Overview: In this presentation Prof. Karras uses his experience researching and writing about 18th century Scottish migrants to make the case that daily unfiltered communications, from thank you notes to letters to emails, are the building blocks of what historians do. He also explains how teachers and students can use narratives - their own, their parents' or others' - to understand what historians do, and to make history themselves.

I used to tell my students that being a historian is like going into the locked drawers of your parents. The fact that the information is forbidden and not readily available makes it much more interesting.

The fundamental job of the historian is to read other peoples' emails, letters, etc. to understand the relationship between an individual and time and place in which that individual is living. Most important for historians is that these things are written without any thought of a larger historical narrative. The people writing them are not thinking they'll be collected - they're not thinking beyond the moment.

There are various kinds of personal narratives. Travel diaries give an understanding of one person as he or she travels from one place to another and observes. Teachers have students write journals or diaries wherein adolescents try to work out their thoughts. The most famous example of this is Anne Frank who gives us observations based on her limited perspective but which are nonetheless an important piece of a cultural puzzle. Many other personal narratives are unpublished, fragmentary and not well known - often just sitting in box somewhere. Letters between friends and lovers, birthday cards, and thank you notes can be important to show the world people are living in. Now we also have emails.

Personal narratives generate historical questions. They are a very good way to bring students in. It's useful to work on a concept with students (i.e. what they did on vacation) then talk about why they chose what they did. This helps them understand basic historical questions. When did they write their piece, right after vacation or a little later? How did that influence what they wrote? Why did they write what they wrote? They begin to understand the meaning of history - ascribing meaning to particular actions and interactions.

There's a great old book that's very easy to read: What is History by E.H. Carr. He makes the case that history is constantly changing. What is a fact? How do you know that something really happened that one person recorded? Often the source itself can come through a prism of interpretation, translation, etc., and he deals with those issues.

Today I'm going to talk about my experience, my personal narrative of using personal narratives in constructing history. I'll tell you how it is that individual letters of people who were disconnected were put together to create a collective experience of migration in my book, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

My book is about Scottish men who lived in Maryland, Virginia and Jamaica in the 18th century. I looked at letters from people writing to family and friends. My sources were papers in frayed strings, sometimes boxes, sometimes better preserved. What they had in common is that they were old (1740-1820) and written by a single group of people most of whom did not know each other. I picked these dates simply because that's when the letters were from. They dealt with perceptions people were having at particular moments in time and what their audiences wanted to hear.

When I began research on the Carribean in graduate school I thought: how will I get primary sources? Historical books before 1950s were narratives with bibliographies at the end. They didn't tell you where secondary sources were from. So I talked to librarians. They are our friends! They know a lot! Nothing was online and they helped me go through binders and help identify all kinds of wonderful documents.

I found a librarian in Philadelphia who helped me find this collection - it came in four boxes - nobody knew what was in it. What I started to discover was there was a complete history of a doctor named Alexander Johnston who was Scottish and moved to Jamaica. He kept a list of all his patients, what he charged, what ailments they had, and what he wrote to his family about his experiences. He was not thinking that anyone would come along and do anything with this - but I was able to recreate part of his life, to find patterns. I looked at where he lived, where his patients lived, how far he traveled, etc.

A sense of time and place is very important in personal narrative. Old maps sometimes list where houses are and who lived in each; I had one for Johnston and his patients and was able to visualize his physical space. This can be an important tool for students.

So Johnston's story was interesting, but so what? Was he representative of anyone? Scots in the Caribbean? People from Aberdeen? I wanted to figure that out, so I went to Glasgow, Edinburgh and England and I did research and discovered that a lot of Scots went to Caribbean at that time - and a number of doctors. I was overwhelmed when I found that there were hundreds of collections. I moved there for a couple of years and read all these accounts, in libraries, castles, private homes.

What I started to do is write down what people were saying. I began to translate their experiences - and I began to see a pattern. There were large numbers of Scots going to Caribbean - ostensibly temporarily - to take the role of the "invisible middle class" in jobs created by the plantation society. I asked myself: "why were these people doing this?" These were not huddled masses yearning to be free - but well educated people who wanted to make money and go back home. They didn't like Jamaica - and they hated Virginia and Maryland. They were economic migrants.

Along the way their lives got in the way - they accumulated property and money which they couldn't translate so well to moving back home, so many of them invested in Jamaica. They hated the place but owned property and hoped to make enough to eventually sell and buy back in Scotland. So I saw this pattern.

The moral of the story is that one person's papers led me to write a book full of stories of several hundred more people. In order to do this I had to categorize people. I wrote about one representative person or several people to construct a type of person. Key to all this was understanding one individual's life and relating that to the lives of others. The trick is to have enough of these accounts to be comfortable making judgments about what's indicative and what's not. The bigger the generalization the more helpful - but we have to look for patterns.

It is very easy to have students make their own personal narratives - to collect them so that they have their own historical documents. Another way would be to ask students to ask their parents to collect letters, emails, etc. - to take an anthropological approach. What can students infer from these documents? A variety of sources can add up to different interpretations. A very important historical skill - and what makes history so interesting - is coming up with different interpretations, different narratives. (Another way is deconstructing narratives that already exist).

Narratives provide insight into people's minds. One thing to remember is that some of the best insights come from people in unfamiliar environments. This doctor's experiences were different from what he expected, and that makes for good observation. People have a habit of writing down what is odd, unfamiliar, etc., and we as historians have to think about how to capture that. Documents are enormously helpful, or - if one is working in the present - interviews. These kinds of observations are really crucial to teaching history.

Overview: In this presentation Professor Knapp explains how scholars and others attempt to construct an understanding of the ancient world - a period with a poverty of personal narrative to work from.

The ancient world is bereft of personal narrative. We have no interviews that are not literary constructions, no oral histories, no journals. Though we know they were kept, none survives. We have many letters, but one always has to wonder how much is real. The kinds of journals and letters that you find in grandma's attic and you make your career from don't exist in the ancient world.

Thus we mainly take material from elites, about 1-2% of the population. We misrepresent the ancient world when we talk about "daily life in Ancient Rome" because we're really discussing the lives of elites. This is not to say there are no eyewitnesses at all, but when you're comparing them to other times and places where so much more exists, you become saddened. My wife works in a more recent historical period, and I would give anything to get my hands on stuff that she routinely has. But we all have our jealousies!

One exception to the ancient rule of elite literature is the New Testament. This is a very rich but underutilized document because people fear getting into a religious discussion. The New Testament is written by people like you and me, and it's the only document from the ancient world that isn't elite. So it's really a mine. For example the letters of Paul are fascinating. I also use Luke and the Acts to deal with family life. With any section one should highlight for students what the relevance is; it's easy to get sidetracked into proselytizing.

Ancient personal narratives have some of the same challenges more contemporary ones do. Eyewitness accounts are non-transparent. Everything is interpreted. We know that no eyewitness account can be taken as fact, but must be taken as prejudiced, biased, temporal, etc.

We have more material from common people than you might suppose. It's harder to get at; it is often in small pieces. Elites as narrators are much more widespread but we have to remember that most elite narrators are constructing literary pieces. When Sappho writes poetry about school for girls, this is not just Jim Lehrer reporting the day's events - this is someone constructing the portrait they want to present to the world from their own perspective. Plato has a philosophical agenda behind what may appear to be straightforward reporting.

An important distinction: when you look at published collections of "eyewitness" accounts you'll often find confusion between primary sources and eyewitness accounts. Primary may mean telling other people's stories. So you have to be critical about compilers. Vivid accounts don't mean they were there, so be careful.

Let's look at personal narratives of Roman common people. Almost all of these come from one or two sources and are more or less unavailable. Jo-Ann Shelton is the best place to go for these (As the Romans did : a sourcebook in Roman social history, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1997.) Papyrus is what people wrote on in Egypt - but was expensive. So people wrote on pottery. Gravestones are another great source. You really get people speaking through gravestones about who they were. Students really warm to this kind of thing because it's much closer to their own experience than literary elite stuff.

Along these lines, the material from Pompeii is extremely rich. It's possible to get to common people in a way that's impossible anywhere else in ancient world. Egypt has Papyrus; Pompeii had architecture. You can do lots of things with architecture - helps you understand dwellings, daily life instruments, etc.. But for personal narratives, we have thousands of graffiti - something that we have practically nothing of from the rest of ancient world. They are scrawled everywhere - with much more imagination than graffiti around here. In classroom it would be very possible to use graffiti as examples of daily life.

