Oral History Program Research Articles

A Black Women’s Practice: Oral History from Fisk University’s Ex-slave Narratives and the Black Women Oral History Project

ABSTRACT Building on recent works that question a simplistic, White narrative of the history of academic oral history, this article focuses on the labors of Black women related to the field. It spans the fifty years during which the first oral history programs began and the Oral History Association came to prominence by highlighting two twentieth-century bookends: Ophelia Settle Egypt collecting ex-slave narratives at Fisk University in the 1920s and the Black Women Oral History Project at Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library in the 1970s. 1 Spotlighting Black women’s oral history work—from project design, advising, and funding, to interviewing, transcribing, project management, and archiving—demonstrates how they developed ethos and practices that reflected themselves and their communities as part of the larger field and best practices. Their approaches are precursors to many of today’s innovations in oral history methods and theories.

Marvette Pérez: A Visionary Smithsonian Curator

Details the career of Marvette Perez (1961–2013), the first Latina curator at the National Museum of American History. Essay emphasizes her curatorial accomplishments, focusing on her collecting practices including some of the larger and smaller acquisitions that she added to the national collections of the Smithsonian Institution. Large collections discussed include the Teodoro Collection of Puerto Rican History, the Goya Foods Inc. Collection, and the Celia Cruz Collection. Smaller collections mentioned include the Diosa Costello Collection, the Tito Puente Collection, the Mongo Santamaria Collection, and a collection of panos from New Mexico. Archival collections are also referenced such as the Clotilde Arias Collection, Latin Jazz Oral History Program, and the Puerto Rican Division of Community Education. Also mentioned is the prior history of Hispanic collecting in the museum conducted by curator Richard Ahlborn which focused on Spanish settlements in the southwestern United States.

‘We Bounce Off Each Other’s Vibe’: The Importance of Symmetrical Intersubjectivity between Interviewer and Narrator

ABSTRACT The field of oral history has long theorized the intersubjectivities forged between narrators and interviewers, yet there is still a lingering assumption in some oral history literature that the positionality of the interviewer in relation to the narrator does not matter much to the interview process. This article seeks to challenge these assumptions by reporting on empirical data collected via interviews and focus groups with narrators who told their stories as part of two different peer-to-peer oral history programs led by two different community archives centered on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC): Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). In peer-to-peer oral histories, narrators and interviewers share at least some formative experiences and identities, reflecting a relationship of equality rather than extraction. Our findings indicate that, across participants from both organizations, shared positionalities engendered trust, safety, and rapport, creating conditions for life-changing interviews (that is, conversations that resulted in significant realizations and actions in narrators’ lives). Peer-to-peer oral history programs, in which members of minoritized communities interview each other, correct the power imbalance inherent when members of dominant groups interview narrators from minoritized groups. They counter extractive models in which credentialed academics mine minoritized community members as sources. We propose the notion of symmetrical intersubjectivity to describe the ways in which positionalities held in common between narrator and interviewer create the conditions for more honest, rich, and intimate life histories to be shared and recorded.

Canalside Chats: The Panama Canal Museum Collection Oral History Project

Capturing the history of the Panama Canal through the words of those that lived and worked there has been an important part of the Panama Canal Museum Collection’s (PCMC) mission since 2010. These first-hand accounts serve important roles in preserving the past as well as in the enrichment of present day exhibits and classroom instruction. The first significant campaign towards this goal coincided with the 2014 Centennial Celebration of the Canal’s opening, and was part of a partnership with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) that continued into 2015. In 2019, after a brief pause, PCMC began preparing to restart the oral history program. Months of planning created the necessary, behind the scenes framework, and we started conducting interviews again in Spring 2020, but our work, along with most of the world’s, dramatically changed with the arrival of COVID-19. We quickly shifted gears, creating online portals for people to submit their individual written narratives and conducting interviews over the phone and Zoom. Despite the new challenges, great additions to the collections have been made over the last two years, particularly though our partnership with Pan-Caribbean Sankofa, an organization that supports the documentation and preservation of the history of the West Indian community associated with the Panama Canal.

