Oral History Collection Research Articles

Public archives determination of social memory in appraising local government records in South Africa

A hybrid version of macro-appraisal is used by South African public archivists when separating records of enduring value from ephemeral records. This appraisal function should occur immediately after the filing systems have been approved by the national and provincial archivists. However, in most cases, this function only occurs two years after the filing system has been approved. In the 1990s, the South African National Archives changed its traditional appraisal methodology from a Schellenberg approach to formulate a sound appraisal policy based on the macro-appraisal model. One of the key elements identified was the need to identify gaps in the written records that could be filled during the appraisal process. These gaps could be complemented by the collection of oral history. This study used qualitative data obtained through content analysis and literature to review the appraisal policy guidelines and approaches of the National Archives and the Gauteng Provincial Archives in relation to the process of appraisal, issuing of disposal authorities and capturing of oral history projects in relation to Gauteng local governments. This study used a case study design and specifically focused on the appraisal of Gauteng local government records. Interviews were held with officials of the National Archives and Gauteng Provincial Archives involved in the function of appraisal of public records. This study indicated that there were gaps in archival collections, which should be supplemented by the collection of oral history testimonies. The oral history testimonies collected from individuals and communities affected by socio-economic and socio-political events are not captured by the country’s public archivists. These narratives of post-apartheid South Africa are being lost and may not be captured by the national and provincial archives services. The key recommendation of this study is that there should be clear policy guidelines relating to the process of appraisal and transparency on how these processes are undertaken in South African public archives.

Smears, Laughs, and Barnyard Hokum: Early Jazz Trombone and the Problem of Novelty

Smears, Laughs, and Barnyard Hokum: Early Jazz Trombone and the Problem of Novelty

Uncover Marginalized Narratives of Japanese American Incarceration: An Annotation Scheme for Natural Language Processing and Data Analytics

ABSTRACTAround 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry was forced to remove into internment camps in the United States during World War II. Densho Digital Repository curates a collection of oral histories, which mainly includes 904 filmed interviews about “Japanese American incarceration experience from those who lived it”. This study uses web scraping techniques to collect 904 narrators’ bio information and analyzes their demographic information, including race, age, and location. Nisei counts the most of the Japanese American narrators (78.82% of all narrators). 279 (39.35%) of narrators were minors (born between 1926 and 1942) in the year 1942, when the incarceration happened, with over half of them (58.78%) being teenagers (age between 12 and 17). The majority of narrators (82.09% of the total) are from the west coast, namely, Washington State, Oregon State, or California State. This study also constructs a scheme for incarceration oral history, based on which the incarceration historical texts can be manually or/and automatically processed. The annotation scheme includes seven categories: (1) pre‐war background to the incarceration; (2) government's decision to remove ethnic Japanese; (3) life after removal and during the incarceration; (4) military services; (5) returning of ethnic Japanese after WWII; (6) legal challenges; (7) redress movement.

Studying Industrial Oral History during the Pandemic – Ethical and Methodological Questions

This article discusses an oral history project that examines homer production at the Högfors Ironworks in Karkkila. This was a cooperative project of the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Labour Archives and the Finnish Foundry Museum in Karkkila. A “homer” (firabeli in Finnish) is an object made for one’s own benefit by a worker using his or her factory’s equipment and materials. The article focuses on ethical and methodological issues affecting the study of industrial oral history during the COVID-19 pandemic. What kind of practical and ethical challenges were faced, how could they be solved and how did they affect a project? These issues are reflected in relation to recent academic discussions on conducting oral history interviews during the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic affected the process in numerous ways. The conducting of interviews required a unique solution based on the local services of Karkkila. The risks for interviewers and interviewees were minimized. However, the downside was that a video interview during the long pandemic period might have been a psychologically stressing experience for some interviewees. The interviewees’ ideas about homer practices were similar to those of the previous oral history collections. The major distinction between the Karkkila collection and the previous collections lies in the foundry industry itself.

