Author: ohadmin

The UW-Milwaukee Archives Department has added a transgender-focused research piece to the LGBT collection. The Milwaukee Transgender Oral History Project is one of the first transgendered history projects completed in the area. Brice Smith completed the project for the archives department of the library.  Smith was asked by the UWM Archives Department to complete the transgender project to supplement research already completed on the LGBT community. For full story, click here.

The descendants of the large landowning Irish and Anglo-Irish families of the great houses have told their stories in an oral history project  launched at the National Library.  The “Great Houses of Ireland,” an oral history collection, comprises interviews with more than 100 members of prominent Irish and Anglo-Irish families conducted over three years by historians Maurice and Jane O’Keeffe of Tralee.  For full story, click here.

“People from both sides behaved like beasts,” says Sarjit Singh Chowdhary, a retired brigadier, offering an indisputable overview of the events in Punjab during the year that India was partitioned.  His testimony is among the innumerable first-person accounts that comprise the core of Ishtiaq Ahmed’s meticulously researched thesis on the direst events of 1947, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Oxford University Press). Essentially an invaluable oral history of events in the Punjab during that decisive year, it serves as an overarching cautionary tale. For full story click here.

Approximately 50 people turned out to hear and share tales of attending some of Ledyard’s one-room schoolhouses that were scattered around town until 1948 when all the districts were consolidated.  Attendees shared memories of going to school extra early to start the fire and fetch drinking water and people remembered how teachers separated the girls from boys on the playground.  For full story click here.

Thirty-five years ago, a band of volunteers at Ambleside Library formed Ambleside Oral History Group, to interview older people talking about their lives. Innovation and technology was changing Lakeland life so rapidly, the group thought it was important to capture living memories of the past which might otherwise be forgotten with the passing of the older generation. For full story click here.

Stephen Brier, professor of urban education and senior academic technology officer at The City University of New York, spoke at Lehigh on Thursday, April 5, about his personal experience with digital storytelling by connecting it to his work with oral history. Brier described himself as a “premature digital storyteller,” mainly because most of his work has dealt with the usage of oral history. “I’ve spent more than 35 years of my professional life committed to making the history of ordinary people accessible,” he said. For full story click here.

In 2001, when Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard co-founded the ACT UP Oral History Project, ACT UP was largely erased from public memory. It lived in the hearts and minds of those who had fought the AIDS epidemic, but there was no easily available information, no renewed public discussion of the achievements of the AIDS activist movement. In an attempt to redress that loss, we have interviewed 128 surviving members of ACT UP and made the transcripts and video clips from those interviews available on our website, actuporalhistory.org. For full story and links, click here.

Margaret Hiza Redsteer is a geologist of Native American descent who lives in the Navajo Nation, a native American reservation in the state of Arizona.  She is known in geologist circles for her pioneering weather, soil and land surveys of Navajo Nation and now it seems she is turning her focus to mapping the effects of climate change.  What is so unique about this project is that she is using oral history and memories to compliment the hard science.  High Country News has a fascinating interview with Redsteer about her project. To read more and find links to interviews, click here.

The Goulburn Regional Conservatorium opened its doors on Wednesday night and invited the community to come in and see what it is they really do.  Paul Scott-Williams said Rock Con would help serve as an oral history of the facility. “I think it is really important in an institution like this to start to develop a library of work that is being created and performed,” he said. “I think the saddest thing for me is when a kid gets up and gives a great performance and there is no lasting record of that. So the aim has always been to begin to create a library an oral history of this place, marking from this point on into the future, so that we can track the kinds of things that happen and you never know, we might end up recording a kid in their earliest performance who goes onto become an international star, who knows, and we will have that recording of them when they were five playing three blind mice in their concert,” he laughed. For full story click here.

Local history is one of the most popular forms of history in Australia. Yet there is a yawning gap between the enthusiastic amateur and the academic historian. While some academic historians engage with local history, sadly there is an entrenched snobbery from the academy. From the other side, the enthusiastic amateur is too wound up with a parochial approach to local history and often doesn’t see the bigger picture. If both sides can engage with each other, the result would be a better type of history practise and a greater contribution to the story of Australia. For full story click here.