oral history

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• SOURCE: WAMC
  2/17/2021
  

  Behind The Former Slave Narratives Captured By A New Deal Program

  Writer Clint Smith: "the narratives are full of those moments that remind you of the personhood of these people who in so much of our teaching of history are sort of these silhouettes or these abstractions."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/2/2021
  

  Man Travels to Virginia in Quest to Interview WWII Veterans

  A young Californian has traveled across the world after founding a nonprofit agency to collect and preserve the stories of surviving World War II veterans. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/20/2020
  

  Pandemic Forces Holocaust Survivor Interviews Onto Zoom

  COVID forced a fast shift to video chat to record interviews with Holocaust survivors for the US Holocaust Museum's oral history project. 

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• SOURCE: Nashville Scene
  12/10/2020
  

  New Oral History Project Spotlights Roles of Nashville’s Women Musicians

  Musician and historian Tiffany Minton's new oral history project tackles the stereotype of the Nashville session musician – the backbone of the city's recording industry – as a white guy. 

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• SOURCE: Harvard Gazette
  8/28/2020
  

  Crowd-Sourcing the Story of a People

  Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the new director of the Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. She discusses the practice, teaching, and value of public history as "a boisterous, crowd-sourced endeavor."

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• 7/26/2020
  

  "You Sold Me to Your Mother-in-Law...": An Ongoing Quest to Reconnect a Family

  by Ken Lawrence

  David Jackson had been forcibly separated from members of his family with no word of their subsequent fates for more than two decades, yet he had not given up hope of finding them. Can today’s historians shed light on his quest?

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine
  6/9/2020
  

  How Oral History Projects Are Being Stymied by COVID-19

  As the current pandemic ravages minority communities, historians are scrambling to continue work that preserves cultural heritage.

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• SOURCE: Columbia News
  6/1/2020
  

  Group Will Document How a Global Pandemic Has Affected New Yorkers

  A new oral history project, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, will be both a historical record of the coronavirus pandemic and a learning tool for how the city can handle future crises.

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• SOURCE: Chicago History Museum
  5/18/2020
  

  An Eyewitness to Studs

  To mark what would have been the 108th birthday of Studs Terkel, Peter T. Alter, CHM chief historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History, reflects on the memorable moments he shared with Studs at the Museum and Studs’s enduring cultural influence. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/3/2020
  

  We Are Losing a Generation of Civil-Rights Memories

  America’s response to the pandemic harkens back to ugly times in our country’s history. But to recognize that, we need to know our elders’ stories.

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  5/4/2020
  

  “How Are We Going to Look Back on This Time?” Oral Historians Record Daily Life During COVID-19.

  As COVID-19 rages around the world, archivists, librarians, oral historians, and activists have spun up oral history projects to document their communities’ everyday experiences during an extraordinary social, political, cultural, and historical moment.

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• SOURCE: Wired
  4/17/2020
  

  An Oral History of the Pandemic Warnings Trump Ignored

  The president says “nobody ever expected a thing like this,” but dire predictions have been heaped on leaders for decades.

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• SOURCE: CBS News
  4/7/2020
  

  Artificial Intelligence is Preserving our Ability to Converse with Holocaust Survivors even After They Die

  Survivors of the Holocaust now have the chance to preserve their stories in a way that allows them to directly answer future generations' questions about their experiences.

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• 3/22/2020
  

  Why Holocaust Fiction?

  by Bernice Lerner

  Had they had a choice, I believe Hitler’s victims would have wanted nothing about the mortal crimes against them falsified. 

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• SOURCE: Activist History Review
  

  Historical Memory and the Slave Narrative Collection

  by Sarah Whitwell

  Rather than viewing memory as a passive process of recalling lived experiences as objective truths, historians have begun to view memory as an active ordering of the past.

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• SOURCE: AP
  2/1/20
  

  Historians Struggle to Understand Oral History Written in Forgotten Shorthand

  The 1951 transcription is written in a decades-old shorthand style that few people use today. “It’s definitely a lost art,” Langsdon said.

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  10/07/2019
  

  'We Are Inside the Fire': An Oral History of the War in Afghanistan

  by Fahim Abed and Fatima Faizi

  Afghans have endured four decades of conflict, with little prospect of peace. This is the story of the last 18 years since the American invasion, as told by the men and women who’ve lived it.

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine
  9/27/19
  

  Listen to the Stories of Alabama’s Civil Rights Sites

  A new interactive project seeks to preserve oral testimonies connected to 20 historic locations.

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  8/19/19
  

  Myrna Katz Frommer, 80, Dies; Oral Historian of Catskills and Brooklyn

  She collaborated with her husband, Harvey, on “It Happened in the Catskills” and other histories told in the voices of the people who were there.

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• 6/9/19
  

  The Challenges of Writing Histories of Autism

  by Jonathan Rose

  And how historians might overcome those obstacles.