The Oral History Review articles from June 2002

The Oral History Review archives from June 2002

Editor's introduction.
June 22, 2002... One of the fascinating things about oral history is that it is both an ancient practice and a recently developed discipline. In one sense, it is as old as story telling; in another, it is a discipline that has emerged as academic practice in...

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... I would like to write a book someday entitled, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. In this book I would include Fred Harris, the first man I met who I knew was illiterate. He was from New Hampshire and lived in a camp in the woods near Mt....

The Burnette Bugle.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... The call came at nine the morning of April 29, 1999. It was our niece, Chris, from Chicago, telling us that her mother had died quietly during the night. Myrtle Bailey, my husband's younger sister at age 74, had battled hypertension with...

Oral history and the professor: an academic epiphany.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... The events precipitating me into the then unknown realm of oral history include a happy pair of intellectual coincidences occurring in 1986. At that time I was completing studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania....

Senator Fong and my start in oral history.(practice of oral history; Hiram L. Fong)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2002... I first got involved with oral history in 1975, when I had a sabbatical for the University of Hawaii Library. Part of my project was to learn more about the emerging practice of oral history. Learning that Columbia University (which started the...

Narrative and experience: illness in the context of an ethnographic interview.(practice of oral history; Argentina)
June 22, 2002... In the climate of methodological optimism of the 1960s and 1970s, the mere deed of going to the countryside with a tape recorder and finding an "expert" in the chosen field used to guarantee an ethnographic work academically acceptable. My...

My oral history roots.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... I was ready to begin the interview. At least, I thought that I was--this was the first oral history interview I'd ever conducted, and I felt nervous and under prepared. As an exhibit researcher at the Minnesota Historical Society, I'd been...

I just wanted a Tuesday-Thursday class schedule; what I got changed my life.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... Having been a hippie dropout in the sixties, I'd gone back to school at the University of Maine thirteen years later to finish my BA in history. I was commuting an hour each way to campus. And I had a thirteen-year-old daughter who was too...

A wise choice.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... When I signed up to take an oral history class during the summer of 1973, I had no idea what the class even was. I only knew that I was starting a graduate program, and my major professor Thomas G. Alexander, also assistant director of the...

Never underestimate the power of a bus: my journey to oral history.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... I first became interested in oral history while eavesdropping on a bus in London during the winter of 1980. I was a junior in college, studying theater in London for one year. On this particular day, I was sitting across the aisle from a...

Hooked on oral history.
June 22, 2002... We met each week around the dining room table in a Victorian house at 35 Buena Vista Terrace in San Francisco. The late afternoon sun shone through the branches of the tree next to the bay window, dappling the tabletop and our lined paper...

The painting that became an oral history.
June 22, 2002... The pure Americana street-corner scene pulsed with life: children bicycling up to an old-fashioned-looking grocery store whose dark green siding was plastered with catchy advertisements and Coca-Cola signs, people laden with grocery bags...

Each of us sees history through our own eyes.
June 22, 2002... I began doing oral history long before Studs Terkel made it a popular source for "history as if people matter." I wish my thesis advisor, University of Minnesota Prof. David Cooperman, was still alive, so he could tell you why he encouraged...

Just asking: capturing memories as a child, student, and historian.
June 22, 2002... If my family stories can be counted as oral history, then my introduction to this means of extracting personal memories came at a very early age. When I was in my early teenage years, my grandmother started telling me of what my grandparents...

Asking personal questions.(oral history interviewing techniques)
June 22, 2002... You might say I was grandmothered into the Regional Oral History Office at UC Berkeley as an interviewer-editor in 1970. In those days, there were few courses in oral history methods. The idea of a graduate oral history program was just a...

Remembrance of things past: service learning opportunities in U.S. history.(studying oral history through student community service)
June 22, 2002... When I first heard about the Alliance for Community Engagement (ACE) Program, a yearlong series of workshops and meetings directed at developing and teaching a service learning class, I hesitated before committing myself to this project. At...

Questioning history: personal inquiry and public dialogue.
June 22, 2002... I can trace my involvement in oral history back twenty years, to the early 1980s, when I decided to create family history documents as holiday presents for my sisters and brothers. I was in my early thirties, and found myself intensely curious...

