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5 Questions About: Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Thom Henninger discusses Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend.

Read Troy Reeves’s review of Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend is available online and in issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend explores the life of a man born in a remote part of Cuba who became an elite baseball player. Oliva traveled to Florida to try out for the Minnesota Twins in April 1961, at a time the failed CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion led to the severing of Cuban-U.S. relations. The Twins chose not to sign Oliva, but in an unanticipated twist of fate, he was not able to return home because of political developments beyond his control. He persevered and went on to have a 16-year career that many believe deserves to be honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Oliva’s second chance came with a cost. The 22-year-old, who grew up on a family farm far from a big city, arrived in the United States without financial support, a working knowledge of English, or a support system to survive in a foreign culture. He quietly endured the isolation from all that was familiar to him while working to succeed in the highly competitive environment of professional baseball. His struggles and ultimate success are a fascinating and inspiring story that is worth sharing. Oliva, who married and raised a family in Bloomington, Minnesota, still lives there and works as a part-time coach with the Twins.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Oral history was critical to the book, as Oliva joined me for lengthy sessions to tell his story. He wasn’t the only Cuban player with the Twins who endured isolation from family during the 1960s. Five others—Camilo Pascual, Julio Bécquer, Sandy Valdespino, Minnie Mendoza and José Valdivielso—also provided firsthand accounts of leaving home and adapting to a new culture as teenagers. At age 17 in 1951, over the course of his first summer in the U.S., Pascual was assigned to three different minor league teams—in New York, Texas and Oklahoma—and speaking virtually no English, traveled alone between them equipped with only a hand-carried note to get him to where he needed to go. They all struggled with communicating and, at the same time, solving the riddles of a new culture. Finding agreeable food was part of the challenge, and Oliva, after arriving in the U.S., always carried two notes with him. “Ham and eggs” was written on one, “fried chicken” was written on the other—and for months that was all he ate.

The stories of Cuban players became more complicated in 1961. Most of them were training in Cuba before the start of the 1961 baseball season when Fidel Castro, Cuba’s revolutionary leader, arrived at a baseball field one day and told the players they had a choice to make. They could stay in Cuba and be given baseball jobs, or they could return to the U.S. to resume their careers but would not be allowed to return to Cuba. Facing a nearly impossible decision, they returned to the U.S and sadly left loved ones behind.

When the Bay of Pigs invasion took place that spring, a few players were separated from their wives—including two who were pregnant—who had not yet traveled to the U.S. for the summer. Mendoza recalled how he and his wife and two young daughters were not reunited in the U.S. for four years. For most Cuban players, nearly a decade passed before they were able to reunite with extended family. A few never again saw a parent who passed away during the years they were isolated from their homeland. A few have never returned to Cuba, though Oliva now travels there nearly every year to visit family.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

The lives of the Cuban players from this era are powerful stories of a unique group of immigrants. These stories have largely gone untold, and discovering and reporting their firsthand accounts was a highlight of writing this book. At the same time, they shared the core struggles that all immigrants face, and in a country that was built on waves of immigrants over the decades, those stories are worth telling as part of American history. Each new generation of immigrants has contributed to our history and the success of the country, and we should celebrate their contributions.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Documenting with oral history and telling the stories of those who played the game over the decades are critical components of baseball writing today. Baseball historians continue to fill in the blanks of bygone eras, and there are oral histories of more recent eras still open to explore. Nearly all of the Cubans who played major league baseball during that era were employed by the Washington Senators-Minnesota Twins franchise that moved to Minnesota in 1961, and their firsthand accounts are a unique collection now available to baseball historians. Their accounts and stories may draw more interest with Cuban natives playing professional baseball in the U.S. again. There are common threads in what leaving home to pursue a baseball career has meant to both generations of Cuban players.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

The struggles Oliva faced when he arrived in the U.S. make a compelling story, but equally powerful was his ability to overcome those challenges to become a successful player and find his place in his new home. That is what I find most memorable about Oliva’s story. His work ethic, perseverance and upbeat approach to life are inspiring qualities that were critical to his survival and success.

