A People's History of the Hmong

Built from more than two hundred interviews recorded for the Hmong Oral History Project between 2002 and 2009, which is what distinguishes it from every other general history on this shelf. Hillmer organizes the testimony rather than paraphrasing it, so the book moves through China, Laos, the Secret War, the camps and Minnesota in the voices of the people who were there. Where accounts of the same events differ, they are allowed to differ. That makes it slower going than a conventional narrative history and considerably more trustworthy on anything within living memory. Hillmer is a historian at Concordia who spent the better part of a decade on the interviews. Read it against Quincy's Hmong, History of a People, which covers similar ground from the archives instead. Several of the full interviews remain available through the project. For general readers, students, and families tracing their own history.