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11 books match the query 'Witnesses'

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Accusatory Practices

Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989

Edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately

University of Chicago Press, 1997

"Produced by religious intolerance, political fanaticism, or social resentment, denunciation is a modern democratic practice too long neglected by historians. This fascinating book, written by excellent specialists, establishes a first inventory of this practice, leading the reader through the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary cultures of the last two centuries."—Francois Furet

"This is a fascinating and highly original exploration of a familiar, though poorly understood, phenomenon of modern societies in general and totalitarian systems in particular. From the French Revolution to the NKVD, Gestapo, and Stasi, denunciation is analyzed both as a function of political surveillance and as deeply rooted in the social practices of community and the workplace. The book represents a refreshing amalgam of deeply archival research and theoretical rigor."—Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University

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Fictions of Evidence

Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages

Jamie K. Taylor

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

Throughout the Middle Ages, witnessing was a crucial way religious and legal “truths” were understood and produced. Religious and secular officials alike harnessed the power of testimony to assert doctrinal, political, or legal responsibilities. Swearing an oath, testifying in court, and signing a deposition were common ways to shape and discipline both devotional and legal communities. In Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages, Jamie K. Taylor traces depictions of witnessing in a wide range of late medieval texts and shows how witnessing practices formed and reformed, policed and challenged medieval communities.

Through close study of texts like the Man of Law’s Tale and Piers Plowman alongside sermon exempla, common law statutes, and pastoral treatises, Fictions of Evidence argues that vernacular literature was a vital site of criticism and dissent. It shows that devotional and legal witnessing practices offered medieval writers a distinct vocabulary they could use to expose how the ethical and legal obligations to one’s community were constructed. And since vernacular writers often challenged the ways ecclesiastical or secular authorities asserted community bonds, they found they could use those same witnessing practices and language to imagine extra-legal or extra-ecclesiastical communities that followed different ethical codes.

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Forensic Epidemiology

A Comprehensive Guide for Legal and Epidemiology Professionals

Sana Loue

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Sana Loue explores the concepts of legal and epidemiological causation, the use of epidemiological data based on populations to determine causation in an individual case, and the use of epidemiological evidence in litigation, including the reliance on experts and expert witnesses.

Loue provides a guide for the attorney with little or no background in epidemiological theory and for the epidemiologist contemplating a new role as an expert witness. She assumes of her readers a working knowledge of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence.

Discussing the epidemiologist as expert witness, Loue covers the nature of that testimony, the purpose of the testimony, and the qualifications necessary to be regarded as an expert witness. She examines various legal theories of causation, primarily in the context of product liability and toxic tort, and addresses epidemiological principles and methods used in the process of causal inference.

Loue also focuses on legal mechanisms used to assess causation. Her concern here is with depositions and testimony and the preparation of epidemiology experts. She concludes her study by comparing the legal and epidemiological concepts of causation, using actual legal cases as examples.

Throughout the text, Loue incorporates excerpts from depositions, interrogatories, and trial testimony to provide concrete examples. She also sets up an appendix to provide nonattorney readers with an overview of the legal system. Ultimately, her goal is to foster a greater understanding between law and epidemiology.

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Judging Justice

How Victim Witnesses Evaluate International Courts

James David Meernik and Kimi Lynn King

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Some injustices are so massive, so heinous, and so extraordinary that ordinary courts are no longer adequate. The creation of international courts and tribunals to confront major violations of human rights sought to bring justice to affected communities as well as to the entire world. Yet if justice is a righting of the imbalance between what has happened and what is reflected in the law, no amount of punishment and no judgment could compensate for that suffering and loss.

In order to understand the meaning of justice, James David Meernik and Kimi Lynn King studied the perspective of witnesses who have testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Using a unique survey, Meernik and King look at the identity of the victims and their perception of the fairness of ICTY. Because of the need to justify the practical and emotional difficulties involved in testifying before an international tribunal, witnesses look not just to the institution to judge its effectiveness, but also to their own contribution, by testifying effectively. The central elements of the theory Meernik and King develop—identity, fairness, and experience—transcend specific conflicts and specific countries and are of importance to people everywhere.

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No More Silence

An Oral History of the Assassination of President Kennedy

Larry A. Sneed

University of North Texas Press, 2002

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Nonhuman Witnessing

War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World

Michael Richardson

Duke University Press, 2024

In Nonhuman Witnessing Michael Richardson argues that a radical rethinking of what counts as witnessing is central to building frameworks for justice in an era of endless war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture. Dismantling the primacy and notion of traditional human-based forms of witnessing, Richardson shows how ecological, machinic, and algorithmic forms of witnessing can help us better understand contemporary crises. He examines the media-specificity of nonhuman witnessing across an array of sites, from nuclear testing on First Nations land and autonomous drone warfare to deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic investigative tools. Throughout, he illuminates the ethical and political implications of witnessing in an age of profound instability. By challenging readers to rethink their understanding of witnessing, testimony, and trauma in the context of interconnected crises, Richardson reveals the complex entanglements between witnessing and violence and the human and the nonhuman.

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Operation Defensive Shield

Witnesses to Israeli War Crimes

Edited by Muna Hamzeh and Todd June

Pluto Press, 2003

On March 29, 2002 the Israeli army launched Operation Defensive Shield, the largest military offensive against Palestinian civilians since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. During the operation, the military used the most advanced weaponry at its disposal: Merkava tanks, Apache attack helicopters and F-15 fighter jets. When the operation ended on April 21, Israel had destroyed the Palestinian economic and social infrastructure, leveled large swathes of residential area, killed 220 people, injured hundreds more and arrested thousands.

