Category: OHAA QLD Blog

An innovative community arts project to promote environmental awareness along the Hunter River has begun in Singleton, with four more days of planned workshops to follow. The River Stories workshops, supported by Hunter Councils environment division, are offering classes in painting, mixed media, illustration, oral history and multimedia. Works produced, including those in Singleton on Saturday and Sunday, are destined for Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG). Natural history illustrators, Trevor Weekes and Tallulah Cunningham, mixed media artist Judith White, and oral historian Janis Wilton have led the workshops. ABC Open One On One: River Stories workshops have also taught people storytelling skills in photography and audio recording.  For full story click here.

The Presidential Oral History Program is systematically and comprehensively debriefing the principal figures in the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton, with plans to do the same for future presidents.  The Program is also conducting special projects on important topics in American political history.  To view this site click here.  Note, this site has also been added to the OHAA Qld Delicious site.

After September 11, 2011, there was a sharp increase in hate crimes against people perceived to be Arab or Muslim in the United States. These crimes are perpetrated out of fear and ignorance and harm innocent people while deepening mistrust. To help counter Islamophobia by educating our community about Muslims and Arabs, this project collected several oral histories of Muslims who study and work  at the Anne Arundel Community College.  Stereotypes fly in the face of the stories of these Americans in their own words. Check out this site here.

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.