Life Story Links: November 14, 2023

“We must acquiesce to our experience and our gift to transform experience into meaning. You tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.”
—Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories

Vintage poster with original artwork by Alexander Dux promoting tourism, June 1939, produced by the Work Projects Administration; image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital Collection. The posters were designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia between 1936 to 1943.

Their stories, in print

A NEW LOOK AT KING WHO ABDICATED
A new bio of King Edward VIII weaves together his own writing, interviews, and diary entries from his original ghostwriter to form “an extraordinary new portrait of one of the most famous characters in modern royal history.”

AN ICON TELLS ALL
My Name Is Barbra, Ms. Streisand’s long-awaited (and rather enormous) autobiography, doesn’t have an index, but a writer for the NYT has teased out “the best bits.” Oh, and the audio book (read by the author) clocks in at a mere 48 hours.

What becomes of our memories

‘OBSESSIVE, DIARISTIC RUMINATION’
“But what I did understand then was that [reading her journals] was an incredible honor, perhaps even a trespass, which came with a responsibility.” Anne Liu Kellor on keeping (a giant chest full of) journals.

REMEMBER WHEN…?
Last week I offered up a few ideas for how to remember intentionally, rather than letting social media sites such as Facebook or the Photos app on your phone be your only source of “memories.”

IT’S IN THE TELLING
“I wanted to see what the local newspaper reported about my grandfather’s act of bravery in preventing a lynching.” How two versions of a family story sparked a writer’s quest for truth.

Personal history, public access

ACCESS TO AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
“What reduced me to tears was the fact that my great-great-grandmother had spent 60 cents on two “baker tins,” more than the payment she received for an entire day’s work.” How a researcher discovered some of her own history at the National Archives, and an introduction to a project to make Freedmen’s Bureau records available to the broader public.

UNSEALED AT LAST
Unopened love letters in Britain’s archives are “a treasure trove bearing intimate details about romance and daily life in mid-18th-century France.”

20 YEARS IN…
In this podcast episode, StoryCorps goes back to the organization’s early days, including the challenges of building a recording booth in Grand Central Terminal, and follows up with participants from the first-ever radio story they broadcast on NPR:

INTERACTIVE MAP OF MEDIEVAL MURDERS
“While historical records have increasingly been digitized, Ms. Swarthout said that online archives were not always easy to use...[but] tools like the murder map are a fresh way to synthesize large amounts of old information. ‘It’s just very fun to go through.’”