Oral History Project Research Articles

Making the Past Relevant

AbstractThis paper outlines several outreach initiatives that the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológico Regional Ancash (PIARA) established to address the challenges of heritage preservation at the prehistoric archaeological site and rural community of Hualcayán, located in rural highland Ancash, Peru. We discuss three projects—a heritage festival, a textile enterprise, and an oral history project—that were designed and executed through a collaboration between PIARA and the Hualcayán community. We find that these “co-creative” projects encourage local stakeholders to discover and define for themselves the value of both their ancient and modern heritage. Reflecting on the outcomes from these projects, we discuss the co-creative approach as an effective strategy for improving the preservation of archaeological remains and enhancing the livelihood of the modern community.

‘The confidence to know I can survive’: resilience and recovery in post-quake Christchurch

This paper explores the relevance of terms such as resilience and recovery when analysing earthquake stories recorded for the Women's Voices/Ngā Reo o Ngā Wahine Project after the sequence of earthquakes and aftershocks in Christchurch, New Zealand's second-largest city, in 2010–2011. While the media focused on stories of victims, the heroic work of rescue teams, policy, army and firefighters, or the deliberations of national and local politicians, the National Council of Women of New Zealand wanted to ensure that women's everyday quake experiences were recorded for posterity. The outcome was an oral history project that documented the stories of women all over the city, both beneficiaries of earthquake support and those active in assisting others. Their narratives illustrate how resilience in the face of natural hazard events, such as this earthquake sequence, requires effort, ingenuity and imagination, but also the activation of multiple actor networks and relevant technologies. These ‘insider stories’ also highlight the ways in which expectations of ‘resilience’ can obscure vulnerability after natural hazard events and the complex and uneven processes associated with ‘recovery’. The relevance of critical reflections on discourses of resilience is explored through attention to the stories of specific women.

Migrating motherhood and gendering exile: Eastern European women narrate migrancy and homing

Synopsis This article draws on a larger oral history project with Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Polish migrant women living Greece, exploring how migrancy, motherhood and mothering intersect with how a negotiation and translation of emotional, cultural, embodied agency is transformed in the meanings of citizenship on translocal and transnational levels. We unpack gendered representations of how striving to belong is transmitted in migrant mothering practices and how the latter intersect with wider issues of immigration policy and status in an era of crises in Greece. In mapping experiences of migrant mothering through participant narratives, we demonstrate the importance of understanding mothering and migrancy as parallel, complementary and complex performativities. As such they form iconographies of resilience, incorporation and individual agency as women cope with being both migrants and mothers, often without extensive networks of support, and within a context of a wider xenophobic and crisis-ridden Greece.

Recording oral history: a guide for the humanities and social sciences

Recording History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. second Edition. By Valerie Raleigh Yow (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005. Pp. 416. Index. Cloth, $75.00, paper, $29.95). In this revised edition of her textbook, Recording Valerie Yow presents an introduction to oral history that is extremely accessible and useful. The author's aim is larger than simply offering instructions on how to record interviews. Instead, Yow presents a cogent and clear synthesis that combines practical advice with consideration of many ethical, methodological, and analytical challenges that researchers may encounter. The book's chapters are divided topically in a manner that makes it easy for readers to find and read relevant information; a detailed table of contents and extensive index aid this effort. Individual chapters offer practical advice on topics such as Preparation for the Project, Interviewing Techniques, and Legalities and Ethics. Other chapters are more theoretical or scholarly, summarizing current thinking in the social sciences and humanities on topics such as Interpersonal Relations in History, Oral History and Memory, and Analysis and Interpretation. The remaining chapters are geared toward the researcher who seeks guidance on starting an oral history project focused on a community, an individual, or a family. A series of appendices contain examples of forms one might use in research and professional guidelines for interviewers. Throughout the text, Yow presents an overview that will be helpful to both beginners and experienced oral historians. For the novice, Yow includes detailed and practical information about how to conduct an interview and how to design and start an oral history project. She covers topics such as framing questions, selecting equipment, and creating forms and a format for keeping information and materials well organized. This information is suitable for use within a classroom or to direct independent researchers working outside a scholastic setting. Yow is a confident and accessible guide, drawing on her own extensive experience as an interviewer and researcher, as well as framing her advice within the context of the standards set by relevant historical organizations. Like these organizations, whose oral history guidelines are reprinted in the book's appendices, Yow urges interviewers to conduct broad, life history interviews, rather than those focused more narrowly on a single topic, and that they make arrangements to preserve their interviews in a suitable library or archive. Her instructions are framed with these expectations in mind. …

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American WestJessie L.Embry, Editor. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.

Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West Jessie L. Embry, Editor. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.In Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West, editor Jessie L. Embry has assembled eighteen authors to share their experiences working on oral history projects. Throughout the essay collection, each author comments on oral history's unique utility for the study of the American West and, in doing so, revisits some well-trod arguments. In particular, several authors focus on oral history's ability to fill gaps when textual sources are unavailable or misleading and on oral history's tradition of giving voice to people who are often ignored in mainstream historical texts. However, instead of seeming redundant, attention to the logistic, emotional, and political process of doing oral history produces an engaging narrative and provides satisfying insight into the interactive, communal process of writing oral history.Embry divides the book into three sections. The first section provides a retrospective look at careers spent working in oral history. She describes her experiences at the Redd Center for Western Studies, pointing out the fundamental importance of existing personal ties and the establishment of trust for a successful oral history project. Barbara Allen Bogart compares two oral history projects-her dissertation research into the homesteader past of Fort Rock, Oregon and a project on mining in Evanston, Wyoming-that bookend her oral history career. Laurie Mercier documents her experiences recording women's oral histories in Montana, demonstrating that much can be gleaned from studying the silences in oral history interviews.Section Two includes a series of oral history projects that fill gaps in Western historiography-telling the complex and varied stories of women and minority groups in the twentieth-century West. William Bauer, Jose Alamillo, Clay tee White, and Skott Brandon Vigil document labor in California and the Southwest. Bauer, Alamillo, and Vigil interview Native American and Flispanic farm laborers to document their continued sense of family and community in the face of alienating labor practices. White chronicles the overlooked experiences of African American workers in postwar Las Vegas. Joanne Goodwin, Sandra Mathews, John Sillito, Sarah Langsdon, Marci Farr, and Melanie Newport uncover the untold stories of women's lives in the West. Georgia Wier records the experiences of Japanese families in 1940s Colorado, adding complexity to the story of Japanese dislocation and internment during World War Two. …

Peter Scott. The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi and Family Life between the Wars.

Peter Scott presents in this book a revisionary history of the genesis of the modern British suburb which concentrates especially on how, in the decades between the two world wars, large sections of the British working classes became suburbanites. The author dismantles the often-heard opinion that modern suburbs were primarily a middle-class phenomenon. As such, they were financially beyond the reach of even the upper layers of the working classes even if developers, politicians, real estate agents, and building societies tried to recklessly impose the suburban way of life onto them. Eschewing any a priori dismissive or appreciative attitude toward suburbs, Scott relies instead on datasets like, for example, 600 returns from “Britain's first detailed national household expenditure survey, conducted by the Ministry of Labour over the year beginning October 1937” (p. vii). Other sources include personal testimonies, such as interviews, biographies, and contributions to oral history projects, from migrants who moved into suburbs. The main thesis of the book is that the interwar years were characterized by a process of suburbanization that allowed approximately 25 percent “of non-agricultural British working-class households [to] move to suburban estates … with around 13 per cent taking the municipal housing route to suburbia, around 9 per cent taking the mortgage route, and perhaps 3 per cent renting privately developed suburban housing” (p. 10). Even more, the end of the Great War brought with it the end of terraced housing, until then one of Britain's favorite types of building for housing the working classes and sections of the middle classes. Drawing on prewar garden city ideas, the new suburban housing was mostly low-density, short terraces, and especially “semis,” or semi-detached houses. Finally, Scott traces in great detail the manifold social changes that came with swapping urban housing for suburban homes. “[A] new form of working-class respectability emerged, based around maintaining minimum accepted standards of dress and other visible markers of consumption, restrained speech and behaviour, high standards of personal and domestic hygiene, ‘privatized’ family- and home-centred lifestyles, and an increased commitment of resources to the welfare and material advancement of the next generation” (p. 11).