Other tips for teachers:
How can you liven up the classroom? In radio (and later, TV) there was a popular series of historical "newscasts" read by Walter Cronkite called "You Are There!" with ancient and non-ancient episodes. Triumph of Alexander and Death of Socrates episodes are available on DVD. (One outlet is http://www.otrcat.com/youarethere.htm )

In the audio book, They Saw It Happen: Eyewitness Accounts from Ancient Greece to Hiroshima. (Matthew Lewin et al., Naxos Audio Book http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/nabusa/pages/429312.htm) there is the Plague of Athens which is clearly a genuine eyewitness account and has wonderful detail. My particular favorite is The Conspiracy of Catiline about a down at the heels noble who had been dissed by the system and decides to lead a revolution. There are the four speeches of Cicero that he delivered against Catiline in the senate.

There is an excellent historical mystery novel called Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor (Fawcett, 1994) that is very readable. It really brings many issues to life. You could also have students do their own report along with a standard debate or jeopardy or whatever else. These things taken together could make an interesting event for the students.

Another event is the destruction of Pompeii. There is a brilliant eyewitness account by Pliny the younger. Pliny in two letters tells what he saw. The book Pompeii by Robert Harris is quite good. Harris has done a lot of research and made an accessible, readable novel. You can also look at several film versions. Next to Cleopatra, the destruction of Pompeii is the most filmed ancient episode - 10 versions versus Cleopatra's 27. Many of them are available from Netflix. There are also multitudes of websites that deal with Pompeii. And Science Fiction Theater had an episode called "Frozen Sound" dealing with the destruction of Pompeii that's really wonderful. With all these things you could put together something cohesive for students and have some fun.

"Romans In Their Own Words" - classroom lesson developed from Robert Knapp's presentation by history teacher Carolyn Rinetti, Pleasanton Middle School.

"Regional Oral History Project"
Prof. Richard Cándida Smith, History Department and Director of the Regional Oral History Office, U.C. Berkeley.
(Summary notes by Katie Galloway.)

Overview: Prof. Cándida Smith explains the importance of oral history to understanding cultural history, and how individual accounts, taken together, can form a complex picture of a culture at a particular time in history.

Oral history is the oldest form of history - it's a cliché but it's also true. People have always handed stories down verbally. Like any literary form they're quite conventionalized and get carried down with little improvisation (unless there's a political change and a revised story told to support that change). We could call the passing down of stories about the past from generation to generation "oral tradition."

"Oral history" is a modern research tool used to record in a permanent fashion the actual words of people with first-hand information about the recent past. Oral history overlaps with oral traditions but offers a window into a more informal world of conversation. It might be more useful to think of oral history as documenting the oral culture of different groups of contemporary people. Oral history as a research tool emerged at the beginning of the 19th century with the rise of university and journalism. You can go to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and read stories of the French Revolution from people in their own words. In the 1830s Jules Michelet wrote a multi-volume history of the French Revolution based on interviews with eye-witnesses and participants. Hubert Howe Bancroft did interviews with hundreds of people in the 1870s about the U.S. conquest and settlement of the American West - including 85 interviews with leaders of Mexican California. Academics have come back to this archive again and again to re-write this history based on rereading and reinterpreting what this body of interviews says about the history of Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking Americans in the state.

I've been using oral history along with other sources for about 35 years. I got hooked on it when I was doing a project on urban renewal and it became obvious that the written record was not only dry but misleading. I realized that the way I could retrieve what was missing was by talking to people involved in the history, people from all sides of the story. In the course of that work I saw that what people were telling me, which wasn't always factually correct, was nonetheless much more complex than the way academics were talking about the subject. We academics have our ways of trying to box everything up in logical models that can lose the complexity of people's experiences and make it difficult to see how and why people responded as they did to the challenges and opportunities they faced. Oral history gives us a glimpse of the factors going into decision-making on a personal and local level. When we have numerous accounts from the same community, we can begin to piece together, along with other sources such as letters, diaries, newspapers, newsletters, etc., a more complex picture of how people in the community understand their own past and why they believe things turned out as they did. To remove personal stories - especially in modern history where they're so available - is to really lose something important to understanding decisions in the past affecting the present.

We remember things because we talk about them with the people we see in school, church, and work, with our family at home, and when we're hanging out with our closest friends. We adjust the stories we share with each other as people respond to what they hear. Over time within a community there are sets of stories that define a shared understanding of the past. It's a form of vernacular history that is vital to shaping how any group understanding who it is and how they fit into the broader world. When you talk to an individual you're talking to a whole group behind them that helped to shape their view of the world and provide answers to crucial questions like, Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going next? What are the values most important to us? What are the dangers that threaten us?

Oral history has been a way of helping unpack this usually hidden dimension of community life. If you collect individual narratives you can get a record of how a group of people together understands their experience and get a sense of the landscape of that community. If you're only looking for hard facts you'll be disappointed. Oral history can provide lots of facts, but what people remember can be faulty so dates, names of people, sequence of events all need to be checked against other sources. If you're interested in the way a community looks at the world, oral histories are one of the richest, most important sources we have about most aspects of life in the 20th century.

While recording interviews with stenographers began in the 19th century, the invention of the tape recorder allowed oral history interviewing to expand dramatically. A study in 1989 by Chadwyck Healey, a library information systems company, revealed that there were 1.5 million interviews in libraries and archives in the U.S.! Sixteen years later, there must be at least 2 million. This rich history is underutilized but those interviews provide many, many answers to questions about how the United States changes over the last 100 years.

At ROHO we have dozens of projects going on at any one time. A major recent project looks at the city of Richmond, California, during World War II, and how one medium-sized town changed socially, culturally and economically as a result of total mobilization for war. We look at gender dynamics, race relations, education, health care, entertainment, religious life, police and fire services, the War Manpower Commission, the U.S.O. We wanted to see how war transformed American life.

Before 1940 the United States had the smallest standing army of any major industrialized nation. It had the lowest percentage of GDP going to military spending. Overall, the federal government was very small, responsible only for roughly 15 percent of total government spending in the nation. Since 1940, the federal government's responsibilities have multiplied, and continued military spending was the most important factor (though not the only one) driving its growth. How did such a rapid centralization of decision-making and power on the federal level affect peoples' lives? We interviewed across socio-economic, racial, cultural, gender lines to see how war complicated peoples' lives.

Tips for teachers:

I think it is best to have students working together in groups - either as a class or smaller groups within a class. They can do something on local history - food, real estate, industry, housing, race, what was happening to women or children at a particular time, etc. Urban High School in San Francisco spent a year doing an ambitious project on Holocaust survivors. There have to be people available to interview, people who are alert and healthy enough to speak about an aspect of their past. One project I advised in the Pasadena Unified School District had fifth- and sixth-graders interviewing their parents about where they were during the Vietnam War. Most of their parents were not in the military or peace activists, but that finding in itself was still very interesting in its own right. It helped students think about how even during wartime, much of "normal" life continues.

It's a good idea for teachers to have an idea about what's interesting to them, a topic where they have some background information and know where to go to get more. But the topic should be broad enough for students to have some leeway to explore different aspects of what they are working on and thus develop their own interests. The topic can be local, or it can be global. The basic requirement is that there are people with firsthand information available to interview. The next requirement is that there are resources in the library or other community institutions that can provide background information.

If you're going to have a public forum for your project you need releases from interviewees for the interviews to be quoted and the interviewees to be identified by name. If it's the private work of students you don't. Check with the office in your system that's responsible for "human subject protection." When getting releases - if interviewees are 18 or older you need a release from them and under 18 you need a release from their parent or guardian. [You can find a sample legal release form on the ROHO web site. If you have questions, please feel free to email ROHO (roho@library.berkeley.edu).]

Our website provides many resources: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/resources that can be used in preparing for a project and training students. There are also samples of student work.

Teacher's Roundtable: Using oral histories with students
(Summary notes by Katie Galloway.)

Teacher #1: About 15 years ago we started doing cross-departmental work where the English teacher did the letter writing around the world with students and I taught the history part of it. We've also had students write letters as if they were writing from a particular point in history. We've had them interview each other as if they were famous people (Pharaoh building pyramids, for example). We also have them become everyday people - one interviewee was a worker on the Great Wall of China. One was a batboy for the Yankees during Babe Ruth. One girl was a pre-flight mechanic during the space shuttle. We also had one student's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, come talk to the kids.

Teacher#2: I worked on the "people" section of a website called Crossroads - "a community heritage website," for the communities of Castro Valley, Hayward, and San Lorenzo. You can look at it at www.historycrossroads.org It includes cultural/historical timelines, places, pathways and a search function. It was developed by the Hayward Area Historical Society and is a great resource for students and teachers - and a great model for others who might want to try putting something like that together for their communities.

