News Brief: The Latest in Oral History III

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.

Technically I’m supposed to find projects and write about them, but I found this blog post on Northwest History that talks about Spokane’s Pride, an LGBT oral history project. He discusses the project and even highlights a few more LGBT oral history projects. The rest of his blog might be of interest as he is a public historian and assistant digital archivist who uses it to “explore the intersections of public and digital history."

The U.S. Naval War College just completed a 20 year oral history project with women who were in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). There’s no audio online, but the full transcripts are there so you can learn about another facet of American military history.

If you’re interested in oral history of people in religious orders, and happen to be in Peoria, you can stop by this exhibit, which features a few oral histories with older priests. No matter where you are, you can listen to these clips of interviews with nuns.

Oral history can make for great performances. Here one town, inspired by StoryCorps, is collecting stories of residents and producing a play. Of course, oral histories of significant events can contribute to a more well rounded production, as it does in this project, which addresses the impact of World War I in England both nationally and locally.

The Catskills are suffering from what has been deemed a heroin epidemic. The Kingfisher Project is an attempt to use oral history and storytelling to report on the problem, as well as to fight it.

Though I didn’t know much about the partition of India, I’ve heard about the 1947 Partition archive before. I think this article really sums up the importance of the archive as a record of the largest mass migration in history.

This wasn’t a very audio-heavy list, so I’ll end with an assortment of short clips from Columbia’s archive. Enjoy listening to people from Thurgood Marshall to Dorothy Parker.