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It is hard to believe that it has been nearly one year now since I was approached with a very unique opportunity. I was working as a newly appointed staff member of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH) when then-Senior Editor Elinor Maze asked if I would be interested in joining the ranks of H-OralHist and guiding the listserv’s transition to a new web-based format, the H-Net Commons.
My journey began with a nomination to the H-OralHist editorial team, a journey I took with BUIOH Editor Michelle Holland. For the uninitiated, H-OralHist originally served as an e-mail subscription listserv for those interested in current topics in the field of oral history. Participants could submit a question, a news announcement, or details on an upcoming conference or event, and H-OralHist would circulate that information to its membership. For every topic, members had the ability to respond and provide further information or answers as they saw fit. The H-OralHist editors would moderate this discussion, making sure the flow of information stayed relevant.
After our induction in October 2013, Michelle and I became the first editors trained in the new web-based system. Previously, editors merely interacted with listserv members via e-mail exchanges using the H-Net mail server. The H-Net Commons has a much more robust interface to navigate, including both the public face through which the entire membership interact, plus the back-end review system where editors select and work with submissions. The new features and training are quite substantial. H-Net Commons now provides multiple avenues of interaction, ranging from the familiar discussion posts to the ability to upload photos, write blog posts and more.
While Michelle took the editorial reigns of H-OralHist in early 2014, still operating under the old listserv system, I worked with the H-Net administrators to prepare our list for migration to the new Commons platform. In late March, it was our turn in the migration schedule, and we went live on the new platform in April 2014. Michelle and I worked out the initial bugs, and pretty soon the conversations were flowing again. Users of the new H-OralHist may now choose how they stay on top of new discussions. They can continue to have individual topics pop up in their e-mail inbox, receive a digest system for daily summaries, or work exclusively with the new online platform. The Commons functions much like a typical online forum now, allowing one to reply to discussions from the topic page. For those interested, the archive of prior discussions still exists and is available from the splash page sidebar under “Discussion Logs.”
At the moment, the remainder of the H-OralHist editorial team is working through the new training. We have had one successful editorial transition already this summer, with two more planned for the rest of the year. My hope is that as we enter 2015, the entire staff will have the necessary experience under their belts and editorial shifts will proceed like clockwork. As for me, I am currently revisiting the old resource materials and adding/cleaning links to the various oral history collections and centers across the world. Additionally, with the help of Oral History Association President Cliff Kuhn, we have planned an H-OralHist open forum event for this year’s annual meeting in Madison, WI. It is scheduled for noon on Thursday, October 9th. It will be an opportunity for anyone — especially our 3690 subscribers — to stop by and ask questions about the new web interface or offer suggestions on what other tools we should employ on the Commons. I hope I will get an opportunity to meet many of you there as we continue the discussion on the future of this invaluable resource we call H-OralHist!
Headline image credit: Migrating birds. Public domain via Pixabay.
In a few months, Troy and I hope to welcome you all to the 2014 Oral History Association (OHA) Annual Meeting, “Oral History in Motion: Movements, Transformations, and the Power of Story.” This year’s meeting will take place in our lovely, often frozen hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, from 8-12 October 2014. I am sure most of you have already registered and booked your hotel room. For those of you still dragging your feet, hopefully these letters from OHA Vice President/President Elect Paul Ortiz and Program Committee co-chairs Natalie Fousekis and Kathy Newfont will kick you into gear.
* * * * *
Madison, Wisconsin. The capitol city of the Badger State evokes images of social movements of all kinds. This includes the famed “Wisconsin Idea,” a belief put forth during an earlier, tumultuous period of American history that this place was to become a “laboratory for democracy,” where new ideas would be developed to benefit the entire society. In subsequent years, Madison became equally famous for the Madison Farmers Market, hundreds of locally-owned businesses, live music, and a top-ranked university. Not to mention world-famous cafes, microbreweries, and brewpubs! [Editor’s note: And fried cheese curds!] Our theme, “Oral History in Motion: Movements, Transformations and the Power of Story,” is designed to speak directly to the rich legacies of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest, as well as to the interests and initiatives of our members. Early on, we decided to define “movements” broadly — and inclusively — to encompass popular people’s struggles, as well as the newer, exciting technological changes oral history practitioners are implementing in our field.