5 Questions About: 1889: The Boomer Movement, the Land Run, and Early Oklahoma City

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Michael J. Hightower discusses 1889: The Boomer Movement, the Land Run, and Early Oklahoma City .

Evan C. Rothera’s review of 1889: The Boomer Movement, the Land Run, and Early Oklahoma City is available online and in issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

1889 tells the story of Indian Territory (later, the state of Oklahoma) between the post-Civil War treaties of 1866 through 1890, the first full year of non-Indian settlement in the six counties that constitute central Oklahoma. I frame the story within the larger history of Old Oklahoma where displaced tribes and freedmen, wealthy cattlemen, and prospective homesteaders faced off in disputes over public land and federal government policies.

As disputes captured headlines nationwide, Indian Territory became a battleground of Gilded-Age politics. Although the fundamental controversy over non-Indian settlement in central Indian Territory ended with the land run of April 22, 1889, disputes over land ownership continued for generations. Settlers who crossed illegally into central Indian Territory before the appointed hour (noon, April 22, 1889) gave the state its dubious moniker as the “sooner state.”

1889 gets behind the mythology to reveal Oklahoma’s foundation story as far more nuanced—and far more interesting! —than many historians have depicted it.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

To capture the drama of illegal “boomer” incursions into central Indian Territory, the Run of ’89, and nascent urbanization of the townsite that became Oklahoma City, I rely heavily on oral history interviews conducted by the WPA in the 1930s. Those interviews are preserved in print and microfilm as the Indian-Pioneer Papers. They are also available online in the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collections.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

As Oklahoma and Indian territories were among the last territories opened to non-Indian settlement and were not admitted to the union as a single state until 1907 (Arizona and New Mexico entered the union in 1912), older Oklahomans interviewed in the 1930s were likely to remember the state’s transition from frontier to region. Some, men and women alike, had crystal-clear memories of their youthful adventures as cowboys, soldiers, train conductors, teachers, bankers, businessmen, and other professions that facilitated townsite settlement.

Together with newspaper articles, memoirs, and correspondence, oral history is a powerful tool in allowing these pioneers (members of what I call the generation of 1889) to speak for themselves. Unfortunately, racial prejudice and lack of access to the levers of communication make Native American stories harder to come by. Yet I did find plenty of oral history interviews with women and African Americans that help to dispel gender and racial stereotypes of frontier settlement.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Relying on the Indian-Pioneer Papers to tell the eighty-niner story enabled me to write history “from the bottom up” rather than “from the top down.” Almost by definition, oral historians are also social historians. Whether oral histories were collected yesterday or a century ago, they reveal lived experience and give us glimpses into everyday lives.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

Like many frontier stories, Oklahoma’s foundation story and its centerpiece, the run of 1889, has been mythologized to the point where the actual history has been obscured. Moreover, marketers and politicians have appropriated the imagery to further their causes and buried the history under a pile of slogans and heroic tropes. I am a fan of OU football (unless they’re playing the OSU Cowboys…), but I can’t watch the Sooners without reflecting on the challenges the generation of 1889 faced, the Native Americans they pushed out of their way (Oklahoma was, after all, Indian Territory), and the crimes many of them committed by “jumping the gun” on the day of the run and stealing land that they failed to obtain legally.

Oral history strips away tropes and stereotypes and replaces them with first-hand accounts of what happened on the Oklahoma frontier, and it helps to explain why it mattered. Eighty-niners’ stories—some tragic, some hilarious, and all packed with meaning—are what I hope readers will remember long after they finish the book.

Deadline Extended: OHR Call for Submissions for Upcoming Special Issue on Ethics

We’ve extended the deadline for submissions for the Oral History Review ‘s special issue on ethics in oral history, broadly conceived. Submit full articles by June 1, 2020 July 1, 2020.