At history's knee.(studying oral history)
June 22, 2002... My interest in oral history--although I could not have called it by its proper name--dates back almost to my birth. For you see, one of my distinct blessings is to have begun life in a three- and indeed during my very earliest years...

I bless the day.(Holocaust oral history)
June 22, 2002... I bless the day in 1979 when I read a small article in the St. Louis Jewish Light, a weekly newspaper, about a Holocaust Center that had been established in 1977. When people ask me how I became involved in oral history I have always told...

Bertold Brecht, public housing, and oral history.(perceptions on oral history)
June 22, 2002... In "Questions From a Worker Who Reads," Bertold Brecht writes evocatively of how the history of ordinary people is forsaken in favor of the stories of kings and emperors. "Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten...

My community, my history, my practice.(oral history of queer Latino San Francisco)
June 22, 2002... I was barely beginning to navigate the strange world of UC Berkeley when I had to choose which community testimonies I was to record. It was spring 1995, and I was enrolled in a Comparative Ethnic Studies research seminar. Professor Julia Curry...

Beginnings in oral history: or how one man and two women helped give birth to an oral historian.
June 22, 2002... While doing undergraduate work in the early 1990s at Idaho State University, we students in a U.S. survey class had an opportunity to interview a family member who lived during the Depression instead of taking an exam. The instructor, Dr. Ron...

Reconstructing a community with oral history.
June 22, 2002... Like many of my colleagues, my introduction into the field of oral history came about quite by accident. As is the case in many "accidents" that fate lays upon us, that accidental first experience with oral history precipitated a change in me...

Back doors.(practice of oral history)
June 22, 2002... I came to oral history by the back door, as many have. It happened this way: I'd always been a fan of Studs Terkel and had used several of his oral histories in composition classes over the years. So in 1980, when I was completing my...

Listening to dreams and stories.(practice of oral history, Iowa Women Artists Oral History Project)
June 22, 2002... "Interview and write about women artists around the country"--a forgotten line in my "list of dreams" written after I graduated from college in the early 1980s. But somehow this dream as a young woman lodged in my subconscious mind, and many...

Oral history journey.
June 22, 2002... My love of history, particularly that of individuals, has grown steadily since my youth. When I was seventeen, my grandfather told me of the cities he visited before coming to the United States from Hungary. I found it difficult to believe him....

From the trapline to the library: Alaskan oral history origins.
June 22, 2002... I hadn't heard of oral history--had no idea of what it even was--until I came to work for the Alaska and Polar Regions Department at the Rasmuson Library in 1995. At first, I had only ten hours a week to spend in oral history, so I was able...

From childhood storytelling to oral history interviews.
June 22, 2002... Being a nineteen-year-old immigrant from Vietnam had been a blessing. That was in 1994 though, when I first set foot in Westminster, the hodge-podge of the Vietnamese enclave in America. I was old enough to still be adept to the Vietnamese...

"Let's call it `The Horry County Oral History Project'".
June 22, 2002... A vast area of South Carolina once isolated by ocean, rivers, and swamps, Horry County (don't pronounce the "h") became my home in 1974. I wrote a book about trying to put down roots there, and described a number of colorful people such as the...

Oral history beginnings.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2002... I received a master's degree in American History (Constitution) from the University of Louisville in 1983, twenty-five years after I graduated from Vassar College. Subsequently, I worked on a project with my professor, mentor, and friend Mary...

Genesis of the Inter-American Affairs Collection.
June 22, 2002... It was in about 1977 that Mrs. Williams and I were visiting our hippie daughter, her husband, and their two little daughters in a hippie community near Taos, New Mexico. It was a rainy foggy night. Inside we kept near the wood-burning cook...

An interview with Enid Douglass.(oral historian)(Interview)
June 22, 2002... MARY LARSON: Today is January 20, 2002, and I'm here interviewing Enid Douglass in Claremont, California. Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. We greatly appreciate it. Would you be willing to give us a short biographical sketch first,...

Ordinary Heroes.(Theater Review)
June 22, 2002... Directed by Todd Krispinsky for the Wallpaper Project, in collaboration with the Great Lakes Theater Festival. Performed in Auglaize County, November 5, 2000. For more information on this project, contact Rachel Barber (Coordinator, the...