Teacher #3: My district is really good about chasing federal money - we get computers, cameras, etc. - I know that's a little weird because its sort of elitist - but the money is out there. When the resources are available, kids become filmmakers pretty quickly.

Teacher #4: There's a senior center across from my school. I send out a letter to all the seniors to see who wants to participate in the project - and my students' parents make the food to contribute to events. Here's what we do: we figure out with the kids what we want to ask the seniors. The kids get together in small groups and brainstorm about questions. Then all the groups share and together they pick a collection of questions. Then we go visit the seniors in small groups. I like having them interview an old person they don't know because that's more of a challenge than doing their own grandparents. Maybe we do their life story or instead of doing their whole life we do a topic in history. I also work on interviewing technique. We watch clips of different interviewers, Rosie, Oprah, etc. We look for what they do to encourage people to talk. What do they do with their bodies, etc. I tell the seniors that we'll bring food and figure out a time when they'll be interviewed. The seniors are asked to bring artifacts, pictures, etc. We make books and keep one for the school and give one to each senior. Kids are really frightened when they first go - they're afraid of old people and think they're scary - but it's really a wonderful, rewarding exchange.

What Was Communism And What Did It Mean To Different People?
Sener Akturk, Political Science Department, U.C. Berkeley
(Summary notes by Katie Galloway.)

Overview: In this presentation Sener Akturk asks how we find reliable sources in a totalitarian society. He explains how to use bits and pieces (from propaganda posters to cartoons to personal accounts) to approximate a picture of the former Soviet Union - a society steeped in propaganda.

Understanding Communism Requires geographical, temporal, and social lenses.

The meaning of Communism for the people who lived under it is a vast and difficult topic to navigate because, first, there were many very different communist regimes around the world, from Cuba to Vietnam, from Yugoslavia to China, and of course the Soviet Union. Communist regimes also spanned long periods of time, in the case of the first socialist state, Soviet Union, 75 years or about three generations. Finally, the experience of communism, as is the case with all social experiences, is a relative one depending on the position that the observer occupies in a given society. In order to get as honest a picture of Communism as possible, I suggest we approach the subject by looking at the testimonies of men and women from different occupational, ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds, not only from Moscow, Petrograd and a few other major cities but also from provincial towns and cities away from the center, such as in Siberia, in Central Asia, in the Caucasus, and the like. Communist experience is still a mystery, where personal and official narratives are either unavailable or unreliable, or both, and yet we try to approximate the picture of the socialist society as much as we can. The famous illustration regarding people's inability to fathom mystery and the supernatural events, given by the Hindu philosopher Siniti Kunar Chatterji, can be applied to the Soviet Socialist experiences as well: As Chatterji said, We are like blind people who, feeling this or that part of an elephant's body, are severally convinced that one of them is touching a pillar, another a snake, a third something hard, the fourth a wall and another a brush with a flexible handle-according to whether they are in contact with a leg, the trunk, a tusk, the body or the tail." (Braudel 23) In this presentation, with the aid of personal narratives, bibliographies, and pictures, I will introduce you to the experiences of people from as many different backgrounds as possible, all living under communism in the Soviet Union. A note of scope is necessary here: first, because of the limited time and my limited knowledge, I will only talk about Communism in the Soviet Union, which was somewhat comparable to the Communist experience in the other Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe that you see in your maps, but not that similar perhaps to the communist experiences in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and other socialist or proto-communist regimes beyond Europe.

The Soviet Union was the union of 15 socialist republics that were populated by different ethnicities, different nations. So Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Estonian, Latvian, Georgian, Ukrainian nations all had their own respective republics. They were kept together, unified in the Soviet Union, not voluntarily, but for the most part by the military-political force and pressure from Russia, which was by far the largest, most populous union republic. Like the United States, the Soviet Union was a multicultural, multiethnic country, where different languages, races, religions co-existed, though not under democracy, but under a totalitarian regime. And also of course religious practice was prohibited; the state was officially atheist and it conducted anti-religious propaganda, especially in the early times, destroying churches and mosques and persecuting religious, pious people. The difference from the United States is that the Soviets had the idea that a nation = a state. So for every ethnic group they created a separate state, in a way that is obviously unlike the United States where we don't have separate states for the Hispanic, African, Asian, Italian, Irish, Jewish-Americans. The importance of the Soviet Union's division into 15 republics and these ethnic-national differences is that, overall, Russians and non-Russians had different attitudes and experiences under Communism, because for non-Russians, Communism was more or less a continuation of Russian oppression and imperialism, and also, in most Union Republics, especially in Central Asia, people had a buffer zone between themselves and the state. Because the state was in Moscow, it was far away, and it was Russian speaking, it had to rely on local Tajiks, Kazakhs, Latvians, Georgians, Uzbeks, to implement and execute official orders. So some claim that Soviet rule was most felt in Russia, and in particular in Moscow, Petersburg, and other major cities, where power and politics reigned supreme, while a village in Pamir mountains in Tajikistan was perhaps less influenced, positively or negatively, by Communism.

The Goal: Investigating Everyday Life Under Communism -- The Problem: Finding Reliable Sources

One of the major problems in investigating everyday life under Communism is finding reliable sources, where people honestly give their opinion on an issue. That's where personal letters, interviews and memoirs, can play an important role. However, I would also be cautious in discounting the opinions expressed by different people in official Soviet newspapers, because an expressed opinion, even under a coercive state, is still only an opinion.

One technique of navigating the Soviet experience, while avoiding being one-sided, is to pick polar opposites: émigré memoirs, published in United States and Western Europe, which tend to be very anti-Soviet, and on the opposite side, officially reported opinions of people on the street, which tend to be favorable, and in between these two extremes, unofficial letters and memoirs of people living in the Soviet Union.

Hence, we can hope to reconstruct people's experiences by putting together bits and pieces from the testimonies of people occupying different positions in society: not only the senior party member and factory manager, but also and more so the peasant, the lay soldier, women, minorities, not only from the metropolitan Moscow and Petersburg but also from provincial towns. In short, pick your samples from different parts of the country, different ethnicities and occupations, age groups, etc.

Covering Different Time Periods, Noting the Temporal Variation

One last step in reconstructing a realistic picture of the Soviet experience is to pick from different time periods, to maintain temporal variation and honesty. I would avoid discussing only the Great Terror of the 1930s, but I would also discuss the relative calm, peace, and prosperity of the 1970s, for example. Not only the catastrophes of World War II, but also the celebrations accompanying the launching of Sputnik and the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow 1980.

In short, this technique of reconstructing Soviet experience from personal narratives will hopefully give us a more or less realistic picture of Soviet society. I look at personal narratives of working conditions, women's status, happy and unhappy people, underprivileged, persecuted minorities, dissident intellectuals, frustrated artists, people who genuinely cried in Stalin's funeral, people who realized their hatred for him, people who still cry today in Communist rallies in present-day Russia for the past glory of the Soviet Union, and the overall ambiguity that surrounds Russians' attitudes towards Soviet Union.

The least we can do in trying to understand the Communist experience is to approach the subject from multiple points of view, relying on the personal narratives of men and women from different occupational, ethnic, religious, political, regional backgrounds, urban and rural, both from the center and the periphery. Using idealized propaganda pictures depicting the goals of the system, as well as using real life pictures of workplaces, houses, and urban landscape will also help in reconstructing the Soviet experience in the classroom. This will allow us to have a more or less realistic picture of what everyday life was like in the Soviet Union.

I picked up a very nice archeological term from my days as a part-time translator of archaeological excavation texts from English, "in situ." It literally means "in the original position," but in practical terms, it refers to archeologists' attempts at recreating in their excavation sites the same environment, the same wall, and the paintings, and the table, and the rug, and the stove and everything else in the original position they existed. The more original personal narratives and original audio-visual supplements we use, we get closer to reconstructing components of the Communist experience in their original position: these are propaganda pictures they saw, this is how it looked like in real life, this is where they lived, this is what they thought about what they saw and experienced, this is what they listened on the radio before they went to sleep, et cetera. This was just an introduction into the Communist experience. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

My main theme is that there are different ways to access the female gaze than the male gaze. In the past women were not funded as explorers and diplomats or to lead trade expeditions. But women did travel, they did have important reflections, and getting to these is important. And women moved around a lot, more than men in some cases.