Little Dixie’s Circus Cemetery

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Often referred to as Little Dixie, the southeastern corner of Oklahoma is home to more than just customs stemming from Native American influences in the 1800s and southerners who later migrated to the area in the 1900s. Outside of similarities in agriculture, architecture, demographics, and politics resembling the American South, in one town you can add another unique feature to the list: the circus. Hugo, Oklahoma, the county seat of Choctaw County, has served as the winter home for traditional tent shows since the 1940s. The Miller family's Al G. Kelly and Miller Brothers was the first to call Hugo, Oklahoma, home, thanks to the support of local businessman and circus fan Vernon Pratt. While Pratt offered the Millers free water for their animals, it proved to be a good move for circus owner Obert Miller and his two sons, Kelly and D. R., as the family was looking for a warmer climate over the winter months. Soon after the Millers established Hugo as their winter quarters, other shows followed. In addition to the town's temperate climate, Hugo also has easy access to state highways, which run north and south as well as east and west, creating more options when planning circus routes. The Hugo-based tent shows often followed the agricultural harvest and brought entertainment to rural communities throughout the South. Through the years, approximately twenty circuses established winter quarters in Hugo, with notable owners such as Herb Walters, the Miller family, and Jack Moore all setting up shop in the Little Dixie town known as Circus City, U.S.A. As of 2014, only three traditional tent circuses continue to call Hugo home: Carson and Barnes, Kelly Miller, and Culpepper & Merriweather. Despite the boom and later decline of circuses in the area, Hugo continues to hold strong to its circus heritage. One distinct reminder of this heritage can be found while exploring the tombstones at the Mount Olivet Cemetery. In the 1960s, a section of the cemetery was established as Showmen's Rest, serving as the final resting place for circus entertainers, employees, and show owners from not only Oklahoma but all parts of the country. Wandering through row after row of unique markers and engravings sparked an interest in the people laid to rest there. Unanswered questions led to the development of an oral history project focused on preserving the culture of those with circus ties in the Little Dixie town of Hugo, Oklahoma. NOTE Photos and interview excerpts were recorded as part of The Big Top Show Goes On: An Oral History of Occupations Inside and Outside the Canvas Tent. Made possible by a 2011 Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, oral history transcripts, recordings, and images from this project are available at the Oklahoma State University Library and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We had a gentleman that worked for us, and he was just a drifter that came on as a teenager and ended up spending his whole life with us. His name was John Carroll, and he worked with the animals. And especially back in the old days, some of the guys that would come along, they were drifters and didn't really have family connections, and so the circus kind of ended up being their family and their home, and they spent their lives here. So John Carroll was one of those characters. He had lost his eye in an accident, and he received like an insurance settlement. I think it was seventeen thousand dollars or something, and he didn't have a family. About five or six years later, he passed away. And unbeknownst to my father, he had left this insurance settlement to my father. My dad didn't know what to do with it, and about that same time my uncle passed away, and that was in 1960. So he got the idea of making this place where circus people would be buried, because a lot of times circus people, like I say, don't have roots, and they would be buried in Timbuktu. …

Literacy narratives as sponsors of literacy: Past contributions and new directions for literacy-sponsorship research

In this article, I review influential contributions made by writing-studies researchers to the research literature on literacy sponsorship. Through this review, I show how subsequent studies have reiterated three basic assumptions of Deborah Brandt's pioneering oral-history project. However, I also demonstrate that later writing-studies research on literacy sponsorship has tended to narrow Brandt's expansive notion of literacy sponsors to denote people exclusively. I link this trend to subsequent studies' greater reliance on personal narratives as evidence sources. This genre typically concentrates power of influence in human actors. In this way, I propose that the rhetoric of literacy narratives “sponsors,” or enables and constrains, the literacy-related experiences of researchers as well as study participants, and of teachers as well as students. Moreover, I suggest that future literacy-sponsorship studies might attend particularly to the affective force of narrative rhetoric, or literacy narratives' power to fascinate, repel, and otherwise move audiences and recounters. Drawing on important terms in Brandt's work on literacy sponsorship, I outline directions for future research that would examine literacy sponsors as rhetorical “figures,” literacy narratives as “scenes” of literacy sponsorship and literacy sponsorship as “involvement.”

