Jonathon Fairhead is a current OHMA student. In this post, he discusses whether or not Moustafa Bayoumi's encounters with Muslim Arab Americans are oral history.
Read MoreMiguel Zenón and his caravan of conversations
Bud Kliment is a current OHMA student. In this post, he discusses Miguel Zenón's vision of the stories jazz can tell us.
Read MoreAlum Liza Zapol interviews to preserve Greenwich Village history
Narrator Frances Goldin, East Village
New oral history interviews commissioned by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation are online!
Read MoreStories from the Carriage Trade: A Staged Reading
OHMA alum Elisabeth Sydor will host a staged reading of her thesis.
Read MoreNews Brief: The Latest in Oral History II
Kate Brenner is a current OHMA student. Hailing from the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, she spends a lot of time laughing at New Yorkers who complain about the cold, and generally bemoaning a lack of availability of cheesecurds. When she's not busy perpetuating stereotypes about Midwesterners, she explores the dynamics of group interviews and story circles to better capture the history of a community.
As much as it’s fun to read about oral history, it can also be nice to revel in the actual orality of it. So here are links that (mostly) have an oral component for you to listen to.
I may be biased because I read some of Listening on the Edge for a class, but here’s an opportunity to listen to the two authors discuss their opinions on interviewing people closely after an event, as well as the impact on the interviewer.
If you listen to Radio Diaries you may have already heard this, but I just started listening, and was very excited when I listened to their podcast from last September. It has 2 previously unpublished oral histories conducted by Studs Terkel for his Working series, one with a taxi driver, the other with a parking attendant.
Speaking of Studs Terkel and Working, did you know they made it into a musical in the 70’s? I did not, but a school in California recently performed it, and a blogger mused upon the relevance of performing it today.
The New York Public Library is embarking on a massive oral history project on living in New York. Here they’ve assembled a sampler of clips to pique your interest in interviews about life in Greenwich Village, Harlem, Morris Park, as well as the experiences of being blind in the city. Listen to them and then explore the full interviews available on each project’s website.
This essay from Transom about perception of voices on NPR was published in multiple places on the internet, inspiring a lot of different conversations. One was orchestrated on twitter by NPR’s Code Switch blog team. It was also a topic of discussion on one of my favorite podcasts, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, where they took into consideration all different types of voices and the general perception of them on the radio.
February was Black History Month, so a lot of links in my Google alert were specifically related to that, which is great, but wouldn’t it be cool if African American history wasn’t highlighted for just one month? The Visionary Project looks at the lives of African American Elders. Each person’s page has a brief biography, and then a selection of clips to watch from their interview. It’s really well organized and seems like it would be a great teaching tool to use all year.
Despite being a self-avowed nerd, I have never watched Star Trek. But after the death of Leonard Nimoy, this segment of his interview with the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexlar History project describing exactly his inspiration for the Vulcan hand gesture was widely circulated on the internet.
[Workshop Reflection] Community-based Oral History in Weeksville, Brooklyn
[For a full video of the talk, see here.}
Questions Asked:
Please tell us about your background and how you got to where you are.
Please tell us about what Weeksville is.
You touched on the idea of the movement creating the museum. It what ways, now that the center has been established, will the exhibits and programs continue to be movement based?
You touched on the idea of trying to make it a democratic place but how do you balance that with the sometimes bureaucratic process of running the center? Are there sacrifices that need to be made?
What does your audience look like? And are you trying to reach beyond the community?
What is Weeksville’s relationship to the surrounding community and how has it affected or been affected by change in the community?
What are other creative ways of preserving community history and what are impediments to it? What kinds of technology do you use?
Workshop Reflection: Weeksville Heritage Center uses Oral History to Preserve a Sense of Place
On April 25th, Jennifer Scott of the Weeksville Heritage Center, which preserves several homes that were part of the original Weeksville community, established in 1838 as one of the first free black communities in the country where blacks owned property, spoke to the OMHA students about the center’s use of oral history to encourage the democratization of this unique Brooklyn community’s history.
The community has always been an important part of the Weeksville Heritage Center starting with the preservation of the Hunterfly Road site in the 1970s, which was a concerted effort taken on by many residents of the area. The level of community involvement through archeology and preservation that could be seen in the fight to preserve the Hunterfly Road Houses is always rare, said Scott, but extremely rare in 1968, when this was happening.
Oral histories were collected in the early days of the preservation of Weeksville in conjunction with Medgar Evers College. Histories were collected from a wide range of community members, including many of the people involved in preserving the Hunterfly Road Houses and other Brooklyn residents associated with the place. Luckily, most of those histories survived and are now preserved.
The Center has started collecting more oral histories from community residents over the past few years. Scott said she sees the oral history collection as vital to understanding the place, helping to connect the people of the community to the historic location and giving these histories and memories a tangible location to be attached to.
Scott emphasized that one of the critical roles of oral history is to erode illusions about people, places, and history. And for Weeksville, it has been a way to encourage a more democratic and inclusive view of this important but relatively unknown part of Brooklyn, New York, and American history.
Scott also said that the oral histories collected from those that were influential in preserving Weeksville have the benefit of showing the webs and networks of people that make things happen. In some ways, she said, it demystifies the process.
As for the future of oral history at the Weeksville Heritage Center, Scott believes that the past needs to be connected to the present and that oral history is a great way of doing that. She said she has used the collection of oral histories as a way of getting people re-involved in the project and that it is a great way of cultivating community involvement.
Scott said that they continue to experiment with new ways of presenting the oral histories within the exhibits at the Center and to rotate the histories used to make sure that every story is heard and available to the community and the greater public. Scott assured students that the Weeksville Heritage Center continues to look at new ways to make the oral history collection accessible and engaging.
By OHMA Student Shannon Geis http://shannongeis.net