This book documents these events through a collection of electronic witness narratives written by Palestinians who were under attack and by Israeli and international peace activists who witnessed the results of these attacks. Deeply moving and courageous, these narratives offer a uniquely powerful and intimate account of the daily reality for Palestinians who endured Ariel Sharon's military strategy, and the death and destruction that strategy has caused throughout the Occupied Territories.

Most important, the witnesses' voices bring to life the aggressive nature of this strategy -- they belie the noble motives ascribed to Sharon and those in his government and military who designed and carried it out. The editors argue that Operation Defensive Shield is a prelude to Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. They provide historical context, a chronology, and an analysis of the conflict that situates the horror of these days in their proper perspective.

Operation Defensive Shield: Witnesses to Israeli War Crimes is an essential record for those who want to understand what happened in the West Bank in the spring of 2002, and what it portends for the future of the region.

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Petrograd, 1917

Witnesses to the Russian Revolution

John Pinfold

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2017

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution irrevocably changed the course of history, with consequences still being felt a century later. This book offers a dramatic depiction of the chaotic events of the revolution, drawn from selected firsthand accounts.

Assembling extracts from letters, journals, diaries, and memoirs from a remarkably diverse cast of both Russians and foreign nationals who were there when the revolution broke, Petrograd, 1917 is a strikingly close-up account of these world-shaking events. Each entry is supplemented with a short introductory note that sets it in context, and the book is rounded out with more than seventy illustrations, including photographs of the Romanovs and the violence in the streets as well as propaganda posters, postcards to loved ones, and more. In these pages, the drama and terror of those days comes to life once more, a century on.

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The Man Who Sleeps in My Office

Jason Sommer

University of Chicago Press, 2004

With grace and style, Jason Sommer considers how to live in the wake of history among those who are indelibly marked by it. On the surface a book of poems composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, The Man Who Sleeps in My Office offers more than a poetic chronicle of suffering and loss. Instead, Sommer—the son of a survivor—has discovered a delicate balance that allows him to be in and of history without succumbing to it. In these works, both the seen and the unseen—the failed or rejected vision—alter the seer, as the limit of one thing becomes the verge of something else. Whether about the Holocaust, the dog he'll never own, or love between a husband and wife or parent and child, these poems savor the mysterious instant when alternatives of vision unfold. While these moments may also conjure loss, the losses are made good, as when, in "Legion," someone forgets why he has walked into a room but salvages from the lapse not the purpose of the errand but a sense of the ultimate worth of a life. These finely crafted narrative poems tell the story of these unanticipated perceptions, when the ordinary opens to the very human story of failed understanding and quiet epiphany.

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Witnesses to Beatitude

Seven Romanian Greek Catholic Bishops Under Communism

Francisca Băltăceanu

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

Veteran authors Francisca Băltăceanu and Monica Broşteanu render extensive archival research into a readable, stand-alone volume about seven key figures in the outlawed Romanian Greek Catholic Church. Prefaced by the Greek Catholic bishop of Bucharest, the book synthesizes indispensable background information for reading the story of these twentieth-century church leaders from Transylvania where in 1700 an agreement of union was reached between the Romanian Orthodox leadership and the Catholic Church in Rome, forming the Romanian Church United to Rome, Greek Catholic. In 1948 the Soviet-imposed government in Romania determined that the Romanian Greek Catholic Church no longer existed and detained its bishops: Vasile Aftenie, Valeriu Traian Frenţiu, Ioan Suciu, Ioan Bălan, Alexandru Rusu, and Iuliu Hossu. At the same time, it detained numerous priests including Tit Liviu Chinezu who was secretly consecrated bishop at the request of the papal nuncio. I>Witnesses to Beatitude traces the bishops’ various origins and the extensive pressures put on them to cut their ties with the Vatican. For creatively resisting these pressures the seven men were put in the infamous Sighet prison and under house arrest where in 1969 Iuliu Hossu, the last to survive, was made a cardinal in pectore by Pope Paul VI. The book garnered a large bipartisan Catholic and Orthodox readership in Romania where it was a bestseller at the 2019 Bookfest. Drawing from the casefile submitted to the Holy See to recognize the martyrdom of the seven bishops who were beatified in June 2019, the book documents how the Communist government conducted a fierce campaign to ban the Greek Catholic Church and made the Orthodox leadership look responsible. The book includes oral testimonies suggesting the life force and humor that brought the bishops through the storm. It also contains the full bibliography of the casefile and an introduction and updated bibliography for English-language readers.

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Witnesses to the Struggle

Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement

Anne Loftis

University of Nevada Press, 2014

In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Loftis examines the artists who put a human face on the farmworkers’ plight in California during the Great Depression, focusing on writer John Steinbeck, photographer Dorothea Lange, sociologist and author Paul Taylor, and journalist Carey McWilliams. Loftis probes the interplay between journalism and art in the 1930s, when both academics and artists felt an urgent need to be relevant in the face of enormous misery. The power of their work grew out of their personal involvement in both the labor struggles and the hardships endured by workers and their families. Steinbeck, Lange, and the other artists and intellectuals in their circles created the public images of their times. Works such as The Grapes of Wrath or Lange’s Migrant Mother actually helped mold public opinion and form government policies. Even today these works remain icons in our shared perception of that era. Loftis helps us understand why this art still seems the truest representation of those desperate times, three-quarters of a century later.

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