Local History Research Databases in Latvian Public Libraries

The paper analyzes the collections and databases of the online local history research created by Latvian public libraries, as well as describes the content of the databases as well as available sources of information and its formats. The research base is websites of the main libraries of Latvia's regions and the digital local history research available online. The result of the research led to the conclusion that Latvian public libraries offer a wide range of online local history research resources and databases: local countyman databases and encyclopedia, libraries history materials, information about county, oral history collections: personal records and memory stories. The interviews can be evidenced in audio format. The full texts of the interviews have also been published. Several Latvian public libraries also offer a video format. It is concluded that the local history databases of Latvian public libraries store and provide unique information about the time, place, historical events and people in the region. The sources of oral history included in the local history databases in the collections of Latvian public libraries are an important part of the historical heritage.

Changing Dynamics of the Bote Communities in Sarlahi and Tanahun: A Comparative Study

The objective of this paper is to analyse the lifestyle of the Botes living in Baireni of Tanahun and Karmaiya of Sarlahi District of Nepali. Traditional livelihood patterns of both places are in transition. Now they are shifting towards agriculture, manual labour, government job, carpentry and engaging in foreign employment. To examine all these issues, this research has adopted over two geographical locations, namely Baireni of Tanahun district and Karmaiya of Sarlahi district; the method is exploratory, descriptive and comparative. In order to meet the objectives of this research, data collections were from multiple approaches. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and household surveys were two forms of the the data collection in this research. Collection of oral history, key informant interview, focus group discussion, informal meeting were also applied. It has made the entire methodology an admixture of Qual-Quan approaches. This study concludes that there are a number of instances of livelihood diversification among the Botes of Karmaiya in Sarlahi and Baireni in Tanahun district. Some of such diversifications include commercialization of farm in the rural Bote villages. This has come about because of urban expansion, expansion of various non-agricultural work opportunities in factories, workshops, private offices and to some extent government office as a result of urbanization. This supports the findings of Ellis (1998) and Babbington (1999).

John T. Mason Jr., The Pacific War Remembered. An Oral History Collection (James R. Holmes)

John T. Mason Jr., The Pacific War Remembered. An Oral History Collection (James R. Holmes)

One Concept, One Term, Good Practice but How to Achieve? —Improving Facet Values Quality for Samuel Proctor Oral History Collection, Hosted by the University of Florida Digital Collections

Faceted search, also known as dynamic taxonomies, is a popular feature applied to digital collection sites. Appearing as clickable labels, facets facilitate search result refinement and content browsing. To achieve the utmost efficiency, faceted search requires each facet value to represent a single concept–that is, one controlled vocabulary term represents one concept. However, in reality, this status is hard to achieve. An example of this can be seen in the digital collection of Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, a high-profile international resource hosted by the University of Florida Digital Collections. The Topical Subject and Genre terms appear with many vocabulary control issues: the same concept is often expressed with different terms; the same term appears with different spelling variations; and/or outdated terms mingle with more up-to-date ones. Additionally, compound terms that represent multiple concepts prohibit the grouping of content that share individual concepts. In short, a great deal of improvement will be needed to optimize the faceted search. To address these issues, the Digital Support Services department of the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida launched a pilot metadata remediation project using an out-of-box product – Oxygen XML Editor. This article, in addition to providing one more metadata remediation case study, traces the discussions around metadata quality and analyses the general metadata remediation process. Moreover, this article enriches the discussion of vocabulary control in relation to a core function of digital collection sites–faceted search.

LGBTQ Community Archives in Small Urban Centers: Reflections on Community and University Partnerships to Build Awareness of the Lehigh Valley’s Rich LGBTQ History from AIDS Activism to Anti-Discrimination Legislation

Too frequently regional LGBTQ history outside of major metropolises is not a major focus either in university curriculum or for financially strapped local non-profit organizations as they provide essential direct services to our communities. Even as the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have ushered in a new focus on local archival projects, regional organizations often struggle to find funding for local historical projects while universities provide LGBTQ studies courses that center activism in NYC, Los Angeles, or San Francsico, marches in Washington, D.C., and the value of subcultural spaces on the coasts. As scholars have argued in the past decade, literary critics and historians need to focus more attention on LGBTQ activism, cultural production, and community formations outside of major urban centers. For university faculty, staff, and archivists, we have the opportunity to address this need by partnering with regional LGBTQ organizations, using our resources to help build strong local archives, and working with community members to shape narratives about LGBTQ history that engage with national movements while also addressing the nuances of activist work in various cultural contexts. This article addresses how community center leaders, archivists, faculty, and students in Allentown, PA have collaborated to meet these challenges by discussing three impactful archival projects: F.A.C.T. (Fighting AIDS Continuously Together) public history courses, an exhibit titled “Pride Guides and the Early Years of Lehigh Valley Pride Festivals,” and the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. As we provide details about these projects, we trace the value of centering regional AIDS activism, pride celebrations, and struggles for anti-discrimination legislation for our regional LGBTQ community and our students. We argue that courses, exhibits, and oral history collection not only produce regional connectivity to national political projects and strategies, but also build stronger understanding of the import of local activism for promoting equity at the civic and state level. Beyond understanding the historical trajectory of regional activism, archival work and exhibitions bring diverse young people, elders, and those in the middle of life together who may not have met otherwise to reflect on our history and to imagine our future. The process of incorporating students, organizational leaders, and archivists in shared historical projects and narratives formation builds new networks for meeting urgent present-day needs.

