Category: OHAA QLD Blog

Craig Taylor devoted five years to collecting the material for “Londoners.” He gathered stories from all 32 boroughs, conducting formal interviews with more than 200 people, running through 300 tape-recorder batteries and taking down enough notes to generate transcripts of more than 950,000 words. Fewer than half the people he talked to made the final cut. Some interviews took months to set up and lasted just a few minutes. Others went on for hours. For full story click here.

The House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution today proposed by U.S. Reps. Martha Roby, R-Montgomery, and Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, to preserve a collection of accounts from  current and former members of Congress involved in the first and subsequent Civil Rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.  For full story click here.

The League of Professional Theatre Women, in association with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, will offer “Celebrating Our Legacy: Oral History Photographic Exhibit of the League of Professional Theatre Women,” which will open March 8.  Through the exhibit, the League of Professional Theatre Women—which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2012—will “honor the oral history legacy, which, since 1992, has documented an outstanding array of women, all of whom have contributed to contemporary American theatre.”  For full story click here.

The Community Oral History Theatre Project – Sham Shui Po District, presented by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department in collaboration with Chung Ying Theatre Company and the Neighbourhood Advice-Action Council and sponsored by the Sham Shui Po District Council, will be staging four public performances in March. Twenty elderly people will take part in the shows, which are based on the project participants’ recollections.  In a series of workshops, the project provided the elderly with drama training and gathered the personal experiences and valuable recollections of the elderly in Sham Shui Po District. Plots were written based on the collected oral history, and elderly participants were given the opportunity to perform their stories onstage. For full story click here.

Professor Hank Nelson of the Australian National University died in Canberra on Friday, February 17, after a long battle with cancer. His was a life focused on both Papua New Guinea and Australia, and it was the relationship between the two that nourished his intellect.  His work on the Japanese occupation of PNG, and Australian involvement in the Pacific War, entailed ventures into oral history involving collaborations with journalists, as with the 1982 documentary series Angels at War, which won awards both from the Australian Film Institute and at the Nyon Film Festival in Switzerland. That work led to his involvement in the preparation of displays and sound archives of the Australian War Memorial. For full story click here.

Ronald Fraser, who has died aged 81, was one of the most respected, gifted and prolific British historians of Spain. His best-known work, Blood of Spain (1979),  is a peerless account of the Spanish civil war, carefully constructed from interviews with participants on both sides. Conducted with a steady and consistently courteous voice, the book helped establish oral history as a discipline in its own right. Ronnie disliked the description – “as though it were a category of historiography on a par with ‘economic’ or ‘political’ history rather than what it actually is: the creation of new sources to further historical research.” For full story click here.

When Spring Hill Middle School teacher Charlotte Lloyd saw her class’s interest in the subject of Hiroshima develop through reading memoirs and stories about World War II, she seized the chance to have Keiko Fore come speak to her class. Fore, who has lived in Laurinburg for 44 years, was 12 years old and attending school in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.  She relayed her experience of that day and its aftermath to two classes of seventh-grade students last week. Lloyd asked Fore to speak to the class in order to bring to life an event decades removed from her students’ lifetime.  For full story click here.

Decades of oral tradition and a few scant clues suggest the role a northern Maine church played in harboring slaves along the Underground Railroad.  This small Quaker church just two miles from the Canadian border was likely the last stop on the Underground Railroad for many runaway slaves making their way to freedom, according to historians in the Fort Fairfield area.  Documenting the role of the Friends Church and many other sites means relying on oral records passed from one generation to the next. For full story click here.

Last February, the oral history project opened an exhibit at the Nelson Heritage Center displaying the history of the integration of the schools in the county. The exhibit built on the countless hours of research Woody Greenberg had done in 1985 for his doctoral dissertation on the county’s school system, with two of the chapters focusing on the integration process.  He interviewed many people who lived through it and combed through documents from the school board. His research corresponded with a video project members of the oral history project were working on a few years ago and so they decided to create the exhibit, Greenberg said.  For full story, click here.

Cherokee Council Member Diamond Brown, a specialist in the oral history of the Cherokee, was asked if oral history matched the written documents. He replied that written history does not always match oral history.  The story of the Cherokee’s forced eviction from their lands has passed down through oral history.  For full story click here.