Patricia Iannaci always liked history and TV production — both her parents were teachers in those subjects — but she readily admits to never being the best student. But when she took an honors class at Bayonne (N.J.) High School during her junior year, everything changed. That class was about the Holocaust. The teacher, Gene Woods, would interview and record Holocaust survivors, and Iannaci was quickly fascinated not just by the subject, but by the very method of archiving these histories. Eventually, Woods, Iannaci and her father worked together to make a handful of documentaries to display at Bayonne City Hall each year. “All of them had really incredible stories,” she said. “I didn’t even know I wanted to do documentaries before then.” For full story click here.
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StoryCorps Thanksgiving
In the span of just three minutes, NPR broadcasts excerpts from often deeply personal and frank conversations, allowing listeners to get a feel for what moves their fellow Americans, otherwise perfect strangers. Started 12 years ago by Dave Isay, a radio reporter, the project recently launched its smartphone app, StoryCorps.me, in the hopes of making it easier for people to participate. For full story click here.
“When Silence Falls” Exhibition
When Silence Falls provides a voice for those who have been silenced. Encompassing painting, video and sculpture, the collection-based exhibition presents the work of contemporary Aboriginal artists alongside contemporary international artists. It considers the violence and loss of often-unacknowledged historical events––cultural displacement, political oppression, ethnic cleansing and massacres. For full story click here.
Robert French – LGBTI Activist
Robert French’s proudest moment as an LGBTI rights activist came after police raided and arrested 27 people at a sex club called Club 80 in Paddington, Sydney. The year was 1983, just one year before NSW decriminalised homosexuality. “Twenty-eight of us signed statutory declarations to say we had done the same things. Lex Watson and myself were the first two to present our declarations to the vice squad,” French said. “We said, ‘we’ve done the same things you’ve arrested these people for, arrest us’.” They weren’t arrested and French went on to help form Australia’s first police gay liaison group, based on the San Francisco model. For full story click here.
Schoolchildren interview their elders
High school students across the country (USA) are making oral history this week by recording interviews with their elders in an unprecedented effort to stockpile wisdom for the ages. The Great Thanksgiving Listen was conceived by leaders of the nonprofit oral history project StoryCorps. They're encouraging kids to send their audio recordings to a Library of Congress archive, using a free smartphone app available online at StoryCorps.me. StoryCorps president and found Dave Isay hoped to double, in one weekend, the 65,000 audio recordings StoryCorps has collected since 2003. Read full story and take the links to listen to the interviews here.
Oral history interview about Bill Clinton
Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s most trusted foreign policy adviser, died on Tuesday, December 2, at the age of 70 after a yearlong battle with cancer. Berger served for all eight years of the Clinton presidency at the National Security Council, in the first term as deputy national security advisor and in the second as national security advisor. His relationship with Clinton went back to George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, when he met a “dashing figure … in a white Colonel Sanders suit … full of life and joy,” who was Arkansas to the bone. Berger never wrote a memoir, but he did spend two days in March 2005 recording a confidential oral history about his experiences with Clinton for the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Read the interview here.
Charlie Chaplin oral history
Charlie Chaplin once said that all anyone needed to make a funny film was "a park, a policeman and a pretty girl". Chaplin failed to mention the "Tramp" costume that made him world famous. You can see one of the women — among four Chaplin married in the course of his 88 years — in a glistening, outsized black-and-white picture of Paulette Goddard with a stolen bunch of bananas from "Modern Times" in "The Chaplin Archives", a hefty book whose author calls it a "Blu-ray" high-definition tribute to the legendary comic actor and filmmaker. Produced by the specialist German-based publisher Taschen Books, this 560-page tome weighing 7 kg (15 lb) and roughly the dimensions of a small television set, can hardly be read in bed and overwhelms many cocktail tables. "What I wanted to do was make it an oral history, so it's actually Chaplin and his collaborators talking as you read the book, you're reading about the events of his life and how he made his films," Duncan told Reuters in an interview. For full story click here.
The Power of Oral History
The awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature to Belarusian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich is gratifying for, among other things, its recognition of non-fiction as an integral and dynamic sibling to literature. But the Literature Nobel has gone to non-literary genres before. For example, it was given to the Classical Greek and Latin scholar Mommsen in 1902 (the second year of the Prize), peace-activist and philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1950 and, rather more unfortunately, to imperialist historian and biographer Winston Churchill in 1953. But these remain exceptions. Even within literature, the committee has had to soothe the competing claims of various genres — poetry, the novel, drama and the short story. For full story click here.
West Australian Aboriginal Oral Histories
The Indigenous Community Stories (ICS) project has been running since 2008 and is on track to complete 83 films by April next year. But program manager Michelle Broun said they were aiming to do 100 stories altogether — they just need a final injection of funds to do it. For full story click here.
Oral History Review
The goal of this blog is to further promote the Oral History Review’s mission of advancing the understanding of oral history among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. In conjunction with the OHR, we provide digital space to those interested in presenting ideas, thoughts, conclusions, or arguments on the topic of oral history, and we promote these ideas through social media. While we primarily focus this effort on giving OHR authors additional room to discuss their scholarship, we also use our platform to promote the national Oral History Association’s efforts, and we encourage oral history-focused submissions from anyone anywhere. For more information including many links to articles, click here.