“One of the truly unsung heroes of the Apollo program has passed away at age 95. Donald D. Arabian, Chief of the Apollo Test Division, headed the Mission Evaluation Room (MER), which was responsible for solving in-flight problems during the Apollo missions to the Moon. His nickname was “Mad Don,” and anyone who had the privilege of meeting him or working with him described Arabian as “one of a kind,” “colorful,” and “completely and totally unforgettable.” But in the book “Apollo: Race to the Moon” authors Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox designated Arabian as one of four people responsible for the success of the Apollo Program.” Read full story with link to oral histories here.
Blog
Partition and Virtual Reality
“Rabin Sengupta is one among the fourteen million people displaced in Punjab and Bengal during the partition of 1947. At the stroke of midnight on 14th August 1947, India would see itself divided along the Radcliffe line. And communal riots would push fourteen million to uproot their entire lives almost overnight and head for bleak futures in the newly created countries in what’s now known as the largest mass migration in human history. After seven decades, many of them are getting a chance to get a glimpse of their ancestral lands once again, thanks to a virtual reality project by a team of tech and history enthusiasts from Oxford University. Here’s the story of Project Dastaan, and of people yearning to go back home.” Read full story here
Creator of first digital photo dies
“Russell Kirsch, the inventor of the pixel and the first person to create a digital photograph, died Tuesday at his home in Portland, Oregon, according to a report from the Washington Post. Kirsch was 91 years old.” Read full story with link to his oral history interview here.
Japanese Peruvians Kidnapped during World War II
“The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) came out with a verdict on Aug. 4 that ruled in favor of Isamu Carlos “Art” Shibayama and the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project (JPOHP). The IACHR is an independent agency within the OAS, and its main mission is to promote the observance and protection of human rights in the American hemisphere. Because the IACHR has a huge backlog of cases, the ruling came 17 years after the Shibayama brothers — Art, Kenichi and Takeshi — and JPOHP filed a petition with the IACHR on June 10, 2003, and three years after Art Shibayama and Grace Shimizu with JPOHP testified before the IACHR in Washington D.C. Art Shibayama has since passed away and his brothers are in frail health.” This little known history is told here with a link to the oral history website.
Family History Month at Goulburn
“August is Family History Month at the Goulburn Mulwaree Library. You can head to the library for an author talk, to use maps for family history research, and access digital photos this month. The Local Studies Team has released the story of Alphonso Karbehl’s as part of the Oral History project.” Read full story here.
History of Indonesia during 1960s War
“A book that interrogates a turbulent period in Indonesia’s history and authored by a Charles Darwin University scholar was recently awarded by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA). Senior Lecturer in Indonesian Studies Dr Vannessa Hearman was acclaimed by the ASAA with its inaugural Early Career Book Prize for “Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia”.” Read full article about Dr Hearman’s book here.
Studs Terkel and Hard Times
“Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression turned 50 this year. A bestseller in 1970, the book was one of nearly two dozen written by the cheerfully empathetic historian and journalist Studs Terkel.” There are many similarities to current times. Read article and listen to Studs interviewing people about the Great Depression here.
Photojournalist Matt Herron Dies
“Matt Herron a photojournalist who vividly memorialized the most portentous and promising moments from the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement in the Deep South, died on Aug. 7 when a glider he was piloting crashed in Northern California. He was 89. A child of the Depression and a protégé of the Dust Bowl documentarian Dorothea Lange, Mr. Herron assembled a team of photographers to capture the clashes between white Southerners and Black protesters, aided by their white Freedom Rider allies, as they sought to claim the rights they had been legally granted a century before.” Read full story and watch video link to his oral history interview here.
American Indian Oral History Project
“Victoria Canby, interim director of the Museum of the American Indian in Novato, said she is sad that her son will never hear his grandmother’s firsthand accounts of the triumphs and tribulations of her Native American lineage. ” Read full story here.
Former Aboriginal stockman tells his story
“Harry ‘Bunda’ Darlow was a retired Aboriginal stockman and Ray Humphrys a farmer, journalist and budding historian. Both lived around Dalby, 200 kilometres west of Brisbane.” Humphrys interviewed Darlow in 1971. Read the full story and listen to an interview excerpt here.