Each of Us Sees History through Our Own Eyes

Abstract

I began doing oral 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 me to do a of the East European Jewish immigrants who had come to Minneapolis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to include interviews with them as part of my research. Part of the reason, of course, was that since I already had B.A. and M.A. degrees in journalism, interviewing people in depth about events and their participation in those events was something that I was trained to do. And of course the reason I was pursuing a Ph.D. degree was because when I got my first teaching job at the University of Wisconsin/Superior, which in 1961 was still Superior State College, with my brand-new M.A. in journalism, and was introduced to Jim Dan Hill, the president of the college, he looked down at me and said, Well, I hope you're going to upgrade your sub-standard credentials. So that was how, and when, I learned that the Ph.D. was your union card if you planned to teach at the college level. I taught there for two years-because it looked good, in that era,