Announcing 2022 Virtual Issue

The Oral History Review‘s rich archive of nearly 50 years is full of scholarship to revisit and reconsider. Annually we dig into the archive to assemble a virtual issue on a theme, a valuable practice of learning from the scholars and practitioners who have come before us. This year’s virtual issue doubles as an opportunity to explore the theme of next week’s Oral History Association annual meeting, our first conference in person in three years.

By Janneken Smucker

During the summer of 2022, the editorial team had the pleasure of working with Dominic Amoroso, a senior history major at West Chester University. In addition to bringing his experience navigating Twitter, Dom knew his way around WordPress, the platform we use for this blog, from his own projects and initiatives. Needless to say, Dom was a self-starter and great asset to the team. In addition to Tweeting, corresponding with guest bloggers and OHR authors, conducting an interview for OHR Conversations, and generally assisting with our digital presence, Dom mined the OHR archive in search of articles that resonated with the OHA Annual Meeting theme, “Walking Through the Fire: Human Perseverance in Times of Turmoil.” Dom worked closely with me, identifying potential articles focused on African American history to first share via a group Zotero library, reading and annotating them while connecting them to the conference theme. 

He then drafted an editor’s introduction, and like all contributors to OHR, went through our rigorous developmental editing process of sending edits back and forth, working to create a polished, thoughtful piece. Read Dom’s intro here and see the full table of contents, with links directly to the archive, where our publisher Taylor and Francis has lifted the paywall for these pieces. We are honored to work with student interns like Dom and hope they have opportunities to apply the experience to future endeavors. 

On behalf of the editorial team, we look forward to seeing OHA members in Los Angeles, October 19-22, for more discussions of how oral history can inform how we understand human perseverance. 

Featured image by Marion S Trikosko, [Signs carried by many marchers, during the March on Washington, 1963], Library of Congress via Flickr Commons.