This is a past event
The Annual General Meeting of the Friends, followed by a free talk by Professor Marjory Harper
The AGM meeting for Friends members will take place 7-7:30pm, and be followed at 7:30 by a talk from Professor Harper to which members of the public are welcome.
At the heart of the Scottish diaspora is a multi-hued human story that is best told in the words of the individuals who constituted it. While the policies of governments, sponsors and employers may have formed the organisational backdrop against which decisions were reached and implemented, official records often track only numbers and procedures, offering few insights into the real people who inhabited the statistics.
Until the mid-twentieth century emigrant testimony was confined largely to letters and diaries, but in recent decades oral evidence has become a key tool in the modern historian’s trade. This paper uses personal testimony from Scottish emigrants and sojourners to highlight various themes from their own experiences: motives, recruitment practices, transitions, rhetoric and reality, return, and identity.
It draws on a collection of over 70 interviews that I have conducted since 2005, part of an ongoing databank which is currently being processed, preparatory to its deposit in the Sir Duncan Rice Library.
- Speaker
- Professor Marjory Harper
- Hosted by
- The Friends of Aberdeen University Library
- Venue
- Lower Ground Floor Seminar Room, Special Collections Centre, The Sir Duncan Rice Library
- Contact
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To book a place please contact FAUL Honorary secretary Emma Fowlie
e.fowlie@abdn.ac.uk
01224 273385