Raising Children

Bringing up children seems to depend very much on the times and the circumstances of the parents.  The Oral History group has experience of three generations of raising a family: their parents, the way they did it themselves, and the way it is done today. For full story click here.

Californian Migrant Farmworkers

An estimated 800,000 farmworkers in California make up over one-third of the national agricultural workforce. In his new book, Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture, Thompson shares the oral histories of 17 farmworkers, who, in their own words, provide a “birth-to-now” narrative explaining how they got to the U.S. and what their lives have been like ever since. For full story click here.

Working Class Narratives

With school getting back in session, today on the blog we are exploring how instructors are using oral history in the classroom. The piece below, from filmmaker and UCLA Lecturer Virginia Espino explores the power of oral history to connect students to their campus community, and to help them collaboratively rethink what working class identity means in the modern era.  Read full story here.

Cyprus Invasion in 1974

Having a deep interest in human rights and listening to stories told by many new migrants arriving in Australia while a NewsCorp Australia reporter set Andrea Stylianou on a new path. She started a journey to investigate the story of how she had arrived in Australia as a two-year-old with her family in 1975 after they became refugees from the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.  To read full story click here.

Podcasts from Manus Island

For a year and a half, Melbourne-based journalist Michael Green has been in touch with a man in Australia’s offshore – and notoriously off-bounds – immigration detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. The man is Abdul Aziz Muhamat (Green calls him Aziz), and The Messenger is a podcast about his life in detention.  It’s also much more than that.  Read the article and go to podcast links here.

Dadbot Chatbot

Female Russian Soldiers in World War II

Samuel Beckett once declined an interview because, he said, he had “no views to inter.” On the other hand, Svetlana Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II” is made up of conversations with women who have waited their entire lives to speak.  This book is an outpouring, a deluge. Roughly a million Soviet women fought in World War II. Dozens of them, in this volume, gather around Alexievich as if she were a sentient campfire. For more detail about this book click here.