Creating this year’s conference has been a collaborative effort. Working closely with the OHA executive director’s office, our program and local arrangements committees have woven together an annual meeting with a multiplicity of themes, as well as an international focus tied together by our belief in the transformative power of storytelling, dialog, and active listening. Our panels also reflect the diversity of our membership’s interests. You can attend sessions ranging from the historical memories of the Haitian Revolution and the future of the labor movement in Wisconsin to the struggles of ethnic minority refugees from Burma. We’ll explore the legacies left by story-telling legends like Pete Seeger and John Handcox, even as we learn new narratives from Latina immigrants, digital historians and survivors of sexual abuse.
Based on the critical input we’ve received from OHA members, this year’s annual meeting in will build on the strengths and weaknesses of previous conferences. New participants will have the opportunity to be matched with veteran members through the OHA Mentoring Program. We will also invite all new members to the complimentary Newcomers’ Breakfast on Friday morning. Building on its success at last year’s annual meeting, we are also holding Interest Group Meetings on Thursday, in order to help members continue to knit together national—and international—networks. The conference program features four hands-on oral history workshops on Wednesday, and a “Principles and Best Practices for Oral History Education (grades 4-12)” workshop on Saturday morning. This year’s plenary and special sessions are also superb.
With such an exciting program, it is little wonder that early pre-registration was so high! I hope that you will join us in Madison, Wisconsin for what will be one of the most memorable annual meetings in OHA history!
In Solidarity,
Paul Ortiz
OHA Vice President/President Elect
* * * * *
The 2014 OHA Annual Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin is shaping up to be an especially strong conference. The theme, “Oral History in Motion: Movements, Transformations and the Power of Story,” drew a record number of submissions. As a result, the slate of concurrent sessions includes a wide variety of high quality work. We anticipate that most conference-goers will, even more so than most years, find it impossible to attend all sessions that pique their interest!
The local arrangements team in Madison has done a wonderful job lining up venues for the meeting and its special sessions, including sites on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Madison Public Library. The meeting will showcase some of Madison’s richest cultural offerings. For instance, we will open Wednesday evening in Sterling Hall with an innovative, oral-history inspired performance on the 1970 bomb explosion, which proved a key flashpoint in the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. After Thursday evening’s Presidential Reception, we will hear a concert by Jazz Master bassist Richard Davis — who will also do a live interview Saturday evening.
In keeping with our theme, many of our feature presentations will address past and present fights for social and political change. Thursday afternoon’s mixed-media plenary session will focus on the music and oral poetry of sharecropper “poet laureate” John Handcox, whose songs continue to inspire a broad range of justice movements in the U.S. and beyond. Friday morning’s “Academics as Activists” plenary session will offer a report from the front lines of contemporary activism. It will showcase an interdisciplinary panel of scholars who have emerged as leading voices in recent pushes for social change in Wisconsin, North Carolina and nationwide. The Friday luncheon keynote will feature John Biewen of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, who has earned recognition for—among other things—his excellent work on disadvantaged groups. Finally, on Friday evening we will screen Private Violence, a film featured at this year’s Sundance festival. Private Violence examines domestic violence, long a key concern in women’s and children’s rights movements. The event will be hosted by Associate Producer Malinda Maynor Lowery, who is also Director of the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program.
Join us for all this and much more!
Natalie Fousekis and Kathy Newfont
Program Committee
* * * * *
See you all in October!
Headline image credit: Resources of Wisconsin. Edwin Blashfield’s mural “Resources of Wisconsin”, Wisconsin State Capitol dome, Madison, Wisconsin. Photo by Jeremy Atherton. CC BY 2.0 via jatherton Flickr.
There are many exciting things coming down the Oral History Review pipeline, including OHR volume 41, issue 2, the Oral History Association annual meeting, and a new staff member. But before we get to all of that, I want to take one last opportunity to celebrate OHR volume 41, issue 1 — specifically, Abigail Perkiss’ “Reclaiming the Past: Oral History and the Legacy of Integration in West Mount Airy, Philadelphia.” In this article, Abigail investigates an oral history project launched in her hometown in the 1990s, which sought to resolve contemporary tensions by collecting stories about the area’s experience with racial integration in the 1950s. Through this intriguing local history, Abigail digs into the connection between oral history, historical memory, and social change.
