The Oral History Review on OUPblog podcast is back! Today’s episode features OHR contributors Drs. Linda Crane and Tracy McDonough answering OHR Managing Editor Troy Reeves’s questions about the Schizophrenia Oral History Project and their article, “Living with Schizophrenia: Coping, Resilience, and Purpose,” which appears in the most recent Oral History Review. – See more and listen here.
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Tasmanian Fishermen Stories
Tasmania's amazing coastline and abundant fisheries give the state a unique legacy of stories from the sea. Not just the 'tall tales' fishermen are famous for. Real stories of the life, the times and the livelihoods around finfish and scallops and crays. For full story with audio click here.
Fishing History in New Zealand
The port of Timaru has been home to a thriving fishing industry for many years and now part of its commercial history will be recorded, thanks to a $20,000 New Zealand Oral History Awards grant. Timaru women Linda Hepburn and Ruth Low will use the grant to fund research and audio interviews with families who over the years have contributed to the industry.
Oral History of the Internet
In many ways, the world we inhabit today isn’t so dramatically different from the one that existed in 1994. The roads were full of Americans SUVs and Japanese sedans; Congress was mired in partisan dysfunction. Americans vaguely roused their enthusiasm for soccer as their team surpassed expectations in the World Cup. At night you flicked on cable, with hundreds of channels. And then there was the way you used a computer. If you had a computer, and many people did, it sat on your desk and ran programs on floppy disks. It connected to the printer and—if you were very tech savvy—to a dial-up service like America Online or Compuserve. For full story click here.
Oral History in Iran
The oral history project manager Vahid Tabaei elaborated on oral history definition as well as his current projects in this area. For Tabaei, oral history is a part of contemporary history at whose heart is incident. “We take an incident and interview the people who have taken part in it or have been its eyewitnesses,” he said. In an interview with IBNA, Tabaei said that the difference between oral history and memory is that when someone talks on his memory or writes on it, he retells some part of the incidents that has had impact on him/her. For full story click here.
Cooma Oral Histories
The Big hART theatre company is brewing up the ingredients for a new production involving the Cooma community, the band Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, and a cast including Lex Marinos, Anne Grigg and Bruce Myles. Local high school students are recording oral histories in the community to provide stories and themes for the music and script being directed by Scott Rankin. On Sunday 29 June the community is invited to a special performance of the material developed so far. The completed show will be performed at the Canberra Theatre Centre in 2015. For full story from the ABC 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.
Beatlemania came to Australia 50 years ago
Australia’s overwhelming response to the 1964 tour is forever preserved in the NFSA’s collection. The news file here depicts the band’s departure from Sydney on Sunday 21 June 1964 for the New Zealand leg of their world tour, showing ’beatlemania’ in full flight. See this news story and films.
Chicago Hot Dog
Lesley Jenkins writes:
Sadly my time at the Chicago History Museum has come to an end. I met wonderful curators, public education staff, a bundle of volunteers and interns and many many creatives who do a whole range of jobs to keep the place going despite funding cuts driven by the GFC. I learnt a lot from all of them. I wrote a few pieces about oral history at the museum and they should be up on the Oral History Association of Qld blog in a little while for people who would like to know more about how this works here. I started with a hotdog and I am ending with one. This great piece of child friendly interactive sculpture is part of the Sensing Chicago exhibition. This is directed at children to find out why Chicago was once stinky and is no longer. The bright colours and sounds and interactive elements focus on how smells, sights, sounds and tastes tell us about our history.
Oral History at the Chicago History Museum today
Lesley Jenkins writes:
Oral Histo
ry is mainly collected at the CHM for research and exhibition purposes. The focus is usually project based and thematic, rather than following the Life History model. Many of these Unedited interviews from the Museum’s Chicago Politics Oral History Project can be found on the Museum’s YouTube channel in 12-15 minute segments. This project centres around recording interviews with associates and adversaries of Chicago’s renowned Mayor Daley who died in office in 1976 after twenty-one years in office.
Past Museum exhibitions using excerpts from oral history interviews include; an object theatre for the My Chinatown project. Here a few significant objects contained in Perspex object cases are illuminated behind screens. When a light shines on the objects edited oral history interviews tell their story. This becomes the voice-over in the accompanying video.
Oral history has been used in many exhibitions but one ongoing collection area is for the Making History Awards where the interviews follow a life history model of interviewing. In 2002 the Awards were underwritten through a generous grant from The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust. The Trust honors the memory of Elizabeth Morse, daughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, a 19th century Chicago industrialist and land developer. The Trust supports programs that encourage self-reliance, foster self-esteem, and promote the arts, with an emphasis on helping children, youth, and the elderly of Chicago’s disadvantaged communities. Awards have been conferred and oral histories undertaken with a range of Chicago identities including the well-known mystery writer Sara Paretsky. In 2002 she received Richard Wright* for distinction in literature. That year interviews were conducted with civic entreprenuers Richard L Thomas ( a distinguished banker) and Arturo Valasquez Sr (a Mexican American who was an entrepreneur, businessman, community affairs activist and education advocate.) Edward A Brennan received the Marshall Field History Maker Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation in 2003. Carole Simpson received the Joseph Medill History Maker Award for Distinction in journalism and Communications in 2003. Many recipients of the Award become advocates and sometimes donors of the Chicago History Museum.
*Richard Wright was a writer whose most famous novel, Native Son (1940) was set in Chicago. Although he was not from here, he did live and work here in the years leading up to Native Son’s publication. He was not benefactor of CHM and probably had no connection to the organization.