During this week celebrating Earth Day, it’s an apt time to reflect on how oral historians’ methods can have a positive impact on environmental preservation. Excerpted from freelance oral historian Alex Primm’s forthcoming memoir, Ozark Voices: Oral History from the Heartland, this post explores what could have been if we only stopped to listen. By […]
StoryCorps may perhaps be the United States’ most familiar and largest oral history project, yet many oral historians have trouble knowing whether to embrace it as such. Guest contributor Aubrey Parke suggests that another lens through which to consider StoryCorps is digital humanities, with its ethos of crowdsourcing and collaborative forms of publication. What can […]
The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project recently completed an NEH-funded project to transform its oral history collection through the use of cutting edge oral history technologies that allow exploration of interviews through bilingual indexes. Here, Wexler Oral History staff members share their process and innovative results. By Christa Whitney and Carole Renard The […]
Across the world, university students’ lives were upended by the coronavirus pandemic, with the essential community structures enabled by face-to-face interaction no longer possible. Yale senior Henry Jacob and his co-producers launched a podcast to help keep the community connected, with a built in archival structure that preserves the podcast as a primary source, documenting […]
OHR solicited essays on the implications of interviewing during and about COVID-19. We are excited to publish these online today, and in print in the upcoming issue. By Janneken Smucker, Abigail Perkiss, and David Caruso Back in April, which simultaneously feels like two days ago and two years ago, the OHR editorial team contemplated how […]
David Taylor, author of Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America, examines one of the roots of oral history methodology, the American Life Stories conducted during the New Deal as part of the Federal Writers’ Project. Soul of a People is now available as an audio book. The Federal Writers’ Project was […]
OHR has committed to being a forum for discussions among practitioners regarding ways to ethically and logistically conduct interviews in the face of COVID-19. Kicking off this series is Stephanie Snow and Angela Whitecross from the Centre for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine, at the University of Manchester, project leaders of NHS at […]
In our latest installment of OHR Conversations, our recorded conversations with oral history practitioners and scholars, Yolanda Hester shares the process and outcomes of creating Community and Commerce: Oral Histories of African American Businesses in Los Angeles. OHR Conversations, between Yolanda Hester and OHR co-editor Janneken Smucker, recorded May 7, 2020 Listen to audio only. […]
Frances Davey and Joanna Salapska-Gelleri answered a few of our questions about their OHR article, “’We Hung around the Radio with Great Interest’: Accessing Childhood Recollections of World War II through Interdisciplinarity” published in the brand new issue, 47.1. Tell us about the Childhood Narratives of World War II on the Home Front project. Childhood […]
Prince Vlad, a pseudonym the author of this post uses to protect his identity, shares an account of how he interviewed an El Salvadorian gang member after earning his trust, only to learn soon after that his informant had been murdered. By Prince Vlad In the first two months of this year, 234 people were […]