Throughout history women taken as slaves often entered households - working in kitchens, with children, creating material goods for the family. In the process they brought new food, religion, oral history, etc. into these households. Women also might be sent to foreign lands as high status brides, or used as tribute, or as tokens in peace negotiations. They were well placed to become the "eyes and ears" of their natal courts, while bringing ideas and goods from their regions of birth. Princess Wencheng's journey around 700 A.D. as bride of Tibet's most powerful ruler, Songtsen Gampo, and her subsequent influence on Tibetan culture has been the stuff of legends ever since.

Religion often gave women the right to travel on their own volition. The accounts of Christian missionary women are rich sources for studies of their journeys and impact on the peoples they set out to convert. Women also traveled on pilgrimages visiting local sacred sites or far away religious destinations. Their observations and adventures in foreign lands and the goods they returned with illustrate ways they impacted their culture. If you go on my website [aboutwiwhc@womeninworldhistory.com] and hit "biographies," you will get accounts of various women during the Crusades. Also accounts of women who went on the Hajj can be used. While first person sources are rare, secondary source information about the cultural impact of powerful women can be found, such as that of Queen Zubayda, wife of Harun al-Rahid of Baghdad, who expanded and eased the route of the pilgrims, and that of Gulbadan Begam, one of a surprisingly large number of elite women who made the pilgrimage from India during the Mughal period. Female religious esthetics also often left home and family to wander, sometimes teaching and attracting a following. One such a group, India's Bhakti women, wrote emotional poetry which is read and sung even today.

Women who traveled to other lands with appointed diplomats had opportunities to affect influential interactions with women in their host country if they wished. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1786) recorded her enlightened views of Turkish women in the letters she wrote home to her sister in England. (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1718montague-sultana.html)

The mid to late 19th century and early 20th witnessed an extraordinary number of European and American female travelers who wrote of their adventures. Industrialization had increased women's mobility and they more easily could travel by train and streamer. By the end of the 19th century, European imperialism had made many areas of the world "safe" for women travelers. Read accessible accounts by Mary Kingsley, writing about West Africa in 1893 and 1895, and Mary Seacole in her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, published in 1857. The nursing skills of Seacole, a mulatto from Jamaica, introduced many medical personnel to herbal medicine.

Final thoughts are about women who were officially sent out by their governments as emissaries carrying new ideas and reforms to its citizens. Yuan-tsung Chen's autobiographic novel, The Dragon's Village, for example, describes her attempts to try and raise the aspirations of peasant women and help enact new land reform measures in, for her, the unfamiliar far reaches of Western China.

A great resource for first person accounts, from narratives to poetry to essays, can be found on my website: womeninworldhistory.com. The website has thirteen activities for teachers to try in their classrooms. It also has stories of women heroes, provocative quotes from women, stories of women in the work place, during suffrage, ancient Rome, etc. Find an extended essay called "Women as Cultural Emissaries: Considering Some Historic Accounts" at: http://womeninworldhistory.com/essay-07.html

We also have links to books, including the Women of the World Atlas, which colorfully illustrates past to present topics from women's work to marriage to the global sex trade.

Overview: Carrel and Beaver teach a documentary class at the U. C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. They take new documentary students to Asia to report, shoot and edit their own stories, many of which are posted to the Washington Post website as "Emerging Voices."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/emergingvoices/index.html

Q: How do you prepare students to produce these kinds of stories?

A: They study, research and try to do all the pre-reporting they can. They try to conceive what the story might be -- with the proviso that things might change on the ground. The first rule: be flexible. In terms of choosing stories: we have pitch sessions where each student pitches three stories. One generally pans out better than the others. Some stories are chosen before we leave for Asia, others are found there when original ideas fall through.

Once we arrive, students need to have something focused within a couple of days to have enough time to complete the project. It's very rigorous - a documentary boot camp. We work closely with local students as interpreters. In developing their stories, we ask our students to talk to many people and - with main characters or subjects - we expect students to go back again and again to hear people's stories in order to get closer to something like the truth - because stories change all the time.

Each student was alone, working with an interpreter. We have them do interviews in 3 to 5 different locales. Equipment is so small now, you don't need lights, and it's possible to get stuff much more intimately.

One important dimension of this process is attempting to help students and their audiences become more aware and sensitive to different cultures; we need to be educated beyond the missionary impulse of our culture. There are some wonderful things about that impulse and some things that aren't so wonderful. We try to teach people to be deeply tolerant of others. We work with students to make sure they're treating people with integrity. People have something to say but students shouldn't force it.

In terms of narrative: We're looking for coherence and completeness. They cut and re-cut their stories. We look at them together and work on finding the focus and getting to the heart of their story-telling abilities.

In the next month or two you can look at some of these student pieces online at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/emergingvoices/index.html

Suggestions for teachers:

Explore communities near you - get your kids out into Diaspora communities in your area. Our paradigm is to start at home and then go overseas - but you can find wonderful stories without traveling far.

Even just filming without editing is a start. It's now possible to buy cheap cameras. Tell students to get close to their subjects. Sound is very important. There are also much smaller, cheaper computers for editing than their used to be. Editing on Final Cut Pro for Mac is one possibility. I-Movie is another possibility.

A suggestion from a teacher in the audience:

We only have one camera, but we use it to make mini-movies of each student: name, class, year, when they graduate, etc. They email those to students in another country. We send back and forth "slice of life" pieces as a sort of cultural exchange. Sometimes they do it in pairs - videotaping each other doing something in their lives: karate, at the mall, etc. This work really inspires certain students. We do the editing on I-Movie.

Peace Corp's Worldwise Schools Program
Dennis McMahon, Public Affairs Specialist Peace Corps
(Summary notes by Katie Galloway.)

Overview: Peace Corps representatives introduce teachers to this government program and the many free resources available for use in classrooms.

Peace Corps has been around for 44 years and for all that time volunteers have come back to tell their stories. We produce classroom materials for understanding cultures around the world. Peace Corps volunteers go to developing countries around the world. We have several goals:

• To help communities in developing countries meet their needs for trained men and women.
• To help generate a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served.
• To help promote a better understanding of other people and cultures on the part of Americans.

The Coverdell World Wise School Program helps to:

• Engage students in inquiry about the world, themselves, and others.
• Broaden students' perspectives about their world.
• Promote cross-cultural understanding.
• Encourage service.

How do we understand culture?

• Everyone has a culture.
• Culture is like an iceberg (only a little bit is apparent on the surface)
• Understanding someone from another culture can sometimes be hard, because people really do see the world in fundamentally different ways.

Things to try with students:

• Try to see the world from another point of view, not your own.
• Discuss cultural universals that unite all people in a common bond of humanity.
• Understanding and respecting cultural differences can lead to greater harmony in schools, the community, and the world.

Materials from Peace Corps are organized to help meet school address reading comprehension, writing skills, listening skills, speaking skills and social adjustment. The curriculum materials can be printed out from the Worldwise web site or requested by teachers by contacting the Worldwise office.

Information about all these things on the web at www.peacecorps.gov/wws
Also feel free to contact Sally Caldwell, Director Coverdell World Wise Schools program at scaldwell@peacecorps.gov

Overview: Professor Miller describes the first person travel account as a series of stories that reveal a cross-cultural encounter.

What does it mean to take a trip? It means displacement, leaving the familiar, going someplace new, and imaging what it will be like. It begins with the imagination. We imagine the journey before we set out. We tell ourselves a story of what we will see or do. The narrative of the journey begins in our own minds.

Often we do more than just imagine; we write. Writing helps us remember what we saw. The travel journal --- it can be very ordinary and not very interesting. But most of us write about the unusual and the exotic, events that stir the emotions. Those are the experiences we remember.

The best travel accounts are accounts of the astonishing and the marvelous. There are even signposts warning us that we should get ready to be amazed: "Can you imagine!" "I couldn't believe what I saw!" Then you know…here comes a marvel!

What is the appeal of travel accounts? First of all, they take us somewhere new by exposing us to new people and places. My book - Disorienting Encounters (University of California Press, 1992) - is a play on words. A Moroccan traveler left the East and became "disoriented." That disorientation was the beginning of a new kind of knowledge. So travel is an experience of the new that can change our lives and our consciousness forever.

Secondly, travel is sometimes dangerous. There are journeys so dangerous that the traveler never returns. Risky travel is far more interesting than easy travel, for it contains the possibility of death. The thrill of annihilation holds our attention.

Third, a travel account is composed of many little stories. These stories are the building blocks of travel accounts. They are small in scale and easy to digest, but they can cohere to form themes that address something larger.