Living the Story: the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky.(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2002... Directors, Arthur Rouse and Joan Brannon; Executive Director, Betsy Brinson. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Oral History Commission of the Kentucky Historical Society, 2001. 58 minutes. Sale, $12.00 (non-profits and schools); $15.00 (all others)....

One Hundred Years of Stories.(Sound Recording Review)
June 22, 2002... Produced by Neenah Ellis for National Public Radio, 2000. Audio available on-line at http:// www.npr.org. (Go to http://www.npr.org/search and type in "Years of Stories" to get links to each of the broadcasts.) Neenah Ellis, National...

A Portal to Paradise.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Alden Hayes. The University of Arizona Press, 2001. 359 pp. Hardbound $29.95; Softbound $19.95. Alden Hayes, who died in 1998, was a well-respected archaeologist for the National Park Service. He published scholarly work on ancestral...

The Journey of Navajo Oshley: an Autobiography and Life History.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... Edited by Robert S. McPherson. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2000. 226 pp. Softbound $19.95. Utah's slickrocks provide both backdrop for this oral biography as well as contested territory for federal land use policies....

Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization, and Denial.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... Edited by Peter Hayes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999. 280 pp. Hardbound $69.95; Softbound $29.95. Looking back, Elie Wiesel writes in his introductory essay, has been an impossible, unavoidable, necessary task of...

Builders: Herman and George R. Brown.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Joseph A. Pratt & Christopher J. Castaneda. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999. 352 pp. Hardbound $36.95. Brothers Herman (1892-1962) and George Rufus (1898-1983) Brown were born in Belton, Texas, and moved to Temple in...

A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 285 pp. Hardbound $27.50; Softbound $18.50. The title of this book derives from a description of Abraham Polonsky by Congressman Harold Velde during the 1951...

Silent Heroes: Downed Airmen and the French Underground.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Sherri Greene Otis. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 235 pp. Softbound $24.00. Silent Heroes is an affecting tale of some of the French men, women, and even children who sheltered airmen shot down while bombing their...

Men Like That: a Southern Queer History.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By John Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 418 pp. Hardbound $27.50. Oral history has been indispensable to excavating queer pasts in the United States, a diligent undertaking begun a quarter century ago with the...

Power to Explore: a History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960-1990.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Andrew J. Dunar and Stephen P. Waring. Washington, D.C.: NASA History Office, 1999. 713 pp. Hardbound $49.00. Order by mail from: U.S. Government Printing Office, Documents Warehouse, 8610 Cherry Lane, Laurel, MD 20707 using stock number...

Surviving the Winter: the Evolution of Quiltmaking in New Mexico.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Dorothy R. Zopf. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. 118 pp. Hardbound $40; Softbound $19.95. Retired high school art teacher Dorothy Zopf reluctantly followed her husband to Arroyo Seco, New Mexico in 1981. He had found...

Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 260 pp. Hardbound $27.50. In Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner survey rumors and legends...

Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Cecilia Menjivar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 301 pp. Hardbound $55.00; Softbound $19.95. As one of a handful of books on Central American communities in the United States, Fragmented Ties will make a significant...

Dissent in Wichita--the Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Gretchen Cassel Eick. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 312 pp. Hardbound $39.95. For those of us who lived through the 1960s, every evening television brought us face-to-face with news and details of the Civil...

Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 217 pp. Hardbound $29.95; Softbound $14.95. This fine dissertation, which won the 1996 Wesley-Logan Prize for African Diaspora History from the American...

America's Invisible Gulag: a Biography of German American Internment and Exclusion in World War II.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Stephen Fox. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 379 pp. Softbound $34.95. A fascinating and chilling account of German-American internment during World War II, America's Invisible Gulag reveals how thousands of innocent people were caught up...

Women of Courage: Jewish and Italian Immigrant Women in New York.(Book Review)
June 22, 2002... By Rose Laub Coser, Laura S. Anker, and Andrew J. Perrin. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999. 162 pp. Hardbound $54.95. This book was obviously a work of love. It was conceived by SUNY Stony Brook sociologist, Rose Coser, "as a...