The unique story of Martha Raye and her military experience.

Memories of Maggie brings together personal reminiscenes and anecdotes from those who experienced close encounters with the Iron Lady, including Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson, Kenneth Baker, George Bush, Helmut Kohl, John Gummer and William Hague.

The author tells about his and his family's experiences as Japanese American internees at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming from 1942 to the end of World War II. During that time, he made friends with a magpie whom he named Maggie.

A beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison—the only one she ever wrote—about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable at the time, they lose touch as they grow older, only to find each other later at a diner, then at a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and in disagreement each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Written in 1980 and anthologized in a number of collections, this is the first time Recitatif is being published as a stand-alone hardcover. In the story, Twyla’s and Roberta’s races remain ambiguous. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? Morrison herself described this story as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” Recitatif is a remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and about how perceptions are made tangible by reality.

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.3, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: “On all of its levels, memory is defined by an intricate interaction between remembering and forgetting. ”This statement certainly includes the term “race”, a term that has, for a long time, been very present in American history and is still of high importance today. Toni Morrison deals to a great extent with this term in her writings, for example her only short story "Recitatif", where two girls of different races witness a beating incident in the orphanage “St. Bonny's” they live in and who, in the course of the story, revisit their memories of the incident several times. In the 20th century, many analyses of "Recitatif" therefore focused on putting racial markers on the two protagonists, showing how Morrison wants to make her readers aware of their own racial stereotypes. This approach is justified and certainly reveals much of Morrison's intention as the author, but I suggest that the story does not merely deal with racial markers. Hence, this paper will focus on a character that has often been left out: Maggie, the kitchen worker of St. Bonny's. Androne, Stanley and Benjamin are major voices in a small body of Recitatif scholarship that centre on Maggie: Androne offered a ground breaking study focusing on maternal figures, whereas Stanley analyses the story in the light of disability studies. Thus, it will be shown that Maggie has several functions in the text that add to the meaning of the text as well as the understanding for the reader. This paper will investigate "Recitatif" in the light of the concepts of memory and history. I claim that through the character of Maggie, readers can better understand the memory and history of the term “race” in American history. It will be shown how the returning and dividing memories of the incident with Maggie challenge Twyla and Roberta to not accept their memory as complete. Furthermore, it will be shown that Maggie's interstitial narrative provides, at least to a certain extent, answers to the implied question driving Recitatif: if memory is so unstable, how can whites and blacks ever communicate effectively about the history they share?