A Patchwork of Internment

By Bernice Archer [1] | Published in History Today [2] Volume: 47 Issue: 7 [3] 1997 [4]

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Bernice Archer opens our new series with an account of the intriguing hidden messages stitched into Red Cross quilts by British women POWs of the Japanese.

One of the most fruitful areas of new historical research in recent years has been oral history - capturing the testimony and interpretations of those who have lived through the twentieth century and showing how those accounts both model and are modelled by the view that we have of that history. At the same time historians have rediscovered more generally the power of narrative to bring their subject vividly to a wide audience and buttress its interpretation.

With this new series, History and Memory, we are endeavouring to combine the two and bring to our readers the work of historians from around the world by presenting some of their most exciting research in a broad History Today format. We begin with an intriguing cross-disciplinary example from the Second World War - Bernice Archer's account of the secret messages and symbols stitched into Red Cross quilts by British women POWs in Japanese camps, and what they tell us of identity and aspirations under duress.

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