The big stories of Canberra's history have been important in this centenary year but perhaps the ones that will resonate the loudest will be the so-called little ones, the personal tales of its residents. In what was the final official community event on the centenary calendar, Centenary Stories, an oral history project, was launched on Wednesday at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. Members of Canberra's pioneering families were present, with some committing to tell their life story for posterity, showing the changing attitudes, culture and concerns of a city. For full story click here.
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1937 Nanjing Massacre
USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education and Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall have embarked on a historic effort to preserve the testimonies of the last survivors of the 1973 Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing. Testimonies in the new Nanjing collection seek to establish full-life histories of the individuals, including their social and cultural life before and after the Nanjing Massacre. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army captured what was then China's capital city, Nanjing, and killed as many as 300,000 civilians and numerous unarmed Chinese soldiers over the course of two months. For full story click here.
The Serum Run – Alaska 1925
Fairbanks, AK – In 1925, the residents of Nome were facing one of the coldest winters in memory. They were also facing a deadly outbreak of diphtheria and the local doctor had run out of medicine to treat the disease. What followed was one of Alaska’s most famous sled dog runs. The story itself has become Alaskan folklore, but there is little written on the Serum run. A new documentary film, Icebound, leans on oral histories to tell the true story. It premieres tonight in Anchorage.
For full story including film trailer and audio interview with film maker here.
Rise and Fall of BlackBerry
In 1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called Research In Motion, or RIM. For years the company tinkered in obscurity, until it focused on a breakthrough technology: an easy, secure, and effective device that allowed workers to send and receive e-mails while away from the office. They called it the BlackBerry. Read full story and watch video interview here.
Audio storytelling
Siobhan McHugh discusses how audio storytelling is becoming more popular:
In a cultural milieu dominated by long-form television dramas such as Breaking Bad and Madmen, how has the apparently simple activity of audio storytelling gained such clout? In the US, documentary radio programs such as RadioLab, This American Life and Radio Diaries enjoy sold-out stage shows telling real-life stories that combine serious journalism with compelling personal narratives, philosophical discourse and an irreverent but always engaging tone. Read Siobhan's full article here.
World AIDS Day Play
As a part of World AIDS Day, a new theatre work focusses on the experience of young gay men in the 1980s, revisiting the past without preaching to the present about the epidemic and its influence on Sydney’s gay community. “I’m trying to target two audiences,” The Death of Kings writer by Colette F Keen. “The old guard and the younger community who have been lectured to and told ‘when I was young’ over and over again.” Keen and Deusien previously collaborated on a verbatim piece telling the stories of the 9/11 first responders, but the origins of Death of Kings came about in a different way, when a friend of Keen’s made an off-the-cuff statement. “He’d been through the ‘80s in Sydney and he just said ‘I’m really frightened that 30 years on the people who survived are going to die and although we have oral history saved in libraries all we will hear are American stories.” Built on interviews that took place between January and December 2012, the show tells the tales of a varied group of gay men. For full story click here.
China’s Great Famine Genocide
Between 1958 and 1962, Mao Zedong embarked on a mad and brutal scheme to transform the Chinese economy through forced collectivization—the so-called Great Leap Forward. Historian Frank Dikötter called the ensuing disaster one of the “most deadly mass killings in human history,” estimating that over 45 million Chinese died as a result. And yet few people outside of China are aware of Mao’s greatest crime. For his new book Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine (Yale University Press), historian Zhou Xun travelled through the Chinese countryside collecting first-hand accounts from the forgotten victims of a forgotten genocide. Read article which includes excerpts from book here.
Award for public art tour (USA)
Frankfort-based Joanna Hay of Joanna Hay Productions Inc. is the recipient of an award presented by the national Oral History Association. The 2013 OHA Award was presented to the independent producer for her Frankfort Public Art Tour project, sponsored in part by the Kentucky Historical Society. The project was conceived and overseen by Hay and her associate, Judy Sizemore. It documents a representative sampling of public art treasures – including oral histories – found throughout Frankfort. The tour can be accessed online or from a smartphone here, where viewers will find a map showing the location of each item on the tour plus additional images, audio and other information. For full story click here.
Editor's note – this story may provide inspiration to our own communities and historical societies.
Defending oral history
Kaitlin Fontana reflects on the death of Studs Terkel and the place of oral history today:
Five years ago, literary icon Louis “Studs” Terkel died in his native, beloved, Chicago. He was 96, four years short of a milestone befitting the expansiveness with which he’d embraced the seldom-heard voices of his country — that is the working, the poor, the normal (in particular, that odd normalcy that is the American Midwest). For Studs Terkel not to make it to 100 seemed cruel, because his voice seems as old as America itself.
Read her full article here.
Oral history in India
History was crafted out of "facts", said the British historian E H Carr. Facts, which were like "fish on a fishmonger's slab". What is "official" history, whose history it documents and whose it skips, has been a concern for historians the world over for several decades now. A bunch of Indian documentors, who believe there are other fish in the sea than official histories acknowledge, will gather in Bangalore on Monday and formally inaugurate the country's first Oral History Association of India (OHAI). From discussing how life was for Indian freedom fighters in Cellular Jail on the Andamans to looking at memories of 1984 riots and the Bhopal gas tragedy, the conference will be a broad palette for documentors and historians. For full story click here.