People talk a lot about Brooklyn changing, but to understand what the change is, one must understand what it’s changing from. To that end, the Brooklyn Public Library has undertaken over the past year an oral history project called Our Streets, Our Stories, whose audio files are shared on a Tumblr and on SoundCloud. The participants in Our Streets, Our Stories are senior Brooklynites who share their memories of what their neighborhood was like growing up, or when they moved here, or how it’s changed over the years. Click for more and listen to interviews here.
Blog
Podcasts of abortion stories
The Abortion Diary is the intersection of self-expression, healing, and the art of story-sharing and story-listening. We are dedicated to creating a space for people to share stories they haven’t been able to share and listen to stories they haven’t been able to hear. See more here.
NZ Projects receive funding
Diverse stories of New Zealand history, including sheep shearing, an internationally successful business and Cook Island music-making will be brought to life through this year’s New Zealand Oral History Awards recipients announced by Manatū Taonga, Ministry for Culture and Heritage. See more here.
Oral History in Digital Age
Today we return to our regularly schedule programming, coming back to our ongoing series or oral history origin stories. We hear how Steven Sielaff found his way to the crazy mixed up world of oral history, and how his technophilia feeds into his love of oral history. Read more here.
Black US Olympians at Nazi Games
Eighty years ago this month, the United States competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, and 18 African-American athletes were part of the U.S. squad. Track star Jesse Owens, one of the greatest Olympians of all time, won four gold medals. What the 17 other African-American Olympians did in Berlin, though, has largely been forgotten — and so too has their rough return home to racial segregation. For full story click here.
Treading Air
Townsville's underbelly is revealed in a shocking true story of tattooed, cocaine-snorting, gun-toting prostitute Lizzie O’Dea. The novel is set in the 1920s behind the city’s Causeway Hotel, once part of a notorious red light district where Lizzie and her standover man, husband Joe “Curly” O’Dea, could be found frequenting seedy bars. By day she was known as Lizzie O’Dea but her alias as a prostitute was Betty Knight. Townsville author and JCU writing lecturer Ariella Van Luyn has spent three years researching and writing the forgotten story into a book she has titled Treading Air, launched this week. For full story click here.
Bangarra Dance Theatre
Bangarra Dance Theatre has a long history of performing in Canberra. Over time the works we have seen from this acclaimed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander company have always been powerful and moving evocations of Indigenous culture and history – stories of the land, the people and the connections between them. The works have consistently been visually stunning in both set and costume design. Choreographically they have looked back to an ancient dancing heritage while also embodying a contemporary dance vocabulary. In addition, they have always been danced to original scores or soundscapes. For full story click here.
New USA Book Prize
Writers have something new to aspire to: the $75,000 book prize announced Wednesday by PEN America, the literary nonprofit based in New York. The $75,000 award is named for Jean Stein, the Los Angeles-born author and oral historian. For full story click here.
Gun Violence & Black Lives Matter (USA)
Anna Deavere Smith has created more than 18 one-person oral history plays based on hundreds of interviews, most of which deal with social issues. Her most recent one-person show, LET ME DOWN EASY, focused on health care in the U.S. For more and an audio interview with Smith click here.
Bernard King Interview
The last recorded interviews of prominent celebrity cook Bernard King have been obtained by the State Library of Queensland in its bid to celebrate the diversity of the state's identities. King, who "broke a lot of ground in the entertainment industry" as a gay performer, recorded the interviews shortly before his death in 2002 and now the library is working to make the recordings available to the public. For full story click here.