If that weren’t enough to whet your academic appetite, the article also went live the same week her first daughter, Zoe, was born.
How awesome is that?
But back to business. Earlier this month I chatted with Abigail about the article and the many other projects she has had in the works this year. So, please enjoy this quick interview and her article, which is currently available to all.
How did you become interested in oral history?
I’ve been gathering people’s stories in informal ways for as long as I can remember, and as an undergraduate sociology major at Bryn Mawr College, my interests began to coalesce around the intersection of storytelling and social change. I took classes in ethnography, worked as a PA on a few documentary projects, and interned at a documentary theater company. All throughout, I had the opportunity to develop and hone my skills as an interviewer.
I began taking history classes my junior year, and through that I started to think about the idea of oral history in a more intentional way. I focused my research around oral history, which culminated in my senior thesis, in which I interviewed several folksingers to examine the role of protest music in creating a collective memory of the Vietnam War, and how that memory was impacting the way Americans understood the war in Iraq. A flawed project, but pretty amazing to speak with people like Pete Seeger, Janis Ian, and Mary Travers!
After college, I studied at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, and when I began my doctoral studies at Temple University, I knew that I wanted to pursue research that would allow me to use oral history as one of the primary methodological approaches.
What sparked your interest in the Mount Airy project?
When I started my graduate work at Temple, I was pursuing a joint JD/PhD in US history. I knew I wanted to do something in the fields of urban history and racial justice, and I kept coming back to the Mount Airy integration project. I actually grew up in West Mount Airy, and even as a kid, I was very much aware of the lore of the neighborhood integration project. There was a real sense that the community was unique, special.
I knew that there had to be more to the utopian vision that was so pervasive in public conversations about the neighborhood, and I realized that by contextualizing the community’s efforts within the broader history of racial justice and urban space in the mid-twentieth century, I would be able to look critically about the concept and process of interracial living. I could also use oral history as a key piece of my research.
Your article focuses on an 1990s oral history project led by a local organization, the West Mount Airy Neighbors. Why did you choose to augment the interviews they collected with your own?
The 1993 oral history project was a wonderful resource for my book project (from which this article comes); but for my purposes, it was also incomplete. Interviewers focused largely on the early years of integration, so I wasn’t able to get much of a sense of the historical evolution of the efforts. The questions were also framed according to a very particular set of goals that project coordinators sought to achieve — as I argue, they hoped to galvanize community cohesion in the 1990s and to situate the local community organization at the center of contemporary change.
So, while the interviews were quite telling about the West Mount Airy Neighbors’ efforts to maintain institutional control in the neighborhood, they weren’t always useful for me in getting at some of the other questions I was trying to answer: about the meaning of integration for various groups in the community, about the racial politics that emerged, about the perception of Mount Airy in the city at large. To get at those questions, it was important for me to conduct additional interviews.
Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?
As I alluded to above, it is part of a larger book project on postwar residential integration, Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia(Cornell University Press, 2014). There, I look at the broader process of integrating and the challenges that emerged as the integration efforts coalesced and evolved over the decades. Much of the research for the book came from archival collections, but the oral histories from the 1990s, and the ones I collected, were instrumental in fleshing out the story and humanizing what could otherwise have been a rather institutional history of the West Mount Airy Neighbors organization.
Are you working on any projects the OHR community should know about?
I’ve spent the past 18 months directing an oral history project on Hurricane Sandy, Staring out to Sea, which came about through a collaboration with Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (remember them?) and a seminar I taught in Spring 2013. That semester, I worked intensively with six undergraduates, studying the practice of oral history and setting up the project’s parameters. The students developed the themes and questions, recruited participants, conducted and transcribed interviews. They then processed and analyzed their findings, looking specifically at issues of race, power and representation in the wake of the storm.