Research ethics to consider when collecting oral histories in wilderness areas such as the Kruger National Park

In the last half century, oral history has emerged as a historical approach that is being considered by archivists involved with the collection and accessibility of archival collections for researchers and interested members of the public. The approach to ethics by oral historians has emerged from two major fears: the fear of failing as researchers and the fear of failing the narrators and doing harm. Archivists also need to be cognisant of these fears when collecting oral history. Confronting these fears makes it possible to understand the complex questions behind oral historians’ and archivists’ preoccupations and sheds light on how oral history has evolved and expanded as a field. The research objectives of this article are to determine the three principles identified from the Belmont Report that relate and should be applied to the collection of oral histories by archivists and historians from communities and individuals residing and working in and alongside the Kruger National Park. The theoretical framework for this article is the critical race theory to address historical accounts from communities and individuals sidelined by the mainstream media in South Africa. For the purposes of this article, the study was conducted with the Makuleka and Tsonga communities to determine what ethical implications need to be respected when conducting oral history projects with communities.Contribution: This article will contribute to ethics concerning social sciences and specifically the collection of oral history.

Community-based Approach to Collection of Oral History for Documentation of Kelaakrè, An Ancient Citadel in Kurdistan

Many archaeological sites particularly in the mountainous areas of Kurdistan Region of Iraq have limited archaeological documentary records despite their historic significance. Among these is KelaAkrè, a local term for an ancient rocky hillfort dating back to the Assyrian Empire period. This pilot study aimed to document the history of Kela Akrè and its connection to the lower historical Akre town through collection of oral history from the local people in an attempt to establish a historical background research for this monument. Rare availability of literature about this site necessitates collection of oral history from the living memories especially of the elderly local people who have witnessed or remember the past events. Two approaches of oral history interviewing (rifle and shotgun) were used for collection of rich historical information that will serve as a helpful tool for documenting KelaAkrè. Narratives about this site and the historical Akre town explored not only the physical structures but also their functions and uses in addition to the relationships among the existing historical monuments. The community-based approach to collection of oral history about Kela Akrè has proved to be instrumental in compiling useful information that can be documented for future documentation purpose

Walking Books? The Oral History Method at The Hong Kong Heritage Project

What role can oral history play in business archives and in public history contexts in Hong Kong today? This article addresses the work of The Hong Kong Heritage Project (HKHP), a major business archive and soon-to-be museum and its work in collecting and recording oral histories since 2007. It situates the work of HKHP within the wider Hong Kong cultural context and investigates the methodologies used by the project to record 530 oral history interviews, the largest collection of oral histories held by a private cultural institution in Hong Kong. In addition, the article examines the challenges and opportunities of collecting oral history in a for-profit environment and the application and uses of oral history in exhibition contexts as a tool to foster audience engagement as well as to encourage understanding and empathy for history as well as other people.

Review: American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by Naoko Wake