Core to our work as oral historians are the relationships we establish with our narrators, asking them to trust us with their stories so we can learn and broaden our understanding of history. This engagement with our narrators and the dissemination of their stories, experiences, knowledge, and memories is highly complex, from the questions we choose to ask and how we phrase them, to potential power differentials between interviewee and interviewer, to the presentation and preservation of those stories for generations to come, just to name a few. As our methodologies have grown and changed, so have our ethical responsibilities to our narrators, our colleagues, our sponsors, and ourselves. As interviewers, researchers, and preservers of oral history, we cannot ignore the significant role of ethics to our practice.

The editors of the OHR are interested in essays and articles that address the ethical considerations and complications that practitioners have experienced and/or foresee for our future. What must we consider, for example, when we plan to interview at-risk populations or victims of crime and violence? What are the implications of oral history’s exemption from Institutional Review Boards’ review in the United States? How do we handle transnational and international oral history projects when our narrators have different views on ownership of their histories and their use in publications? How do we handle issues of harassment or the legacies of cultural and social hegemony? How does our broadening profession consider our methodologies when anyone with access to a smartphone can claim to conduct oral history? When does de-centering the interview become a key exploratory process of ethical responsibility in oral history research? And what might this decentering look like? This list of questions is in no way comprehensive and should not be taken as limiting; instead we intend to spark ideas that authors should be considering for their submission.

We ask that all completed article manuscripts be submitted to the Oral History Review no later than 1 July 2020 through Routledge’s ScholarOne system. Please include “(Special Focus on Ethics)” at the end of the title of your piece. Should you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

Featured image by Flickr user amk713 licensed by Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

5 Questions About: Australian Lives: An Intimate History

We’ve asked creators of non-print and media projects reviewed in the pages of Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore them. In our next installment of this series, Anisa Puri discusses Australian Lives: An Intimate History,  co-authored with Alistair Thomson and published as both a book and an innovative e-book with audio playback.

Read Virginia Millington’s review of Australian Lives: An Intimate History, in the forthcoming issue of OHR, 47.1. 

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Australian Lives: An Intimate History was the major publication outcome of the Australian Generations Oral History Project, and was published as both a paperback and e-book. The book illuminates Australian life across the 20th and into the 21st centuries by showcasing the diverse experiences of fifty narrators born between 1920 and 1989. Australian Lives illustrates how the interviews enhance understandings of a range of historical topics, and it evokes change and continuity within and across time.

The e-book uses innovative oral history technology developed by the National Library of Australia (NLA) during the Australian Generations Project. This technology enabled the creation of a distinct URL for each small segment of every online interview, and linked each interview transcript with the audio file, so that an online user can click on any part of the e-book text and hear the correlating audio segment. The e-book pioneers a new approach to oral history publication and use: it turns readers of oral history into listeners, so they can hear the rich meanings of voice and expression that are often impossible to capture in written transcripts.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

Our e-book wouldn’t exist without oral history. The NLA’s digital technologies enabled us to experiment with new ways of making a very large oral history collection accessible and discoverable to diverse audiences, including students, researchers, and the public. We focused on how the e-book could provide a curated entry point to individual interviews and the wider collection, how it could facilitate secondary analysis of oral history interviews, how it could blur traditional boundaries between the ‘archive’ and resultant ‘outputs’, and how it could invite users to engage with the aural aspect of oral history.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

So many things! But perhaps most apt here is how oral history enables ‘big picture’ histories—about topics like childhood, war, or migration—to be communicated through individual experiences. Oral history highlights the diversity of lived experience. Narrators interviewed for the Australian Generations Project were so generous in sharing their experiences; working with their stories is a privilege. Focusing on how to connect an audience to the intimacy and layered meanings of the voice was an exciting and rewarding part of the e-book project.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in the project?

We hope oral historians will be interested in the ways we’ve used new digital technologies to create an e-book that redefines how readers and listeners might engage with books and oral history archives. Australian Lives opens up an oral history collection for exploration by users anywhere in the world, and we hope that the e-book invites further exploration of the original interviews. Users can also search by word across the book or use the index to find and play all the extracts on a particular topic. For instance, we indexed emotions, so you can listen to stories that evoke regret, anger, shame, joy, laughter, and so on.

