Falklands soldiers' memoirs also provide invaluable insight into both the specificity of their battlefield experience, and suggest wider universal lessons on trauma more generally. Although presented as individual accounts, central to Falklands memoirs is the importance of the military collective body in maintaining resilience to, and enabling recuperation from, the traumatic impact of combat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of the books "Four and 20 Beds" by Nancy Vogel and "No Vacancy" by Nelly Graf. It explores depictions of domesticity and personal identity in the memoirs, both written by female moteliers in the 1950s. According to the author, women in the motel industry often had access to opportunities for personal and professional development which would otherwise have been at odds with domestic ideals of the era. Privacy and sexuality are also discussed.

The article explores the relationship between memory and history by examining the memoirs of Iranian-Armenians that are active in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. It talks about the relationship between memory of individuals, their private lives and the act of reconstructing and writing history. The role of authors writing their memories as historical presenters and the use of theoretical perspectives on memory and memoirs are discussed. The article also discusses historiographic representations of memory and history.