When Julian Bond and Phyllis Leffler began their oral history project on black leadership, many of the people they interviewed said, “Well, where are the black leaders? King is gone and no one has come to take his shoes.” Read article and watch video here.
Tag: oral history
The Manhattan Project
During World War II, Phil Gardner traveled more than 100,000 miles to recruit workers for the secret project at Hanford, having not the slightest idea what was being built there. He and other recruiters scattered across the nation would get Western Union telegrams at the start of the week from Pasco forecasting the new labor requirements at Hanford, a key site in the U.S. effort to produce an atomic bomb before Germany developed one. For full story, click here. There is also a link to the website here.
Christmas conversations
David Isay from StoryCorps has some suggestions to get the conversation going and learn more about your relatives. Click here for full story.
Fishing Tales from Maine
The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association has preserved some of those fish tales through its Oral History Initiative, a multimedia presentation opening Wednesday at Harpswell Heritage Land Trust. Read the full article with links to videos here.
Memory & History by Bridget Brereton
"The outbreak of World War 1—the events of July and August 1914—is being commemorated in this centenary year, and for the next four years, there will be events marking the various episodes in this terrible conflict. But the history of the war can now only be written from written sources." To read the full article which argues for the importance of oral history, click here.
Alzheimer’s and Oral History
Alex Kingsbury writes – Long before my grandmother lost all her memories, she told me one of her earliest. “My grandfather liked to watch French movies, and he would take me along when I was a very young child,” she told me. “To babysit me, I suppose. I couldn’t understand the words, but I loved to sit there and watch the pictures.”
These were family stories that no one had heard when she told them a decade ago, and it was a good thing she shared them when she did. She was always the family historian, a duty that she relinquished to me over time. Not long after she passed along her collection of documents from many generations of relatives, she let me make some audio recordings of her own memories. Read full story here.
Holographic Oral History
Pinchas Gutter sits in a red chair surrounded by bright green fabric under the glare of several thousand LED lights, 53 cameras capturing his every move. This is the world's first ever full-life history captured in true 3-D. As I interview him, I perch on a stool 8 feet away at 90 degrees to Pinchas. We can see each other through a mirror angled at 45 degrees. I have 400 questions in front of me as we settle in for five days of intensive interview. This is not the fireside chat in the comfort of the interviewee's home. We are joined in the studio by a host of graphic and natural language scientists, multiple interviewers and producers frantically scribbling notes. Oral history just changed irreversibly. Read this interesting article in full here.
School students do oral history
A recent oral history project became more than just another school assignment for a seventh grade class at Readington Middle School. It evolved into an opportunity to forge new relationships while learning other people’s life stories. At their first meeting on Oct. 29, each educator was paired with a group of three to five students with whom they would work over the course of the assignment. During this initial session, the students interviewed the educators, asking about their childhood days, their education and preparation to become teachers, memories of their teachings days, and insights as to how schools have changed since their tenure in the classroom. For full story click here. This is an example of what can be done in the classroom to further oral history.
Oral History in the Digital Age
In this podcast Ken Woodard discusses teaching oral history in the digital age. Click here for full article and listen to the podcast.
Samuel Proctor Oral History Project (USA)
Paul Ortiz is one of those rare individuals who has managed to merge his vocation and his avocation. As director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at University of Florida since 2008, he and his team of about 50 students gather interviews with individuals ranging from migrant farmworkers to war veterans. “Our charge is really to try to document living history as much as possible,” Ortiz said. “We’re constantly interviewing people from different walks of life.” For full story click here.