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14. Anarchive, Oral Histories, and Teaching Comparative Cold War Childhoods Across Geographies and Generations

Chapter of: (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War(pp. 329–348)

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Metadata
Title14. Anarchive, Oral Histories, and Teaching Comparative Cold War Childhoods Across Geographies and Generations
ContributorElena Jackson Albarrán(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0383.14
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0383/chapters/10.11647/obp.0383.14
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightElena Jackson Albarrán
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-04-22
Long abstractChildhood is a normalising phase of life. Each individual’s subjective experience becomes the baseline for establishing a worldview and evaluating differences encountered in others. Yet scholars of childhood have demonstrated that formative years are often informed by political, cultural, and social trends. During the Cold War, citizen and identity formation at the hands of state and media influences was particularly strident. This chapter provides a practical application of childhood studies scholarship to undergraduate education in the context of a semester-long project assigned in an undergraduate history course at a Western university. Oral history projects that connect textbook narratives with the memories of living family and community members help to dismantle the East-West divide, generate empathy, and promote self-reflection of the students as agents of their own historical moment.
Page rangepp. 329–348
Print length20 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Elena Jackson Albarrán

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8321-6661

Elena Jackson Albarrán is a Cold War kid who grew up in the West, and as a historian of childhood, has begun to see her own life as part of a historical era, informed by the structures, policies, news cycles, and cultural values of the time. Through her work with the collective biography project, she has found ways to bring Cold War history to life through oral history projects with her undergraduate college students at Miami University, Ohio, United States. She is author of Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Nebraska 2015), among other articles and chapters. She teaches Comparative Cold War Childhoods and World History since 1945, when she is not teaching Latin American Studies courses. Her latest book Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas is forthcoming from Brill.

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