Travel accounts are not philosophical treatises based on carefully argued themes. They are a series of stories about encounters with the new. So why aren't they trivial? Who cares? How are they justified as sources? The stories they tell often have a deeper meaning. In this book, the author's stories and encounters reveal his attitudes on gender, sexuality, religion, modernity, and the cultural differences between East and West.

Where do travelogues and history intersect? First of all, they are purveyors of fact. They explain moments and give insight into people or places that may no longer exist. They show us what was through the eyes of an individual. Second, they speak for someone who represents a collectivity. Third, they are transmitters of ideas. They tell us about the state of knowledge or understanding of a particular time or place. They inspire a comparative experience - a sort of "A-ha!" about places distant from our own. Fourth, travelogues humanize great events by focusing on the individual - they are easy to relate to. Finally, they valorize people that Western historiography has consistently undervalued. In Disorienting Encounters we learn that Moroccans in this time were complex, intelligent, cultured people; not speechless, inarticulate or devoid of curiosity about the world.

Travelogues have a long history in Arabic literature. They are varied depending on the traveler and the purpose of travel. One purpose was to get to know Muslims in other parts of the Islamic world. Another was to map routes. Yet others traveled to seek knowledge - to study with teachers in other places. There are also travel accounts that describe the Hajj, which often took years. Finally, there was commercial and diplomatic travel, and all combinations of the above.

The goal for the author of the travel journal translated in Disorienting Encounters was to fulfill a mission: to be informative and pleasing to his superiors, and to create a good impression of Morocco among the French. His was carrying out a transaction, conducting an exchange of ideas; he took possession of the experience by making himself transparent to the Other, and managed to get the Other to understand himself. It was a kind of cultural interchange - a give and take in which both sides were affected.

Finally, there is a question of audience. For whom did he write? Here the Moroccan scholar was writing for the Sultan about life in France. This was a commissioned report. When your students keep travel journals, for whom do they write? For themselves? Their teacher? Their parents? Their friends? If motivation is a problem, you might suggest they read a book called Bad Trips, edited by Keath Fraser. Not all travel writing has to be joyous.

"The First Chinese Embassy in the West."
Michelle King, History Department, U.C. Berkeley.
(Summary notes by Katie Galloway.)

Overview: Michelle King describes a period of political/cultural interaction between China and Britain to show how understandings (and misunderstandings) about other cultures can come about.

Here's an exercise you can do yourself or with students. As a historian you begin with a text. The first question is: how did this text come to be? And also: how do I experience or understand it? When you approach a text you may have no specialized knowledge, or no knowledge at all. You want to have your students ask themselves two questions. First, what seems strange about the text? Second, what was strange to the writer as he or she wrote it? These two levels may be similar or different but it's important for the historian to keep these two levels distinct.

A mistake people often make is to apply 21st century standards to older contexts. That leads to a sense of superiority about "us" versus previous peoples or eras. We have to teach people to judge within the context of the era in which people were writing as much as possible. We should think: how is a particular worldview possible?

I want to look at a particular intersection of British and Chinese societies during the 1800s. To put this period in context: in 1793, when Britain first had an embassy in China, China was at the height of its power and Britain was a little country the Chinese didn't care very much about. But as the 19th century unfolded, China became a tragically different place. There was great demand for Chinese goods in Western Europe, but Western Europe had little to offer of interest to Chinese traders. The British merchants sought to balance their trade deficit with China by selling East Indian opium to the Chinese despite protests from the Chinese leadership. The resulting first Opium Wars of 1893-42 resulted in a Chinese defeat. In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking led to unfavorable terms for the Chinese. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain and Britains could not be prosecuted under Chinese law. The 2nd Opium War was also lost by the Chinese and led to more unfavorable terms. Foreigners were allowed to travel inland, which led to missionaries heading to the interior of China to proselytize. The Chinese didn't react positively to missionaries at all. The lore was that they gouged out children's eyes, ate hearts, etc. Chinese converts enjoyed the protection of the Catholic Church, and that made Chinese leaders very angry. The hugely devastating Taiping rebellion was led by man who believed he was Jesus's younger brother. Much of the government's resources went toward fighting this internal conflict, at the same time as they faced market pressure from abroad.

So how did the first Chinese embassy to England come about? The British in yet another treaty mandated it in the 1800s. When we think about the formation of this embassy, it's not just a nice travelogue. There was a serious imbalance of power and much at stake. Travelers sailed enormous distances geographically, culturally, and psychologically. These men in 1877 - they went far. There was a lot they had to think about -- a lot that occurred to them.

[Discussion of selections from Frodsham, J. D. The First Chinese Embassy to the West: The Journals of Kuo Sung-T'ao, Liu Hsi-Hung and Chang Te-Yi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. King shows various pictures and cartoons depicting British and Chinese views of the Other - mostly disparaging characterizations - revealing their understandings, and misunderstandings, of foreign cultures.]

For teachers: you might send students out on little missions to write their own travel narratives and come back to share them with the class. What kind of comparisons do we make? What does it mean to go to a foreign place where you don't know anything? How do you describe those places and people to those "back home"?

The talk by Wayne de Fremery centered on the narrative of Hye Ch'o, a Buddhist Monk who traveled throughout Asia in the 8th century, from around 724-727. The story of Hye Ch'o comes to us through his diary, written in classical Chinese, which emerged along with other historical documents from the caves of Dunhuang in 1900. The diary provides an extraordinary insight into the history, people, and places of 8th century Asia.

Hye Ch'o was born sometime around 700, soon after the Kingdom of Silla unified Korea. Silla was one of three kingdoms in the Korea and the peninsula was unified around 668 (dynasty runs until 935). While the story in his document is quite interesting, no less so is the story of the actual manuscript found at Dunhuang, how it made its way there, and why it was written the way it was.

Gansu province, where the journal was found, is located in central China, along what became known as the "Silk Road." The small town of Dunhuang rests at the edge of Gobi desert, and became a hub for the silk trade due to its beautiful crescent moon lake oasis. Near the town and the lake are also a series of sandstone cliffs. In the cliffs monks carved caves in sandstone rock face, creating places to pray. Over the years these caves grew in size and number and at one time stretched for almost a mile, at their peak numbering almost 1000. Moreover, a monastery was built nearby. In 851, the abbot of the monestary died, and monks erected a statue to commemorate his life in one of the Dunhuang caves. However, sometime during the next 150 years the statue was removed and numerous documents were placed in a small space where the statue once stood and the room was sealed. There they rested, covered up until 1900 when they were discovered.

In 1900 Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovered the cave's precious cache and sold many of the documents to British explorer Aurel Stein in 1907. A year later the French archeologist Paul Pelliot arrived and purchased more of the documents. (The documents are now split between the French, British and Chinese National Libraries). Included in the documents was the earliest known complete printed book (868 A.D.), a copy of the "Diamond Sutra" printed with woodblocks, found by Stein at Dunhuang in 1907.

Hye Ch'o's manuscript, like many of the documents found in Dunhuang, was written in classical Chinese. This makes sense, since until recently, most Korean writing was in Chinese. Han'gul, the Korean alphabet, was developed much later.The manuscript is not complete, missing both its beginning and end. It also appears to be a condensed version of the original as another monk cites sections that are not in this manuscript. It is not clear whom Hye Ch'o is writing for, but since other monks preceded him also left travel diaries; he may simply be following precedent. It also could be for Hye Ch'o's master, or a manual for future pilgrims like himself.

Hye Ch'o's journey starts in China. Why would a Korean monk start in China? Silla Korea was fertile ground for Buddhism. Kings took the name of Buddha's family to legitimate their rule. Hwangnyong temple was a center for Buddhism. However, Tang China (618-907) was the center of East Asia, already very cosmopolitan, with lots of foreigners and Chang'an was the largest city in the world. Additionally, the type of Buddhism Hye Ch'o studied, Tantric Buddhism, was not taught extensively in Korea, so Hye Ch'o may have left to study with a Tantric master in China. So, sometime around 719, Hye Ch'o sets out from Central China, and then in 724 on a pilgrimage to visit the holy sites of the historical Buddha in India.

The first entry in the diary comes from Vaisali, site of the 2nd Buddhist council, and the place where Buddhism split into two schools. Hye Ch'o continued from here to another holy site, Kusinagara, where Buddha is said to have died on his side between two sal trees. Hye Ch'o relates that this area was incredibly desolate when he visits. In his writing, he seems very lonely, indicating that he probably traveled alone and notes that tigers and rhinos often wound monks in this area.

