The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue Book

History, we are often taught, is driven by vast social, political, and economic forces. But each political event, eachwar, each clash in the streets or at the picket lines, is experienced by individuals. It is this profound bond between public history and personal struggle, Alessandro Portelli contends, that gives oral history its significance and its power. In The Battle of Valle Giuliathe title comes from an Italian student protest of the 1960sPortelli reflects on how to connect personal memories with history, how to fittingly collect and represent the complexity of memory. Crossing cultures, classes, and generations, he records the private and singular experiences of Italian steelworkers and Kentucky coal miners, veterans and refugees of World War II, soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Italian resistance fighters and Nazis, and members of student movements from Berkeley to Rome. By listening to those whom others presume are "without historical memory"such as youthful protesters, or the rural Tuscan women who saw every father, son, and brother killed by Nazi soldiersPortelli clarifies the process by which narratives come into being as oral history, and he illustrates the differences and distances between story-telling and history-telling. Portelli's articulate discussion of dialogue, representation, narrative and genre link historical analysis with literary and linguistic theory and with the concerns of contemporary anthropology. Superb. These are wholly sophisticated essays, engaging the deepest questions from a position of full familiarity with the current theoretical literature. And yet they are marvelously accessible and readable, because of Portellis clear, personally grounded, humane, candid, and limitlessly curious intelligence.Michael Frisch, author of A Shared Authority "Brilliant, thought-provoking, highly original."Ronald J. Grele, author of Envelopes of Sound Read More