Revitalizing Native American Oral Histories at the University of Florida

Beginning in 2020, the George A. Smathers Libraries and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program have partnered on a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF)-funded project to revitalize a collection of over 1,000 legacy Native American oral history materials from the late 1960s to the 1970s. This article shares the project's progress and illustrates enduring considerations for working with Indigenous collections.

The Evolution of Best Practice at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program

ABSTRACT Using experienced-based examples from the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, this article is intended to be of practical use for oral historians, archivists, and community organizers. It follows how the Oral History Program has implemented changes to traditional methods but continues to ethically care for their collection while maintaining long-term relationships with donors. The article calls upon users and practitioners to review the best practices in their archives, to listen to colleagues, to follow current literature, but also to be responsive to their patrons’ wishes, honor relationships with donors, find innovative approaches to making collections accessible, and create new best practices while respecting culturally sensitive materials.

Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them by Steve Estes

Reviewed by: Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them by Steve Estes Thomas Blake Earle Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them. By Steve Estes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. [xii], 201. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6777-5.) Combining history, travelog, and memoir, Steve Estes’s Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them follows the odyssey of Estes and his daughter, Zinnia, as they hunt for surf in an unlikely place: the American South. Stretching from Brownsville to the Chesapeake, the southern coast is hardly known for its waves. The region’s choppy surf is a far cry from the breaks of Waikiki and Malibu that fostered the development of modern surfing. But as Estes shows, the South has incubated a surf culture all its own, one that “reflect[s] many of the major trends that shaped the region and nation since World War II: Cold War militarization, civil rights, the counterculture, the women’s movement, environmentalism, and coastal development” (p. 3). Estes takes an unconventional approach to his subject. In contrast with the staid prose that characterizes much academic writing, Estes weaves together a familiar, and at times humorous, style with the insights and erudition of a professional historian. Surfing the South follows Estes and his daughter as they road-trip along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, leapfrogging from (unheralded) surf breaks in Grand Isle and Pensacola to (unheralded) surf breaks in Daytona Beach and the Outer Banks. Estes is as comfortable musing on the ups and downs of the trip—riding secondhand surfboards, staying in ratty motels, and navigating the father-daughter relationship during the preteen years—as he is analyzing the major currents of twentieth-century southern history that have shaped how surfing has developed in the region. Apart from Estes and his daughter, the other characters who populate this search for the stoke are dozens of southern surfers. At every stop along the way Estes connects with locals intimately familiar with the surf scene. As Estes observes, “anywhere with waves can produce wild surf and even wilder surfers” (p. 3). Through his southern surfari, Estes introduces the reader to characters like a born-again board-rider in Galveston, a Vietnam veteran who found waves to surf wherever Uncle Sam sent him, and a Black surfer in Charleston who rides the waves along a once-segregated beach. These interactions have [End Page 401] produced an invaluable source base that not only provides the foundation for Surfing the South but also is available for future research. Estes conducted more than forty interviews that are now preserved as part of the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program. Speaking of sources, some readers may be left wanting. The text is free of citations. “Writing without footnotes,” Estes tells us, “felt like performing acrobatics without a net or surfing without a leash” (p. 191). However, if the absence of citations is a trade-off for Estes’s more engaging style, that is a deal this reviewer is more than happy to make. While wave riding may seem far removed from the major currents of southern history, surfing proves to be a valuable opening through which readers can see the South’s modern past. Readers can also see that the region has ties to the maritime world that go beyond cotton shipping, commercial fishing, and oil drilling. In bringing together surfing and the South, Estes has been careful to avoid the kinds of caricaturing that have often been deployed when discussing surfers and southerners alike, identities that Estes himself shares. “I sought a balance,” Estes professes, “between the inherent sympathies of a native southerner and the crucial objectivity of a California outsider. I realized that I was both part of the ‘we’ and the ‘y’all’ of the story” (p. 4). Estes has given historians of surfing and of the South, not to mention historians who are surfers or southerners, a valuable gift. Thomas Blake Earle Texas A&M University at Galveston Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