Hye Ch'o continued to stop at other stupas and holy places around India, including Sarnath (where Buddha is said to have held his first sermon), the Bodhi tree, and Mahabodi Temple. At many of these stops he writes poems showing his loneliness. At many stops he takes great care to catalogue what he discovers. He talks about local legal systems, the number of elephants possessed by the local king (as a proxy for power), clothing, foods, the local economy, and whether and how Buddhism is practiced. He also throws in little parables about local life, expressing admiration or admonition for local practices.

Hye Ch'o's travels take him to all of the corners of India. He visits Kanauj in northern India. Badami in the south, where he expresses poetic regret that they're aren't any geese in this hot place to take his messages home. He visits what he calls West India, probably near present day Karchi, Pakistan, where he mentions the Arab presence. This provides historians with evidence that during the 8th century the Arabs made a concerted push into India. Each leg of Hye Cho'o's journey is made on foot, probably with nothing more than a begging bowl for food and some crude directions from his last stop.

Again he travels to the mountainous provinces of North India such as Jalandhara and Sidhkula. While he does not actually go to Tibet, he passes on rumors about Tibet from the locals, commenting that the inhabitants are fond eating lice and nits that they pick from their woolen clothes. From here he travels to modern day Pakistan and into Afghanistan (perhaps passing through the Khyber Pass) toward Kabul. Here he passes the Bamiyan, site of the late enormous rock statues of Buddha, recently destroyed by the Taliban. His journey continues westward, through Iran and possibly as far as Damascus, Syria. He claims to have met the king of the Arabs, though this may be an exaggeration. He finds the Arabs uncivilized, as they slaughter much meat and fail to bow.

At this point in the journey, he finally turns back eastward, toward home. Throughout the return journey, his entries become shorter and lonelier, often containing nothing more than a short poem to illustrate his discontentment. At Wakhan, near what is now the Tajikistan border, he pens a beautiful poem about the frigid cold, questioning how he will ever cross the Pamirs. A later entry questions what would happen were he to die in this cold lonely place.

When Hye Ch'o finally reenters Chinese controlled territory he gets a lift. He's happy to be able to communicate and happy to be back in "civilization." The diary ends before the end of his journey, and so we are left to speculate how exactly the journey ended and the diary found its way to the caves of Dunhuang.

In conclusion, the diary of Hye Ch'o means much more for historians and teachers than the simple story it tells. The diary is a great frame for thinking about South and East Asia during the Middle Ages. It gives clues about the Arab advance into India and how far they progressed. Many of the locations he passes still have present day significance, and the events that he describes still have an effect on the people and national boundaries of today. Additionally, the journal shows that Korea should not be thought of as the hermit kingdom it is often ascribed. This is a current notion, and this diary among others helps to dispel the notion of Korea as simply inward looking.

The talk by Professor Riaz Khan, from the Global Studies Department at New York University discussed the migration and identity of South Asians in London. It drew broadly on the themes of violence, the representation of violence, and how these tie into global history as opposed to world history. It also discussed the historical experiences and identity of Sylheti workers in London.

The group of workers in question today would be thought of as Bangladeshi. Until 1947 Sylhet was a part of the Assam province in British India. After the partition, it was partitioned from Assam and included as a part of East Pakistan and now is a part of Bangladesh. Obviously, the historical identity of local residents has changed a lot over the last couple of centuries: Sylheti, then British Indians, then Pakistani, then Bangladeshi.

This group could be described more generally today as South Asians. Indians used to be the more general term, but this term now conflicts with national markers. Even the term Indians has not always had a specific meaning - thanks to Columbus's lack of geographic knowledge. There were East Indians as opposed to West Indians, Hindus as opposed to Red Indians, etc. Now, South Indians accommodates the more recent political divisions. However, neither political divisions nor geographic divisions would have made much sense during the period discussed.

Khan's talk raised the question of how Sylhetis thought of themselves both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Before 1947, Sylhetis were thought of as British subjects. They have been thought of since then in a multitude of ways. Those who left to go to London are thought of back home as British or Londoni. In Britain they might be thought of as British black, citizens of the commonwealth, or some other division. Therefore, it is difficult to view these people as continuous group. Their identity depends on both their experiences and the person describing that identity.

The issue of naming highlights a number of topical concerns about the ways to study history. Each of these identifiers arises at intersections of a wide range of political, geographical, historical concepts. Such identities are less descriptions or ontological markers and more concepts, tied to processes of becoming a collective. Additionally, they are often contested structured processes.

The narratives of the Sylheti are both old and new. Many have lengthy historical ties, but are relative new stories. Large-scale movements of Sylhetis to London did not begin until post WW-II. Most of the migrants were seamen, sailors. Lots of them were merchant sailors who turned in their sea jobs for factory positions during post war boom. Families joining this first wave of workers prompted a second wave of migration in the 1960s and '70s. The Sylheti population has continued to grow since 1950s - even in the face of violence and prejudice. Since 1971, these sailors turned workers and their neighborhoods are main site of Sylheti populations in Britain. Telling the story of the Sylheti migration and settlement relies on oral narratives of Sylheti seamen. Numerous narratives demonstrate the way they viewed themselves as British and hyphenated identities.

British political hegemony relied on navies and mercantile prowess. Until the end of the 19th century, world sea-born trade was synonymous with Britain. This trade was highly mercantile, but gave way to periods of openness. British trade also allowed both employment and mobility of its large colonial labor force. The story about the level of mobility and employment can primarily be told through politics. In 1651 and 1660, protectionist laws against the Dutch created the basis for mercantilism. These laws lasted until the 19th century. They defined what it meant to be British and restricted the employment of colonial subjects, especially on boats traveling to the United Kingdom. This ensured that boats with primarily English sailors came to United Kingdom, though allowed more leeway for routes in Asia/Africa.

The crews that traveled the Asian and African routes were composed highly of South Asians, known as Lascars. Lascar crews came mainly from Bombay and Calcutta (though included others) and ran routes all over Asia. The term lascar defined a category of labor, category of race, and a specific type of labor contract. Not surprisingly, wages of the lascars were far below European sailors and originally not many Lascars went on boats to Europe. Post-1793, as war broke out and European sailors deserted/were pressed into Royal Navy more lascars found their way onto European boats and into London. The reaction of the British public was immediate. Londoners disliked having them there and did not want to open the question of who was British, even if the sailors were technically British by colonial law. Domestic common law rejected their rights and limited the lascars to routes east of Cape of Good Hope.

An 1825 law confirmed this sentiment. Lascars were not considered British seamen when coming to United Kingdom though elsewhere they were full citizens.
Slowly but surely, these rules were relaxed. Soon only British costal trade was limited opening the door for more European routes. Merchants increasingly wanted to turn to cheap non-unionized colonial sailors. Lascars had previous contracts that prohibited union organizations and were therefore a cheap, docile labor force. In 1800s the merchant navy had a labor force of 200,000, 1/3 of which were colonials, primarily lascars. These colonial sailors were primarily hired for hard and dirty jobs, below decks or as firemen, primarily in hot regions of the world (tropics).

Even among the Lascar's regional patterns of employment emerged in 1800s. The crews contracted out of Bombay were mainly Pakistani. The Crews in Calcutta were highly Sylheti, and these Sylheti sailors worked below deck in the engine rooms. Their contracts lasted 2 years - though at the end of that time they often turned around and headed right back out.

The narrative of Mr. Wahab underlines this story. Sylhets like him left home because they were very poor and had no other options. They went to ports searching for work and hooked up with lascar crews. Then they traveled the world seeing "Hamburg, New York, London.. However, they would only see London, and could not stay.

Sylheti people found jobs on the ships because they followed other people. The tradition of becoming a lascar started well before they were born. Already by 19th century, pioneer sailors in Calcutta had developed communication and recruitment networks. Sylheti foremen gave jobs to Sylhetis on boats already filled with Sylheti sailors. These pathways and networks sent them all over the world and as they returned to villages, their stories and riches spurred more Sylhetis to follow in their footstep. Workers returned home with new clothes, money, and exotic tales that created excitement among young people.

By the end of the 19th century, entire families/villages were tied to such networks. The stories of the world spurred village imaginations. Little boys wanted to be like "father, grandfather, brothers" and travel across the seas to see the world. One narrative tells the story of boy who went to Calcutta 7 times before he was old enough to get on a ship. Another tells of a boy who pinched his mother's savings and ran away from home to get on a ship. The area in the heart of Sylhet was known as the "Seaman's zone" and nearly every family in certain regions had someone working on a ship.