Anne Fine

An interview with Anne Fine with an introduction and aside on the role of children’s literature in our lives and development, and our adult perceptions of the suitability of childhood reading material.Since graduating from Warwick in 1968 with a BA in Politics and History, Anne Fine has written over fifty books for children and eight for adults, won the Carnegie Medal twice (for Goggle-Eyes in 1989 and Flour Babies in 1992), been a highly commended runner-up three times (for Bill’s New Frock in 1989, The Tulip Touch in 1996, and Up on Cloud Nine in 2002), been shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (the highest recognition available to a writer or illustrator of children’s books, 1998), undertaken the positon of Children’s Laureate (2001-2003), and been awarded an OBE for her services to literature (2003). Warwick presented Fine with an Honorary Doctorate in 2005.Philip Gaydon’s interview with Anne Fine was recorded as part of the ‘Voices of the University’ oral history project, co-ordinated by Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study.

Swedish Roots, Oregon Lives: An Oral History Project ed. by Lars Nordström (review)

Swedish Roots, Oregon Lives: An Oral History Project ed. by Lars Nordström (review)

Collaborative Complexities: Co-Authorship, Voice, and African American Rhetoric in Oral History Community Literacy Projects

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

Lessons from IJR’s Schools’ Oral History Project, 2004 – 2010

The institute for Justice and Reconciliation works in post-conflict societies guided by its vision to establish fair, democratic and inclusive societies on the African continent. It seeks to do so through four programmes one of which is the Building an Inclusive Society where the Schools’ Oral History (SOHP) is located.In pursuit of the above a variety of processes are explored within formal educational curricula as well as community-wide appreciation of multiple-perspectives as well as multiple-voices that will contribute democratization of local historical consciousness and documentation.Educators and learners are assisted to explore the notions about the construction and production of history; the methodological approaches to the oral history process, and the various ways in which the oral history research could be presented.The IJR’s oral history project has conducted projects in five provinces.A number of provisional lessons are: (1) Older and younger project members from diverse communities are eager to acquire new skills and knowledge in understanding and making contributions to their communities; (2) Project participants enjoyed to engage the ‘other’ in safe spaces; (3) Local government structures seemed interested to participate but in many instances were overwhelmed by their core business of service delivery; (4) One of the ways to stimulate the interest in and development of local history could be to start platforms where aspects of local history could be explored across historical divides.

Voices in Movement: Feminist Family Stories in Oral History and Sound Art

Voices in Movement, a sound installation directed by artist Lizzie Thynne with music by Ed Hughes, draws on memories recorded for Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project. Both the installation and oral history foreground family stories as central to feminist politics, though in diverse and shifting ways. As the producer of the installation and director of the oral history project, I explore how these representations of the family emerge, as well as the differences between oral history and sound installation as forms of life story-telling.

Simply Necessity?: Agency and Aesthetics in Southern Home Canning

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2008 ethnographic celebration of American county fairs, Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz pointed to pigs, quilts, and dirty pickup trucks as surefire signs of rural culture. Jars of colorful award-winning preserves also affirmed the vibrant life beyond urban centers: after all, the authors asked, Who in the city makes jelly? Indeed, jars of sweet potato butter, corncob jelly, pickled ramps, and peach-pecan preserves proclaim country pride in venues across the South today. They crowd the shelves of the Museum of Appalachia store in Clinton, Tennessee, and balance in stacks at the Western North Carolina Farmers' Market in Asheville. Farther east, in South Carolina's Lowcountry, the Charleston Farmers' Market offers downtown visitors half-pints of muscadine-apple jam from Grace's Kitchen, and repurposed gas station off the Charleston Highway stocks condiments like sweet tea jelly (from Rina's Kitchen) alongside local barbecue sauces and plates of fresh pie. (1) Yet county fairs and regional gift shops hardly have monopoly home canning displays: preserving food in city dwellings and urban apartments has become hip in the twenty-first century. Liana Krissoff's Canning for New Generation-. Bold, Fresh Flavors for the Modern Pantry (2010) is just one of many recent publications oriented toward novice canners and new canning contexts. The book's roots lie in Krissoff's memories of her parents as they worked to contain the surpluses of their Virginia and Georgia gardens, but it caters to those who associate pickles with curried lentils and sashimi, who would bypass standard peach jam in favor of a small spoonful of fig preserves with port and rosemary alongside wedge of veiny blue cheese and thick slice of dark bread. Krissoff unapologetically promotes the pleasures of home preserving, not least because of its social benefits: jar of marmalade received in the mail can materialize an otherwise-virtual relationship with fellow food blogger, making the connection as tangible as the blueberries spread her morning toast. Upbeat, intimate, practical, and epicurean, Canning for New Generation advocates sensual revival characterized by playful creation and exchange. (2) The same year that Krissoff published her cookbook, Slate columnist Sara Dickerman wrote that preserving at home had become ridiculously trendy, its products mere culinary trophies meant to display an overwrought and morally framed gourmand aesthetic. In the second decade of the millennium, she lamented, canning had shifted from modest, frugal, and routine practice into one overlaid with revivalist fervor that centered the thriftiness, healthfulness, and environmental virtues of marmalades and dilly beans. Dickerman doubted that the production of small-scale fancy condiments constituted meaningful political statement, that project-based preserving could effect significant environmental or economic regeneration, or, she implied, make dent in larger American problems such as hunger or an abusive industrial food system. But another level, her displeasure hung the social and sensory aspects of new-generation efforts, which she characterized as expensive fits of showy industriousness, their products bloggable and boastworthy but ultimately frivolous. In this view, rosemary-infused fig preserves are out of step with historical practice, which focused serious food like unadorned stewed tomatoes or salted green beans--the kind of goods on which you could actually base your diet. As with many food trends, she concluded, today's cultish hobby was yesterday's (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Dickerman's is not the only public voice that emphasizes creativity and choice in canning's (urban) present, but compulsion and need in its (rural) past. In 2006, the editors of an oral history project in rural Kentucky observed, These days, some may choose to can and freeze certain products, but in the past, it was necessity. …