Naoko Wake’s American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki centers her eighty-six interviews with U.S. hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), conducted in English and Japanese from 2011 to 2017, and two other oral history collections in our memories of nuclear holocaust. By giving voice to the U.S. citizens who lived with sickness and scars for decades after August 1945, Wake dismantles the United States’s righteous atomic victory narrative. Wake’s work is indeed trans-Pacific, reflected by her definition of U.S. survivors as Japanese Americans with U.S. citizenship living in Japan in 1945 and post-war Japanese and Korean immigrants to the United States who became citizens, and by her focus on how survivors defied and deconstructed national boundaries and memories.After a detailed introduction to the project’s methodology and its themes of colonialism, justice, remembering, and gender, Wake organizes her work into six substantial chapters covering the 1880s to the early 2000s. She positions Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immigrant cities where American-born Japanese and Korean residents experienced layered identities that later undermined national narratives. Her analysis of American victims’ memories destabilizes ideas about belonging and shows how nuclear holocaust’s horrors crossed boundaries of “nationality, age, class, or gender” (pp. 74–75). These categories re-emerged as survivors interacted with each other: men focused on saving other victims while women made medicine and cared for hibakusha. Wake posits that U.S. survivors responded to their identity with silence from 1945–1960, marking an era of cross-national “hiding and healing” (p. 133). Starting in the 1960s, U.S. survivors used community ties, personal testimony, and alliances to create a collective memory that fought for medical care from the U.S. government.Wake’s meticulous analysis adds crucial strands to atomic bomb history, including her documentation of the erasures U.S. survivors experienced in America. She notably argues that the Korean War introduced U.S. survivors still in East Asia to U.S. service personnel, resulting in marriages and convincing Korean survivors to immigrate to the United States. Wake proves that the Cold War obstructed survivors’ voices as the U.S. fixated on future nuclear destruction, but their interactions with each other during this era resisted historical portrayals of the United States, Japan, and the Korean peninsula as purely national actors. American Survivors is grounded in immigration, identity, and the Cold War, yet it avoids familiar cultural and political assessments of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and geopolitics in favor of counter-memories that ask new questions about nuclear holocaust’s morality and that link the silences of hibakusha to those of the United States’s incarcerated Nikkei. One of Wake’s major contributions is her critique of the ways U.S. racism and nationalism forced survivors to negotiate their identities as Americans in a society that marked them as Asian and foreign. This affected medical care available to hibakusha—especially women—and caused American citizens to seek treatment in Japan, reminding them again of their status as “perpetual foreigners.”Chapter introductions are sometimes too lengthy, but provide the nuance needed for the oral histories that follow. Survivors’ stories are occasionally incomplete as Wake privileges analysis over narrative; this may be purposeful, but it does leave unanswered questions. Ultimately, Wake presents a complicated, ambitious addition to atomic bomb historiography in an accessible style that builds upon her scholarship on gender, medicine, and the Hiroshima Maidens. She gives power to unheard survivors, many of whom had never been interviewed. She questions the U.S. government’s refusal to confront the universality of the horrors it inflicted on its own citizens, including radiation sickness, discrimination, legal and human rights violations, and lack of American justice.

‘Sharing our voices’—Taking a learning disability history project online during a pandemic

AbstractThis paper reviews the challenges faced by a team at the Grace Eyre Foundation in running a coproduced oral history project during the pandemic. It examines the benefits and challenges of working online, comparing this to face‐to‐face approaches.For over 100 years, the Grace Eyre Foundation has provided support to people with learning disabilities and/or autism across Sussex. Its founder, Grace Eyre Woodhead, was a pioneer—from around 1896 until her death in 1936, she advocated supporting people with learning disabilities in the community rather than in large, isolated institutions.With Heritage Lottery funding awarded in 2019, ‘Sharing Our Voices’ set out to: create a digital, oral history collection of people who had lived in Shared Lives arrangements since the 1950s. create a digital archive of the life and work of Grace Eyre Woodhead. devise a play inspired by the experience of exploring these histories, to be performed as part of the Brighton Fringe Festival 2021.This article: Describes how the Project Team adapted to continue the project during the 2020–2021 lockdowns. Discusses the opportunities, and limitations, of training people using online technologies. Demonstrates the opportunities, and limitations, of conducting oral history interviews online. Concludes that while online technologies are useful, enabling oral history work to continue under restrictions, there are limits to what can be achieved. We set out some of our learning here but it is hard to see how working online could ever fully replace the benefits of meeting face to face.

Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher

Reviewed by: Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher Paul A. Shapiro Dallas Michelbacher. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 174 pp. The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, issued in 2004, made it clear that the Romanian state, recognized as Nazi Germany's most significant military ally on the Eastern Front, was also a major perpetrator of Holocaust-era crimes. The Final Report provided a platform for what since has become a significant outpouring of new scholarship on the Holocaust in Romania, most of which has concentrated on topics that were the focus of the Final Report. These fell into five broad categories: Romanian antisemitism; anti-Jewish legislation and crimes committed by the fascist Iron Guard during the "National-Legionary State" (September 1940–January 1941); the effort of Ion Antonescu's wartime regime to rob and rid the country entirely of its Jewish population; Jewish response; and postwar obfuscation and denial. Barely five pages of the four-hundred-page Final Report were dedicated to forced labor,1 and the topic languished largely unaddressed for years. Dallas Michelbacher provides the first monograph in English on Jewish forced labor in Romania.2 He makes ample use of the major document collection published in Romanian by Bucharest's Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania3 as well as other published documents. To this he adds in-depth research in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives and in major oral history collections. The result is a much more granular study of Romanian forced labor than previously available. The book provides a review of the orders and guidelines issued by the multiple civil and military authorities which administered the forced labor regime. But to this Michelbacher adds a nuanced picture of the corruption that permeated the administration of forced labor, with officials at every level encouraging and accepting payments against labor exemption certificates, preferential retention at one's traditional job, assignment to a particular locality, etc. He describes the varying degrees of risk of verbal [End Page 216] or physical abuse faced by forced laborers according to the personality and motivations of the civilian and military officials overseeing laborers performing tasks that ranged from heavy rail, road, and defense construction work in so-called "external" labor detachments, to humiliating snow shoveling duty assigned to Jews able to remain in their home towns. He captures the antagonistic attitude of local non-Jews toward Jewish laborers and the resentment that the need to keep some 75,000 Jews in technical, managerial, and administrative jobs in order to keep the national economy running created in both official and civil society circles. He provides a glimpse of the impact that removing able-bodied men for labor, under threat of deportation to Transnistria, had on Jewish community organizations and Jewish families left vulnerable to intimidation and blackmail, often lacking in basic necessities, and uncertain as to what would come next. A picture of forced labor at the ground level emerges most vividly in Michelbacher's chapters 4 and 5, which trace developments leading up to Romania's planned mass deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camp at Belzec, and then following Antonescu's decision to abandon the deportation plan. In these chapters the author moves beyond reliance on published sources and draws heavily on previously untapped archival and testimonial source material. He introduces survivor voices, largely absent from earlier studies, and provides graphic detail regarding several well-documented and painfully remembered labor sites—railroad track repair, a canal, defense works, a quarry, etc. Given the power of this new material, it is unfortunate that the book's footnotes provide only partial information, clarifying where a document can be found, but not the precise nature of the cited document. There is an aspect of Michelbacher's approach that leads the author to some problematic conclusions. The difficulty stems from the geographic limitation of the study, for the most part, to forced labor inside the borders of the Old Kingdom (Regat) and Southern Transylvania, isolated from the broader context of what was taking place in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. It...

The Man Who Lived with a Giant: Stories from Johnny Neyelle, Dene Elder ed. by Alana Fletcher and Morris Neyelle