Since the 18th century, Sylhetis had tried to switch from Asiatic articles (rules of contract) to European articles. Often these workers tried to jump ship in London to get better contracts or get jobs in London. The homes and businesses of these first ship-jumpers then became the same type of network going back and forth between sailors and their homeland. Originally the numbers were still small, but by early 19th century, they began to grow. Most followed a pattern of a brief stay before catching a ship back. A few stayed longer, marrying Irish or British working-class women and working. These settlers ran businesses frequented by workers and sailors. In turn, these contacts allowed more Sylhetis to stay.

One narrative tells of a sailor who found another Sylhet walking down the street and London and who gave him shelter and found him a job. The center of this network is a neighborhood known as Allgate; still the center of the Bangladeshi population in London (90% Sylheti). More Sylheti sailors found jobs in Jewish owned clothing stores in the East End or worked in small foreign shops. Quick-witted Sylhets were also able to use their foreignness as an advantage. A narrative tells the story of a man who got job with 600 girls by telling the employer it was against his religion to mess with girls, and the employer bought it.
The world wars spurred employment and increased the migration. Lots of people signed up to help with Merchant navy during wartime. Sadly, these sailors were primarily anonymous, and left off the roles when ships went down. Many families went down together, and one ship could take whole neighborhoods. Still, young men from the same neighborhoods continued to flood into Calcutta to help.

After the war, the partition of India disrupted the networks. The ports got cut off from the "Seaman's Zone" as parts of independent nation states. The loss of Calcutta from the Sylheti network was the key in breaking the chain. Sylhet not on the coastline, and was without a port, making it more amazing that this group became to predominate the lascar crews. The return of Sylheti sailors in droves was disastrous for their villages. They did not have jobs, but could not return to ships. Additionally, everyone returned home at once. The return also disrupted local networks that had developed in this zone (females had taken over a lot of roles in the region - matriarchal system of relationships).

Since many of the sailors had been in London before, they started looking for ways to return and began securing international passports. With the post-war boom, the ex-seamen started coming to Britain to work in factories. Neighbors and villages helped pay their air travel. The flow dramatically increased after passage of 1962 immigration act that set up a quota system in which large numbers of immigrants could work in factories. However, these workers continued their pattern of going back and forth from London to their home villages until further restrictions on movement were put into place.

In addition to the changing notion of Sylheti identity caused by their migratory patterns, the way in which British law has viewed the notion of British nationality/citizenship has changed dramatically over the past century.

In 1914, the British passed an act that attempted to harmonize relationships within its colonies called the Common British Nationality Act. At the same time that it harmonized relations, it allowed the continuation of local discrimination in white dominions. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, could restrict the entry of Asiatic people. Hence, this act did not translate into greater rights for colonial subjects. It created a system of open membership with a hierarchy of rights.

In 1948, the British passed a new nationality act. While it is often criticized, it was far ahead of its time and explores citizenship as a national concept. The act was put into place as the British Empire collapsed and it transitioned to a Commonwealth. All citizens of Commonwealth countries now had the right to enter reside, work, and run for parliament, in the United Kingdom. Inhabitants of colonies that were not yet independent had similar rights. The act continues to be infamous as opening the floodgates to immigration, though the reasons for movements (such as the Sylhetis) were probably much more economic. This act tried to take best elements of previous stages and had open membership with uniform rights. It also explodes many of the myths as citizenship as a national heritage.
At the other end, in 1981 Margaret Thatcher passed an act that viewed Britain no longer as an Empire or a Commonwealth, but as one nation. Britain was defined by a political, ethnic, and cultural composition. This act created a closed membership, but left uniform rights for all those who qualify. This last situation matches closely with the recent invention of the nation state, an entity that claims a long historical heritage, but only emerged post WW-II.

Finally, we turn again to Sylheti notions of citizenship, which draws on all of these stages. Identifications vary by individuals and shift over time. While migration is traditionally thought of as an outcome of rational individual decision-making, these experiences lay out a very different trajectory. We see long-standing cross continental paths that reject any sort of national or citizenship based explanation on migration. National histories drop out of many of the stories of the sea-based Sylheti migration.

Professor Khan closed by asking whether the recent turn to global history can provide any kind of a framework for these experiences. Global points us in the direction of space and seeing the world as a single history, a "spaceship earth". It also points to a shared and common destiny more than the term world history. There are many worlds. A "first world, second world, third world," but it would make little sense to similarly think of the global in terms of such divisions as "first globe, second globe and third globe." Global points to connections and interactions of people within shared processes. How can we recount to multiple paths of such a globe? It clearly is not enough to aggregate local histories. At same time, unifying principles, such as modernization, fail to capture the different trajectories of local experiences. Instead, Professor Khan choose to see a long line of ruptures and ruins along history, and in this context mentioned the usefulness of Walter Benjamin's notion of "brushing history against its grain" in order to recover some of these pasts. One must view historicism as a cultural treasure of the victors and must turn to the stories of the oppressed to get the full story. There is a danger of forgetting the past in favor of hegemonic narratives. Finding this multiplicity of past and the violence and ruin therein proves difficult.

The talk by Abhijeet Paul from the Center for South Asia Studies at U.C. Berkeley discussed textual narratives written by primarily British authors during the colonial period in India. Textual narratives are written to recreate the lives of other people, sometimes fiction, in a historical context and differ from simply archival documents or diaries. While there has been numerous work stemming from such archival documents in British colonial India, Paul noted that there is a lot more to be talked about in the context of individual histories beyond these sources. While there exists an abundance of colonial texts from the 19th to mid-20th century, much of this writing has never come into focus because of the primary types of authors (civil servants and their wives). Additionally, the rise of Indian nationalism means that there has been extensive research on the vernacular writing associated with the national movement, but less on the literature produced by the ruling class.

This talk concerns the expanding volume on Anglo-Indian literature, henceforth Raj fiction, which started mainly with civil servants coming from England to India, in an attempt to give the Anglo experience in India a more human face. This body of work is very under-studied considering its (120 years or so) and tends to be overshadowed by the vernacular writers fighting for independence. Rarely do we think about the administrators of India and their thoughts during this time period. However, not all of these people thought about colonialism or their experience in the same way and there is much to be learned from the variety of personal thoughts on the matter. While civil servants were trained to believe that they live in an "inferior" region, but this belief is not universal. This creates a tension between teaching and belief that emerges in interesting ways throughout the literature in different themes: historical, psychological, and social.

This literature has also been ignored for stylistic reasons. Most of this literature is based on the history as it was "handed down" to Indian civil servants and therefore exhibits a strong bias. Additionally, Raj fiction is not often celebrated for its literary merit, owing to both the subject matter and the diverse skill levels of the authors. However, civil servants (and their families - lots of wives also wrote diaries) tell narratives that show influence of physical location, legends, and tradition of writing and have historical significance: One example is the great number set in 1857, in the context of Indian mutiny, seen by many as turning point in Indian nationalism and resistance to colonialism.

Finally, much of Raj fiction is also overshadowed by a few "great" names that dominate the genre such as Foster, Orwell, or Kipling. In recent years, however, literary critics have begun to appreciate a wider range of authors such as Flora Annie Steel, Sarah Jeanette Duncanand, Leonard Woolf, the husband of author Virginia Woolf, who wrote Pearls and Swine based on Josef Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Talking about these names and their works, for both well-known and lesser known, shows authors writing in and trying to come to terms with an the unfamiliar landscape, both physical and cultural. The reader quickly gets a sense of how desperately out of place both the authors and their descriptions are in this strange land. While this has traditionally been a knock against these works, Paul argues that this is a very reason to study them and come to grips with the struggle therein. The "hybridization" of the genre, which is traditionally seen as biased, anti-historical, and overly aggrandized, contains themes that often have merit based around these exact problems. The search for a home in two cultures, natives masquerading in a white man's mask, the longing for the empire, all demonstrate the struggle and longing of the colonial administrators out of place in and land half a world away from their home.

Finally, if one looks at the micro-history of Raj fiction, it may be less exotic than commonly thought. While much of the writing shows activities that weren't traditional activities: tiger hunts, cricket, summer holiday, and grand balls, the details show another side of colonial life.

One example of this type of writing is "The head of the district" by Rudyard Kipling (1891). This story follows the appointment and experiences of a civil servant on India's northwest frontier (bordering Afghanistan in what is now Pakistan). The writing tries to deal both with administration and local life and the hardships contained therein. Kipling clearly addresses the theme of balance between longing for the empire and attempt to deal with problems in India and accept life there. The story also shows the multitude of conflicting local attitudes toward the British and the attitudes toward their fellow "Indians," which are far from a unified people. The central figure takes the form of a be-speckled, Oxford-bred Bengali administrator who struggles to deal with the local rowdy Batans. Kipling gives the idea that administration in India was like dealing with children, a father walking them through the steps, while giving a clear picture of the diversity of tribes and groups throughout the provinces.