Collaborative Complexities: Co-Authorship, Voice, and African American Rhetoric in Oral History Community Literacy Projects

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

Black Migrants, White Queers and the Archive of Inclusion in Postwar London

This essay examines the historical concurrence of massive West Indian migration to Britain and the explosion of discourses around British homosexuality in the mid-twentieth century. Examining unpublished archives, including an oral history by a queer Jamaican dancer who migrated to London in 1948, and juxtaposing materials from the era that are often kept separate, I work to account for, and fill in, the archival lack around black queer life in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, when the nation was aflutter with noise about putatively ‘new’ and more visible homosexual cultures. But my research also raises questions about the stakes of archival inclusion. Reading sociologies and texts from archives of the Institute of Race Relations, the Hall Carpenter Gay and Lesbian Oral History Project at the British Library, and the papers of Edith Ramsay collected at the Lambeth Library, I argue that the legal inclusion of the male homosexual into the national body politic through the decriminalization of ‘buggery’ proceeded alongside the legal exclusion of the black colonial immigrant. This meant that in the archives and sociologies of these debates, the black homosexual could not be recognized as such (or else he would need to be included in the national body politic, too), making for a queer set of textual misrecognitions, as well as for fascinating irruptions of the queer black figure in normative and normalizing discourses.

Pennsylvania's Past from a Unique Perspective: Oral History

Abstract: An oral history project as part of a course on the history of Pennsylvania offers students an opportunity to connect to the history of their communities, make tangible the topics that we study in class, and provide documentation of a person, place, event, or community that might otherwise be lost. To be successful, students need to learn how to research their topic, work with recording equipment, conduct a pre-interview, structure an interview, ask open and closed questions, and transcribe an interview. While a challenging and time-consuming assignment, the oral history project is often the aspect of the course that students find most rewarding, as it offers them an opportunity to record a family member's story, to learn about an aspect of local history, or to make a contribution to the history of a neighborhood or organization. Reviewing my students' work is also one of my favorite aspects of the course; it gives me added insight into the lives of the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the recent history of the state. Supplemental resources are posted on the journals' web pages.

Pennsylvania's Past from a Unique Perspective: Oral History

An oral history project as part of a course on the history of Pennsylvania offers students an opportunity to connect to the history of their communities, make tangible the topics that we study in class, and provide documentation of a person, place, event, or community that might otherwise be lost. To be successful, students need to learn how to research their topic, work with recording equipment, conduct a pre-interview, structure an interview, ask open and closed questions, and transcribe an interview. While a challenging and time-consuming assignment, the oral history project is often the aspect of the course that students find most rewarding, as it offers them an opportunity to record a family member’s story, to learn about an aspect of local history, or to make a contribution to the history of a neighborhood or organization. Reviewing my students’ work is also one of my favorite aspects of the course; it gives me added insight into the lives of the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the recent history of the state. Supplemental resources are posted on the journals’ web pages.