In addition to blogging about their experience, the students presented their work at the 2013 OHMAR and OHA meetings. You can read a bit more about that and the project in Perspectives on History. This fall, I’ll be working with Professor Dan Royles and his digital humanities students to index the interviews we’ve collected and develop an online digital library for the project. I’ll also be attending to the OHA annual meeting this year to discuss the project’s transformative impact on the students themselves.
Excellent! I look forward to seeing you (and the rest of our readers) in Madison this October.
Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the editorial/media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities. Before coming to Madison, Caitlin worked for the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow their latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
What is the role of a regional oral history organization?
The Board of Officers of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) recently wrestled with this question over the course of a year-long strategic planning process. Our organization had reached an inflection point. New technologies, shifting member expectations and changing demographics compelled us to re-think our direction. What could we offer new and existing members that local or national organizations did not —and how would we offer it?
Our strategic planning committee set out to answer these questions, and to chart a course for 2014 and beyond. Four board members served on the committee: Kate Scott of the Senate Historical Office; LuAnn Jones of the National Park Service; Anne Rush of the University of Maryland; and myself, of the Library of Congress, acting as director. OHMAR dates back to 1976 and has been a vibrant organization for nearly 40 years. Therefore, our goal was not to re-invent but rather to re-focus. To start, we identified OHMAR’s core values. We determined them to be:
Openness
Passion
Community
Education
Expertise
Whatever our new direction, we would stay true to these ideals.
For months, the committee discussed how OHMAR could better serve members with these values in mind. We also polled membership and consulted with past organization presidents about what they valued in OHMAR and what they wanted in the future. What emerged was a plan with several key considerations for how any regional organization can serve its membership:
Build community. Through digital technology, formal and informal events, and low-cost membership, regional organizations can foster meaningful professional networks, offer support, and create opportunities for intimate interaction on an ongoing basis.
Provide targeted resources. Local knowledge can allow regional organizations like OHMAR to provide targeted educational, professional, and monetary resources. For example, oral historians working for the federal government in and around Washington, D.C., have unique challenges to which OHMAR can provide specific tools, tips, and advice.
Leverage expertise. Our region boasts tremendous expertise courtesy of oral historians such as Don Ritchie, Linda Shopes, Roger Horowitz, and more. These experts can help educate new members, especially those from fields such as journalism, the arts, public history, and advocacy on best practices.
Offer meaningful opportunities. By forming new committees, we can offer members meaningful ways to get involved and gain leadership experience.
We presented our findings in the form of a new Strategic Plan at our April 2014 annual meeting. The intimate two-day event was attended by more than 60 oral historians and reaffirmed the value of regional conferences. In fact, feedback stated that for some, ours was the best conference they had ever attended. On the afternoon of the second day, our members ratified OHMAR’s Strategic Plan for 2015-2020. Accordingly, next year, we will focus on improving our internal operations, updating our bylaws, and overhauling our website, member management system, and e-newsletter. In the following years, we will also introduce several new initiatives, including a Martha Ross Memorial Prize for students, named for our beloved founder.
We will be discussing our strategic plan and the role of regional oral history organizations in a panel at the Oral History Association’s upcoming 2014 annual meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. We hope you’ll join us and share your ideas.
Jason Steinhauer serves on the Board of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR). He directed the organization’s strategic planning process from 2013-2014. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonSteinhauer and OHMAR at @OHMidAtlantic.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow their latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Photo credit: Painting by Alice Fisher, a SOHP narrator.
By Caitlin Tyler-Richards
It’s been awhile, but the Oral History Review on OUPblog podcast is back! Today’s episode features OHR contributors Drs. Linda Crane and Tracy McDonough answering OHR Managing Editor Troy Reeves’s questions about the Schizophrenia Oral History Project and their article, “Living with Schizophrenia: Coping, Resilience, and Purpose,” which appears in the most recent Oral History Review. This interview sets the record for our shortest podcast, clocking in at 9 minutes, 30 seconds. But what it lack in quantity it makes up for in quality!
Professor Emeritus Lynda L. Crane, PhD, and Associate Professor Tracy A. McDonough, PhD, are in the Department of Psychology at the Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Over the last several years, they have created an oral history project of life stories of persons with schizophrenia. Their website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed are all ways to learn more about and connect to their work.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow their latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