How US judges manage a dilemma narrating their careers

In the United States the law espouses contrary principles about the relationship between identity categories, such as race and gender, and justice. On the one hand, a more representative judiciary is seen to be a way to ensure greater justice. On the other, the law is assumed to be “blind” to parties’ identities; race and gender of judges and litigants doesn’t matter. These contrary principles create a dilemma when judges narrate their career. This study examines interviews with 20 retired and senior judges, five judges of each of four racial-gender categories: Black and white men and women, culled from the city of Philadelphia’s Senior Judge Oral History Program. After providing specifics about the Senior Judge interviews, past research on gender and race influences on professional talk, and describing issues to consider in interviews, I analyze the interviews and show that judges deal with the dilemma of identities mattering AND identities not mattering by distinguishing two phases of life: how a person came to be a judge and what a person did as a judge. In explaining how one came to be a judge, the person’s race and gender were clear influences. In contrast, when judges narrated their work activities, what they did as a judge, there were few discursive tells revealing a judge’s race or gender. In concluding I consider the problems and advantages of managing this justice-identities dilemma in the fashion that these judges did and suggest a direction for future research.

Pathways in Oral History: Paul Ortiz

In this Pathways in Oral History, we hear from Paul Ortiz, the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida. Ortiz’s work is situated in the realm of social justice, particularly involving workers’ experiences and how race is implicated in workers’ rights. Ortiz is shaped very much by his family heritage and his own experience organizing farmworkers in the Pacific Northwest. As part of that work he interviewed men and women on radio programs, served in the US Army in Central America, and conducted interviews with African Americans in North Carolina for a major research study. Much of his work has centered on African Americans, which has afforded him a keener appreciation of how our economic system has exploited workers from Black and Brown groups.

Notes on Contributors

Other| August 01 2022 Notes on Contributors Italian Americana (2022) XL (2): x–xii. https://doi.org/10.5406/2327753X.40.2.02 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Notes on Contributors. Italian Americana 1 August 2022; XL (2): x–xii. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/2327753X.40.2.02 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian Americana Search Advanced Search John Cavallone is a Chicago area genealogist; author of From Sassano to 48th & Federal Street: An Italian Migration at the Turn of the 20th Century and contributing author to Reconstructing Italians in Chicago: 10th Anniversary 2021 Edition and The Sassano Project. (www.sassanochicago.org). He was the proprietor of the Tenth Planet comic bookstores and has served as technology engineer for AVMA in various school districts in Northeast Illinois.Donna M. DeBlasio is professor emerita of history and the former director of the Center for Applied History and the Oral History Program at Youngstown State University. She has authored and co-authored scholarly and popular works on the history of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley. These include five books for Arcadia publishing and the co-authored publication from Swallow Press, Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History (2009). Dr. DeBlasio is currently editor of Ohio History, published by the... You do not currently have access to this content.

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.

The Globalization of the Church History Department: The Plight of an Outsider Looking In (A Personal Reflection)

The Globalization of the Church History Department: The Plight of an Outsider Looking In (A Personal Reflection)

Fragmented History: Challenges and Perspectives Building a Narrative of the Latter-day Saints in Brazil

Fragmented History: Challenges and Perspectives Building a Narrative of the Latter-day Saints in Brazil

Oral History, Donor Engagement, and the Cocreation of Knowledge in an Academic Archives

This article examines attempts at the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library (SWC/ SCL), in Lubbock, Texas, to integrate its oral history program into collection acquisition, arrangement, description, and discovery processes. Beginning with the creation of a staff position dedicated to acquisition, and continuing through an evolution of job duties resulting from COVID-19, the SWC’s oral historians now not only facilitate collection acquisition through extensive relationship building but also engage donors during arrangement and description. Such reconceptions have led to new processes and workflows, wherein oral history has become an endeavour of collaborative knowledge creation and an enabler of a more democratic archives.

