Today we return to our regularly schedule programming, coming back to our ongoing series or oral history origin stories. We hear how Steven Sielaff found his way to the crazy mixed up world of oral history, and how his technophilia feeds into his love of oral history. Read more here.
Category: Uncategorized
Black US Olympians at Nazi Games
Eighty years ago this month, the United States competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, and 18 African-American athletes were part of the U.S. squad. Track star Jesse Owens, one of the greatest Olympians of all time, won four gold medals. What the 17 other African-American Olympians did in Berlin, though, has largely been forgotten — and so too has their rough return home to racial segregation. For full story click here.
Treading Air
Townsville's underbelly is revealed in a shocking true story of tattooed, cocaine-snorting, gun-toting prostitute Lizzie O’Dea. The novel is set in the 1920s behind the city’s Causeway Hotel, once part of a notorious red light district where Lizzie and her standover man, husband Joe “Curly” O’Dea, could be found frequenting seedy bars. By day she was known as Lizzie O’Dea but her alias as a prostitute was Betty Knight. Townsville author and JCU writing lecturer Ariella Van Luyn has spent three years researching and writing the forgotten story into a book she has titled Treading Air, launched this week. For full story click here.
Bangarra Dance Theatre
Bangarra Dance Theatre has a long history of performing in Canberra. Over time the works we have seen from this acclaimed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander company have always been powerful and moving evocations of Indigenous culture and history – stories of the land, the people and the connections between them. The works have consistently been visually stunning in both set and costume design. Choreographically they have looked back to an ancient dancing heritage while also embodying a contemporary dance vocabulary. In addition, they have always been danced to original scores or soundscapes. For full story click here.
New USA Book Prize
Writers have something new to aspire to: the $75,000 book prize announced Wednesday by PEN America, the literary nonprofit based in New York. The $75,000 award is named for Jean Stein, the Los Angeles-born author and oral historian. For full story click here.
Gun Violence & Black Lives Matter (USA)
Anna Deavere Smith has created more than 18 one-person oral history plays based on hundreds of interviews, most of which deal with social issues. Her most recent one-person show, LET ME DOWN EASY, focused on health care in the U.S. For more and an audio interview with Smith click here.
Bernard King Interview
The last recorded interviews of prominent celebrity cook Bernard King have been obtained by the State Library of Queensland in its bid to celebrate the diversity of the state's identities. King, who "broke a lot of ground in the entertainment industry" as a gay performer, recorded the interviews shortly before his death in 2002 and now the library is working to make the recordings available to the public. For full story click here.
Stories of the Great War
July 1, 2016, marked one-hundred years since the beginning of the devastating Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest of World War I. Dragging on for four months, it incurred more than a million casualties on both sides. By the time it finally ended – November of 1916 – the Allies had advanced less than 10 miles. A new book, “The Great War,” by political cartoonist Joe Sacco, re-creates the first day of the Somme in a 24-foot long panorama. The images are rendered in relentless detail, starting with the beginning of the day, moving into the heartbreaking battle itself, and then the aftermath.This article has a number of links which are set out here:
World War I oral histories – these recordings were done in the 1970s or 1980s and don't have the best sound quality.
Joe Sacco, author/cartoonist of “The Great War” – Video of Joe Sacco showing his book.
Read the full article here.
Sex Lives of Englishwomen
Author of The Sex Lives of English Women: Intimate Questions and Unexpected Answers Wendy Jones states in her introduction, “through our sexuality our humanity is revealed”; and, as with the best oral histories, the personal widens out to become the political. It’s not surprising that Jones studied the great American statesmen of oral history, Studs Terkel, as part of her PhD and jokingly calls him “my homeboy”. For full story click here.