Author: ohadmin

In November 2004, Nona Panova was being interviewed by a researcher from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, working  on an oral history project about private life in the Stalin era.  Nona, a 75-year-old woman whose father had been arrested during the purges of the 1930s, had been talking for several hours about her upbringing in St. Petersburg and her family when she saw the tape recorder with its microphone and panicked.  Read full story here.

A growing and aging collection of books, manuscripts, photographs and other materials related to the history of San Juan Bautista have increased the need for digital preservation of the artifacts.  That prompted volunteer Ken Halla and other members of the town’s Historical Society to begin The Digital San Juan Bautista Project, designed to use modern technology to save the written and oral history of the town for future generations.  For full story click here.

There’s a new middle and high school resource just in time for LGBT History Month that’s designed to help educators integrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, people, and issues into their instructional programs. Unheard Voices, created in collaboration with the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, the Anti-Defamation League, and StoryCorps, includes five lesson plans built around brief audio interviews with nine people who witnessed or helped shape LGBT history in some way.  For full story click here.

If you have read The Help or seen the movie, you will find this interesting – “You’re the real Miss Skeeter!” people often exclaim when they meet Susan Tucker. Not well-known outside African-American or women’s studies, Tucker assembled, in the late 1970s, an important collection of oral history narratives about black domestic workers in the segregated South, which preceded and later contributed to “The Help.”  Interestingly, Tucker’s personal history closely resembles that of Skeeter Phelan, a central character in Kathryn Stockett’s novel. Tucker began working on her book at age 29.  The experience of researching and writing “Telling Memories Among Southern Women” established Tucker’s life’s work. In 1985, she became a fellow at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women. She is currently the archivist at the Newcomb College Institute.  For full story click here.

“The Cyprus Oral History and Living Memory Project” brings together a team of qualitative researchers from Cyprus and abroad, including oral history expert research Dr William Ayers, and led by Frederick University’s Nicoletta Christodoulou.  Christodoulou said yesterday: “The general purpose of the project was to record in notes and photographs and sketches, on audio and video, the voices and words of the people of Cyprus themselves -folks from every community – to capture their memories from the events of 1974…as an approach to teaching about the conflict and promoting reconciliation and peace education.” For full story click here.

The Australian Generations project has begun recording 300 life stories across the nation – not from the elite or the powerful but from everyday people born between the 1920s and 1980s. The stories would be stored forever in the National Library’s digital archive and used in an ABC Radio National history series – and it was the basis for a unique study of generational memory.  For the full story click here.  Also for the story of Radio National’s involvement click here.

Capturing the stories of elderly residents is the idea behind a new project recently launched at BCS Maranoa in Alstonville.  Interactive Life Stories is an oral history project conducted by Sharon Dean, a journalist with a PhD in writing from Griffith University.  The purpose of her program is to empower residents to share their stories with staff, their families and each other.  For full story, click here.

The Rona Tranby Trust, a project linking Jewish and Aboriginal communities, has celebrated the 20th anniversary of its work archiving oral Aboriginal history.  Following the deaths of Jewish immigrants Tom and Eva Rona  in a car accident near Taree in 1987, solicitor Roland Gridiger found himself in search of a project for the betterment of the Aboriginal community as set down in the deceased couple’s will.  The Ronas, Holocaust survivors, had been social activists who wanted to make a connection between the two communities.  Read full story here.

The intriguing history of Aboriginal people who worked in central Australia’s cattle industry is being brought to life by trainee radio broadcasters.  Read full story here.

Even if the term grunge makes you cringe you’ll love Mark Yarm’s 550-plus pages of good rock-’n’-roll storytelling called Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge.  This book shows oral history can be used for modern themes and is published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s debut Ten—two great albums that forever changed rock music. The article reviews the book and also examines the history and merits of using oral history. Read the full article here.