Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters

Social history contests the construction of the past as the story of elites—a grand narrative dedicated to the actions of those in power. Our Lives seeks instead to make available voices from the past that might otherwise remain unheard. By foregrounding the experience of ordinary individuals, the series aims to demonstrate that history is ultimately the story of our lives, lives constituted in part by our response to the issues and events of the era into which we are born. Many of the voices in the series thus speak in the context of political and social events of the sort about which historians have traditionally written. What they have to say fills in the details, creating a richly varied portrait that celebrates the concrete, allowing broader historical settings to emerge between the lines. The series invites materials that are engagingly written and that contribute in some way to our understanding of the relationship between the individual and the collective. Manuscripts that include an introduction or epilogue that contextualizes the primary materials and reflects on their significance will be preferred.

Series Titles

Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery

Helen Waldstein Wilkes

Man Proposes, God Disposes: Recollections of a French Pioneer

Pierre Maturié, translated by Vivien Bosley

Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch

Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly

Mission Life in Cree-Ojibwe Country: Memories of a Mother and Son

Elizabeth Bingham Young and E. Ryerson Young, edited and with introductions by Jennifer S.H. Brown

Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun

Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné and Paul Jackson

The Teacher and the Superintendent: Native Schooling in the Alaskan Interior, 1904–1918

Compiled and annotated by George E. Boulter II and Barbara Grigor-Taylor

Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile

Farideh Goldin

My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell Arthur Bear Chief

The Wolves at My Shadow: The Story of Ingelore Rothschild

Ingelore Rothschild, edited by Darilyn Stahl Listort and Dennis Listort

Amma’s Daughters: A Memoir

Meenal Shrivastava