Interview of Peter E. Friedland

David Alan Grier conducted this interview May 16, 2018 with Peter E. Friedland. This is part of the ongoing oral history program of the Software Industry Special Interest Group, which is part of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. We are here at the Computer History Museum

A forgotten past is the past that is yet to be

South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa that has a running oral history association. In some countries, especially in southern Africa, these oral history associations have arisen and then died a natural death. For example, Oral Traditions Association of Zimbabwe (OTAZI) did not last long. Therefore, it is a positive development for South Africa to have a functioning oral history association. The Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA) is the brainchild of the government and is mainly funded by the government. It is involved in the coordination and documentation of stories that were silent during the apartheid era. Therefore, with this highly perceived task it is necessary to critically evaluate its successes and failures in meeting the objectives of the National Oral History Programme (NOHP). This paper, through document analysis and purposively selected interviews, critically evaluates the achievements and shortcomings of the OHASA from its inception to present with the aim of proposing a ‘working’ model which involves the setting up of a monitoring and evaluating system. The paper concludes that although OHASA unveiled the muted marginalised voices, it soral history programme demonstrate elitism in critical emancipatory as mostly the stories of the elites are covered. Furthermore, such recorded stories are not accessible as the recordings are stashed in the boxes in archives repositories.

A forgotten past is the past that is yet to be

South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa that has a running oral history association. In some countries, especially in southern Africa, these oral history associations have arisen and then died a natural death. For example, Oral Traditions Association of Zimbabwe (OTAZI) did not last long. Therefore, it is a positive development for South Africa to have a functioning oral history association. The Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA) is the brainchild of the government and is mainly funded by the government. It is involved in the coordination and documentation of stories that were silent during the apartheid era. Therefore, with this highly perceived task it is necessary to critically evaluate its successes and failures in meeting the objectives of the National Oral History Programme (NOHP). This paper, through document analysis and purposively selected interviews, critically evaluates the achievements and shortcomings of the OHASA from its inception to present with the aim of proposing a ‘working’ model which involves the setting up of a monitoring and evaluating system. The paper concludes that although OHASA unveiled the muted marginalised voices, it soral history programme demonstrate elitism in critical emancipatory as mostly the stories of the elites are covered. Furthermore, such recorded stories are not accessible as the recordings are stashed in the boxes in archives repositories.

Engaging Students in Oral History in the Archival Science Study Program, Vocational College, Universitas Gadjah Mada

ABSTRACT The Archival Science Study Program, run by the Vocational College at Universitas Gadjah Mada, has produced numerous oral history archives since 1997 and has contributed diverse themes through the Oral History Program course in practical subjects. These oral history archives can be used by the public, through information technology, to facilitate knowledge transfer and as oral evidence using the ARISAN (Arsip Sejarah Lisan) mobile application. This study aims to describe the implementation of the oral history archives dissemination program, as one of the models used for oral evidence, as well as for recording the oral history published in the community.

The oral history programme at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York (1977‐present)

The oral history programme at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York (1977‐present)

Methods for Collecting Oral Histories Amidst a Crisis

ABSTRACT Our goal in this project was to analyze past methodologies of oral history practitioners recording interviewees after traumatic events, which we define as widespread human-made and natural crises. The current COVID-19 pandemic and the reticence that some institutions have shown in engaging with oral history programs due to potential traumatic injury to participants influenced our objective. By examining a broad sample of cases, triangulating our data research tools, and engaging with oral history practitioners currently in the field, we hope to generate a responsible template for documenting the lived experiences of our current, extraordinary times. We studied oral history interviews with participants that ranged from the Rwandan genocide and Japanese American internment to those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Ultimately, we found a need for more accurate community representation, unintuitive interview methodologies to positive outcomes and misconceptions around historical distance, or the amount of time between the traumatic event and the oral history interview, in academic standards.