Reviewed by: The Man Who Lived with a Giant: Stories from Johnny Neyelle, Dene Elder ed. by Alana Fletcher and Morris Neyelle Glen Sean Coulthard (bio) The Man Who Lived with a Giant: Stories from Johnny Neyelle, Dene Elder edited by Alana Fletcher and Morris Neyelle University of Alberta Press, 2019 THE MAN WHO LIVED WITH A GIANT is a classic example of master storytelling in the tradition of late Dene Elders George Blondin (When the World Was New, Yamoria the Lawmaker, and Trail of the Spirit) and John Tetso (Trapping Is My Life). Skillfully edited by researcher Alana Fletcher in collaboration with Johnny Neyelle's son, Morris Neyelle, the book represents a lifetime of stories shared with his family by an Elder who lived through the transition from a self-reliant "way of life" on the land to one that became increasingly influenced by colonial dependency, missionary belligerence, and white encroachment in the latter half of the twentieth century. Recognizing the historical, cultural, and philosophical significance of his father's teachings, Morris began to first record and then painstakingly transcribe and translate his dad's stories in the 1980s. While completing her fieldwork in the Sahtu Dene community of Deline in 2014, Dr. Fletcher was recruited by Morris to help compile the stories into publishable form. The Man Who Lived with a Giant is the result of the web of working relationships that ensued. "[Like] any oral history collection," the editors write, "[this book] is the product of many important relationships: the relationship of the stories to all Sahtu Dene people, past and present; that of the storyteller and his son; the relationship of the two editors; and those among the editors and the support network that help make this book a reality" (vii). The book itself is structured into two parts, "Sacred and Traditional Stories" followed by "Oral Histories from the Life of Johnny Neyelle," bookended by a preface and introduction on the front end and an epilogue, afterword, genealogy, and glossary of North Slavey words on the back end. The first section draws from oral histories that depict "distant time" stories—what some have called "floating time"—representing a period in Dene history and cosmology when spiritually powerful humans and other-than human animals lived and communicated with one another on the land, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in harmony, learning and laboring together to better enable the mutual well-being of all over time. A classic figure in these [End Page 172] stories is that of Yamoria, known in many Dene regions as the "lawmaker," who traveled the world dedicated to establishing the laws that would best facilitate the Dene and animals sustainably living together in peace and reciprocity. Yamoria, like many other characters in these stories, existed at a time when the "world was new," prior to the rapid transformations that would be brought on by colonial development and eventual settlement. The second part deals with stories of life on the land. These stories follow Johnny Neyelle himself—an incredibly knowledgeable and skilled hunter, fisherman, craftsman, and musician—through his important experiences living a fulfilled but challenging life of unalienated labor harvesting the renewable resources that Creation provided. To my mind, the significance of this collection of stories registers on two interrelated levels. First, as someone who regularly works with Dene Elders in educational programming that is substantively shaped by them (and based in large part on the knowledge they have of the land and all that it culturally signifies), storytelling is a critical medium for knowledge production and dissemination. The problem, however, is that Elders who carry these stories are getting older, are passing away, or are sometimes taught by the colonizing society that their knowledge is not legitimate compared to approaches that saturate the classrooms and learning spaces of the dominant society. In such a context, any community-based project that seeks to document and hold up these stories for future generations is a critical project of epistemic decolonization. Second, and relatedly, these histories are meant to teach us things—teach us about politics, law, political economy, and community; they are supposed to inform us how to conduct ourselves safely and ethically in...

“There Will Be an End, But We Don’t Know When”: Preserving Diverse COVID-19 Pandemic Experiences Through Oral History

In March 2020, Stony Brook University Libraries began documenting campus communications and the events locally unfolding as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged across the world. These efforts evolved into a larger rapid-response collecting project planned and managed remotely. Documenting COVID-19: Stony Brook University Experiences was developed to preserve institutional history and experiences. With a collecting scope of personal narratives, photographs, and oral histories, the initiative presented new opportunities and challenges for Stony Brook University Libraries. This study discusses the oral history methods for the project from concept to implementation. It describes the planning and managing processes for the oral histories and considers the ethics of recording trauma experiences contemporaneously during the pandemic. The authors offer practical guidance for developing and processing a rapid-response collection of oral histories in a remote environment.

Filling the ‘Gaps’ in the Representation of Australia’s Cultural Diversity: The Multicultural Imaginary of the NLA’s Oral History Collection

ABSTRACT In Australia’s National Library, the acquisition or commissioning of oral histories is accepted as a method by which their representative mission as socially inclusive and culturally diverse institution can be fulfilled. In this goal, oral history projects which focus on underdocumented, minoritised or marginalised individuals, groups or communities commonly stake their value on the claim that such projects can work to fill the ‘gaps’ in the national story, contribute to a more complete historical record, or recover lost, overlooked or hidden histories. Drawing on the NLA’s institutional documentation, this paper develops the findings of an empirical examination of the NLA’s oral history collection. This examination found a significant mismatch between representations of the oral history collection as diverse and the actual number of ‘diverse’ interviews. Using the analytic lens provided by critical librarianship, this paper considers the implications of these findings and argues for greater recognition of the culturally positioned nature of oral history methodology. It is suggested that by re-thinking oral history’s neutrality, space might be found within collections for a diversity of oral literacies and ‘unique epistemologies ways of knowing, languages, and histories’.

Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick

Reviewed by: Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick Hettie V. Williams Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election. By Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick. ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Pp. xii, 352. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-250-15570-2.) Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick, coauthors of Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York, 2008) and Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality [End Page 193] Changed America (Boston, 2004), is a vivid narrative of the nine days in October 1960 when Martin Luther King Jr. remained in a Georgia jail. King had been arrested for participating in an Atlanta sit-in at Rich's department store as part of a massive wave of protests against the Atlanta business establishment over the issue of segregation. It was the first time King remained in jail for more than one night, described by the authors as a time when King's family "most feared for his life" (p. 5). It was a presidential election year, as the authors note, and the arrest of King, who was increasingly becoming a national figure on civil rights, was "a crisis that would help … determine the victor of the 1960 election" (p. 5). While the majority of the protesters were released, King languished in jail and was kept on a twenty-five-dollar traffic ticket. Refusing to pay bail, King was subsequently sentenced to four months of hard labor, to be served out at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, where Black prisoners worked on chain gangs supervised by vicious white guards. Presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were forced to make a choice on Black civil rights issues on the national stage. Nine Days is the story of how the arrest of King prompted the candidates and their campaigns to grapple with the question of Black civil rights and how their responses ultimately helped determine the outcome of the 1960 presidential race. Mainly it is the story of how the Civil Rights Section (CRS) of the Kennedy campaign, including Black journalist Louis E. Martin, Harris Wofford, and Sargent Shriver, convinced Kennedy to intervene in the situation in King's behalf. Shriver in particular, in his campaign role in charge of outreach to Black voters, pressured for King's release beyond the authority of Kennedy. In terms of organization, the text contains a prologue, fourteen chapters structured around the nine days that King spent in jail, and an epilogue. The prologue and the first two chapters, "In Trouble" and "You Can't Lead from the Back," lay the foundation of the larger story. The series of protests taking place in Atlanta at the time were largely organized and led by students such as Morehouse College student Lonnie King (no relation to Martin Luther King Jr.) in the downtown section of the city. As a result of conversations with student leaders, MLK was compelled to lend his voice to the cause and participate. According to the authors, "the students had timed the protest to affect a close national contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon" (p. 3). These first three sections discuss the events that led up to the Kennedy campaign's greater involvement, including some discussion of the development of the CRS under Harris Wofford, upon the release of most of the students and King's retention after refusing to pay bail. The remaining sections delve deeper into the machinations of the CRS. Nine Days is cogently written and is supported with a wealth of primary sources, including interviews conducted by the authors with eyewitnesses to the events covered in the text, archival collections such as the John F. Kennedy Papers, E. Frederic Morrow Papers, and the NAACP Papers, newspapers, oral history collections, and television and film resources. The authors conducted more...

«Авторедаговані» та сфальшовані свідчення про Голодомор: хто і чому створював варіативні та неправдиві усноісторичні оповіді

Авторкою під час підготовки ГІС-Атласу Голодомору накопичено базу з кількох тисяч одиниць усноісторичних джерел Голодомору. База уможливила порівняння схожих або ідентичних свідчень одних і тих самих чи різних респондентів, оприлюднених у низці видань. Мета статті: з’ясувати, наскільки корелюється наратив однієї і тієї ж особи, опублікований у різних виданнях, з погляду пригадування подій часів Голодомору. Методологія: застосовано історичний метод, аналізу та синтезу, методи джерелознавчого аналізу (порівняльний, текстологічний). Наукова новизна. Авторка зосереджується не на верифікації даних джерел документами чи іншими усними свідченнями, а на достовірності наведених відомостей щодо специфіки пригадування та процесу збирання та підготовки до публікації усних оповідей. Висновки. Дослідження засвідчило, що, з одного боку, наявний певний відсоток републікації свідчень різними упорядниками, що нібито знижує джерелознавчий потенціал видання; з іншого – таке дублювання свідчень часто є цінним матеріалом для розуміння того, як з плином часу мінялися формулювання, часові параметри розповіді; які події найпершими виринали в пам’яті, були важливими для особи, як про них оповідалося. Авторка доводить, що існує певне ядро наративу інформанта, що може доповнюватися значущими для респондента деталями. Встановлено, що вплив інформаційного поля не позначився на ядрі наративу, яке містить вітальні для певного інформанта спогади (переважно пов’язані з боротьбою за життя (обшуки, стратерії виживання) та її програшем (смертністю). Запропоновано пояснення відмінності у пригадуванні респондентами подій у різні роки. Виявлено проблему фальшування свідчення, пов’язану передусім з постаттю інтерв’юера, що не є масовим явищем.