Callan Park: Compassion and Conflict in the Asylum by Roslyn Burge

76 Health & History, 2015. 17/2 Book Reviews Roslyn Burge, Callan Park: Compassion and Conflict in the Asylum (Sydney: Friends of Callan Park, 2015). ISBN 978-0-9943688-0-5 (HC). 32pp. What is Callan Park? Callan Park is an area of 61 hectares in the Leichhardt municipality of Inner West Sydney, between Lilyfield and Rozelle. In 1839, crown solicitor and police magistrate, John Ryan Brenan, made a series of purchases to acquire the Callan Park land, which he named the Garry Owen Estate: Brenan built a house on the land overlooking the Parramatta River which he named Garry Owen House, and this was a local centre for social life until his bankruptcy in 1864. The land was then purchased by a Sydney businessman, John Gorton, who renamed the property Callan Park, after the Callan River in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The entire area was purchased by the colonial government and became Callan Park Lunatic Asylum in 1874. The main complex was completed in 1885, the two major and adjoining areas being known as Callan Park and Broughton Hall. Broughton Hall functioned as the No. 13 Auxiliary Military Hospital during World War I and in 1920 gave its name to the first voluntary psychiatric clinic in the nation. Callan Park and Broughton Hall were amalgamated in 1976 to form the Rozelle Hospital, and this hospital itself was closed on April 30, 2008. Now the former Rozelle Hospital site, known as Callan Park, is subject to the Callan Park (Special Provisions) Act 2002 and is owned by NSW Health. The Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority previously advised the state government on the future of the site but since June 2015 responsibility for the administration of Callan Park has been transferred to the state minister for the Environment. Roslyn Burge is a professional historian who has worked at the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS as a team member on oral history projects, and also, has worked independently with oral history projects for government, corporate, and individual clients. Few communities across Australia have embraced and lived so closely with two psychiatric clinics in their midst for more than 134 years; Roslyn Burge attests that the local community consistently and overwhelmingly supports the establishment of voluntary community mental health services at Callan Park. Health & History ● 17/2 ● 2015 77 History Week is the annual celebration of history across NSW and is presented by the History Council of NSW. Almost every year since 1999 the ‘Friends of Callan Park’ have presented an event for History Week and/or the National Trust’s Heritage Festival as a means of educating the public about some of the issues pertinent not only to Callan Park and mental health services but also to contribute to the public discussion about the state of heritage and the management of institutional cultural landscapes. The History Week theme in 2010 was ‘Faces in the Street’: the friends of Callan Park interpreted this as ‘Faces in the Park’, and utilising oral history interviews and community contributions, an outdoor poster exhibition was launched across the landscape of Callan Park and Broughton Hall. The poster panels were colour-coded according to category: Patients, Residents, Staff, Community, ‘Conflict’, and ‘Memorials and Modernism’. This small publication faithfully follows the above categories in presenting its account of Callan Park and what has occurred there in the past, the feelings of the local community towards it, and the very real concern of the entire community that this unique property will simply become part of the sprawling Sydney suburban ‘landscape’. Magnificent colour photographs detail the unique geography and some fine nineteenth-century architecture; the text informs us that ‘Callan Park and Broughton Hall have more tree species than New York’s Central Park’. The sections of the book devoted to patients and their families and the residents, including farm managers, administrators, matron, and doctors, provide fascinating and most readable insights into this institution, such as the fact that Callan Park was the only government farm to make a profit! The section devoted to conflict and rallying the community is both poignant and powerful; four pages of colour photographs graphically illustrate the community’s involvement with rallies and political campaigns in...

Pennsylvania's Past from a Unique Perspective:

ABSTRACT An oral history project as part of a course on the history of Pennsylvania offers students an opportunity to connect to the history of their communities, make tangible the topics that we study in class, and provide documentation of a person, place, event, or community that might otherwise be lost. To be successful, students need to learn how to research their topic, work with recording equipment, conduct a pre-interview, structure an interview, ask open and closed questions, and transcribe an interview. While a challenging and time-consuming assignment, the oral history project is often the aspect of the course that students find most rewarding, as it offers them an opportunity to record a family member's story, to learn about an aspect of local history, or to make a contribution to the history of a neighborhood or organization. Reviewing my students’ work is also one of my favorite aspects of the course; it gives me added insight into the lives of the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the recent history of the state. Supplemental resources are posted on the journals’ web pages.