Emmanuel Ringelblum, trained as a social historian in Warsaw in the 1930s
Peter N. Miller: "[W]hen forced into the Warsaw ghetto, Ringelblum was ready. The famous research project he organized there, the Oyneg Shabes Archive, was an early, and surely the most amazing attempt ever, at Alltagsgeschichte. It aimed to collect artifacts and experiences that would document the contemporary life of the Jews under occupation and, later, death sentence. The tram tickets, restaurant menus, doorbell buzzers, children’s theater programs, photographs, field reports, essays, and poems were all collected, and then buried for posterity. This was a vision of material culture as life itself. It also speaks to a vision of eternity very different from that of the pharaohs or Mesopotamian kings—this is not about just one man, nor about old stones that cannot be deciphered, but of people as they lived. No more serious argument for its value can be made."