Category: OHAA QLD Blog

On the night of September 27, 1926, the rafters of the Causeway Hall (still standing at Kingston) were rattled by a kind of music never before heard in the young and still culturally impoverished Canberra. It was opera and one of the celebrity rafter-rattlers brought in for the great occasion (staged by the Canberra Philharmonic Society) was the once famous but now almost forgotten Andre Navarre (1898-1940).  But he’s not forgotten by the National Film and Sound Archive and yesterday his daughter Andree Navarre was at the archive to enable that institution to do oral history interviews with her, for posterity. For full story click here.

The Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) has completed its extensive oral history of Dr. Kazuo Inamori, a pioneer in the field of engineered ceramics who, at 80, is regarded as one of Japan’s most respected living entrepreneurs. The institution’s renowned Oral History Program compiles interviews with leaders in the fields of science and industry as a means to record the personal experiences of those who have improved our world. Click here for full story.

Two years after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, The University of Southern Mississippi Center for Oral History continues its work capturing the stories of those whose livelihood depends on the Gulf Coast’s seafood industry, which was threatened by the ecological disaster.  With the support of a grant from the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Center has talked with crabbers, shrimpers and oyster harvesters across the Gulf of Mexico about the challenges the disaster has presented to their way of life and the foodways of the region. Interviews have been conducted in Alabama, including in Grand Bay and the Bayou La Batre area, and in St. Bernard Parish, New Orleans East, and Houma, La.  Click here for full story.

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.