The northwest people are skeptical of their new administrator from Bengal who speaks perfect English. This presents an ironic situation. While it is good for the central British administration to have someone who understands British society, he's a misfit for running local province. Additionally, the Bengali takes condescending view of locals while the locals see the Bengali administrator as "aping" the English. This is an interesting description and a strong indictment of the way in which the British appointed civil servants to various locales. All in all, Kipling provides an interesting tale coming to grips with the India that the British have inherited and must learn to deal with.

A second story in the genre is "The Reformers Life" by Flora Annie Steel, which addresses the plight of women in India. The situation is similar to that described by Kipling, but set in the context of social reform rather than administration. The story focuses on a Muslim man trying to work for the uplift of women in a small town in Punjab. The town is quite remote and lies beyond the reach of "barristers, patent shoes, and progress." While it may be a limited idiom, Steel's work describes a women wrestling with understanding the patterns of social interaction in these small towns. This work has just been published, a sign that people are slowly beginning to realize the importance of this fascinating genre.

The talk by Professor Alex Saragoza of the Department of History in the Ethnic Studies Department at U.C. Berkeley centered on how gender and race affected the development of post-colonial national identities in both Mexico and Cuba. The themes discussed are not simply points in time but continue to affect culture today. For example a great deal of modern Cuban music reflects the themes that we'll talk about today.

It included a number of key terms:

• Contact Zones: This refers to the intensity of the encounter of the colonial order on a particular place, region, site. In Mexico, the impact can be quite varied. The impact could be short and violent or long and muted depending on the location.
• Core Areas: In Mexico and Cuba, there emerged core areas tied to the economic importance of the colony. For Mexico this area was North-Central Mexico, location of major mines and site of mining strikes in mid-16th century. Adjacent to that area, was the core agricultural area (miners had to eat) that was made more important through its ties to the core area of mining. Additionally, Mexico City became the repository of the colonial wealth of both of these areas. The money earned was distributed in Mexico City and then passed on to Spain. In Cuba, the core area was Havana and the regions surrounding Havana. The importance of these regions is clearly reflected in their architecture and culture. You see much more of the Spanish colonial presence in core areas like than Mexico City than a peripheral spot like San Diego. This is the same in Havana versus the rest of Cuba. The huge plazas and enormous colonial buildings of the main towns you do not see 50 miles out of town.
• Intensity, depth: These refer to the both the contact zones and core areas and indicate the level a particular region experienced these phenomena.
• Place/space: Both place and space were highly important to the colonial system. For example, wealthy Spaniards had haciendas, but would rather stay in the city since it was a core area.

Our first encounter with gender and race occurs when we recognize that all four of these terms were gendered and tied into the complex social/racial hierarchy. When Cuba and Mexico became nations they had to decide what to be. However, this decision was not exercised in a vacuum. It followed a long period of colonial rule in which the Spaniards had attempted to create a social/racial hierarchy. The colonial system was not a dyadic system, rather there was an attempt to label by background genetics. This occurred in both Cuba and Mexico.

• Castas system (a racial hierarchical order based on the amount of Spanish blood an individual possessed -- not synonymous with Caste system of India)
• Spaniards
• Creoles (criollos): This group was wealthy and numerous but quite envious the Spaniards at the top of the system.
• Mestizos: Mixed races.
• Free Blacks: This group was much larger in Cuba than on any other Caribbean islands. Free Blacks constituted nearly 30% of Cuba's population at the peak of the colonial period (when there was the greatest boom in the sugar economy of Cuba).
• Slaves (bozales): Slave populations came in surges. The key period for slavery started in 1791 with the Haitian revolution. Haiti was once the largest producer of sugar in the world, producing more than every other Caribbean island combined, and the revolution caused a huge drop in sugar production. With the drop in Haitian sugar, Cuba took advantage and became a major source of sugar for world's sugar market. This became especially true after 1815 and the end of Napoleonic wars fueled by desire for tea that needed to be sugared. Between the 1820s and 1860s there existed a huge demand for labor in Cuba. Since the British were attempting to close down the slave trade, this labor had to come from other sources and included some 300,000 Chinese who came as volunteer workers to work in wretched conditions (for more on this topic, see Monkey Hunting, by Christina Garcia) and workers from other Caribbean islands.

In both places this hierarchy was gendered. Women played the key role in the dynamics involving how this social hierarchy worked and as previously mentioned, the contact zones and core areas were also gendered. When Cuba and Mexico became nations they had to decide what to be. One choice was to take Spanish colonial system, skim off the colonial cream and keep everything else the same. Alternatively, one can have a process of appropriation, taking what is needed or wanted and throwing out the rest. This occurred in many respects. For example, the national language of Mexico is Spanish, not the language of the Aztecs.

In terms of national identity, the key date for Mexico was the revolution of 1810-1821. The revolution created high levels of violence and casualties creating mental scars took years to heal. Cuba's revolution was much shorter making a somewhat easier transition. Both were fighting against history. Mexico was recovering from over 300 years of colonialism while Cuba, the last colony to gain its independence, had been a colony for over 400 years. Therefore creating a national identity in both places posed a huge challenge.

As for gender, there are five things that women do in a post-colonial environment that defines national identity and citizenship. In the same way, there is cultural citizenship. Who is going to be included within our national cultural identity? Once again, women played a key role in shaping cultural citizenship.

Women:

1. Women are the reproductive agents of the nation. This role became an important part of the new patrimony. Which women will we encourage to have more children and with whom? Do we outlaw certain groups from mixing? An example of this is in the Boer war when it was illegal for British women to mix with Dutch settlers.
2. Women reproduce the boundaries of national groups. A Mexican woman will not easily marry an American soldier after the Mexican American war.
3. Women transmit the national culture. What are the practices, cultures, customs, and foods that they will transfer? The common people's, the middle's, the top's? One example comes from a narrative by La Barca, which focuses on the hands and arms of people she meets. Why? These were a measure of status. Women teach this stuff to their children pass on their culture to the next generation.
4. Women signify national difference. Again, La Barca associates women with national difference ("The British do this, the French do this…". Women are an indicator for national patterns of behavior.
5. Lastly, women are participants in the national struggle for nationhood. In Mexico, there is a famous story of the woman who played the roll of Paul Revere. The "motherland" is a female term. Often there is a women in nation legend who carries the torch, the flag, or symbolic the struggle. Think of Marianne in France of The Statue of Liberty in the United States.

So, what was the role of women in Mexico and Cuba? These are questions that are not entirely answered in either place and continue to be questioned today. In Mexico, at nearly every bakery, you can receive a calendar with a picture of a woman on the cover. This woman is usually native looking, with a traditional blouse and pig-tails. This is one image the country wishes to portray, however, it is not the only image. Much of this conflict went on in the cities as centers of the economy.

Women were key players in a society where women were scarce. For a long time ratio was tilted in the favor of the women who were desirable. However, women were desirable for many different reasons. For free black women in Cuba, mobility meant who they married. This meant that they often turned down incoming slaves for mestizos, creoles, or Spaniards. To this day, this is still very important. When you marry somebody, you do not just marry a person, you marry into a family. It is important where they are from, what job they have, etc. These types of things were VERY important for groups in post-colonial society.

The importance of race played out in a number of ways.

1. Free blacks often supplied the houses of the rich. Given the nature of humans, this led to some interesting interactions. Color became a form of desire with those lower in the hierarchy attempting to capture those above them. Therefore, in the art of the time, how you paint Mexican women is very important. Painters to this day strive hard to capture the distinctive colors of women.

2. Sex was never about love in post-colonial societies. Sex always had the implication of power. For men, this played out in both directions. Either "I have the power to have a woman who looks that way", or "I have the power to have a wife who looks like this."

3. Resolution of these tensions: In Cuba, these tensions have not been resolved as of yet. Cubans are still bedeviled with the questions of color, love, and sex. The best jobs inflected by looks, color, and position based on gender and often times it means that women get put in certain jobs rather than men. Mexico is still defensive of this tension too. Mexicans feel they have to produce calendars to show what a Mexican women is. However, a recent controversy arose when a group of upper-class women wrote to TV stations questioning the use of predominantly blond, European looking women in commercials.

The construction of cultural citizenship can take a long period of time and is rarely resolved by political revolution and national political boundaries. It shows us something about the depth and the problematic of constructing a post-colonial society.

Panel: Southeast Asian Refugee Memoirs
(Summarized by Bartholomew