The e-book is also a resource for teaching Australian history in schools and universities. We’ve created an online video that shows how teachers might use the e-book as a rich resource for student learning and research projects.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

That the e-book uses new opportunities created by technological advancements in our field to re-imagine the process of what it means to engage with an oral history book. Listeners can directly experience the rich aural sources themselves, which in turn creates a new set of opportunities: to hear narrators articulate their own experiences and lives, to question our interpretations, to experience the wider context of an individual interview, or to even begin one’s own exploration into the archive.

Oral History and Architecture

In issue 47.1, we feature the review essay, “The New Oral History of Architecture” by Kevin Block, exploring the historiography of architectural oral history and reviewing several recent projects and publications. Here, as he embarks on his own oral history project focused on architectural expertise and knowledge, he shares some of what he learned by writing the review. 

By Kevin Block

In the 1970s, the sociologist Paul Thompson turned his attention away from the history of Victorian architecture to oral history. This would be an important shift in the history of oral history as an academic field. Riding the wave of interest in social history and “history from below,” Thompson would go on to publish the first edition of his now-canonical The Voice of the Past in 1978 and help create the National Life Stories collection for the British Library National Sound Archive. Prior to that shift, however, Thompson had published on English architecture and Victorian figures including William Morris, the craftsman and social reformer, and William Butterfield, the great Gothic Revival architect. For Thompson, the study of architecture from within the discipline of art history was closing ranks in the 1970s, becoming more arcane and specialized as “a library activity.” As much as he loved architectural history, it was time to move on.

Nearly a half-century later, Thompson’s two great interests—architecture and oral history—have begun to merge. As Naomi Stead, Janina Gosseye, and Deborah van der Plaat detail in Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research, historians and theorists of architecture are starting to think more consciously about how to incorporate oral history methods into their research. I emphasize starting to think more consciously, because I have come to realize since completing my review of Speaking of Buildings that oral history has long since been a component of architectural research, whether the researchers acknowledged this dimension of their work or not. There are countless “conversations with architects” in publication or online. In my review, for example, I focus on an unusual collection of architect interviews from Pidgeon Digital that I first learned about while attending last year’s annual conference for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. From the acknowledgement sections and introductions of popular and academic books about architecture, it’s also clear that many traditional histories are based on interviews and de-facto oral history research. The problem is that few scholars within architectural history think about their research practices as oral history methods, and this necessarily influences the lines of inquiry and final products that they pursue, as well as the topics and assignments included in their teaching. To me, one of the benefits of reading Speaking of Buildings is that it reframes these practices within oral history methodologies, and makes the theoretical consequences of that reframing explicit. Part of what I was trying to demonstrate in my review is that one listens to Pidgeon Digital interviews differently after reading a text like Speaking of Buildings.

My own motivation for investigating the oral history of architecture was twofold. First, I’m interested in the topic of architectural expertise. The qualitative interviewing methods of oral history, I suspected, would be a way to better understand the craft and tacit knowledge that is often hard for practitioners to codify or articulate. Second, I’m beginning an oral history project of my own and I wanted to survey the available literature to learn more about the key themes and concerns that structure the field. My project focuses on the architect Vincent Kling. Kling was by all counts the founder of the most important corporate architecture firm in Philadelphia during the 1960s and 1970s, and yet there is practically nothing written about him in the architectural literature, at least in comparison to contemporaneous figure Louis Kahn, who many consider one of the most important postwar American architects. This historical lacuna is largely a result of the surprising non-existence of Kling’s archive. Many of his buildings are still available for study, but the libraries and archives around Philadelphia hold few collections of drawings or working documents related to his work.

To tell the history of Kling, I quickly determined that oral history would be a necessity. Fortunately, there was a way forward. My father worked for Kling’s company after Kling retired and had contact information for former colleagues who knew Kling directly. Many of those colleagues are now retired themselves and some of them are willing to share their stories. Like many other oral history projects that I’ve come to learn about, there’s a sense of urgency to doing this work. In another decade, it may not be possible to assemble a compelling historical account of Kling and his work. He was a big, brash figure, much like his friend Edmund Bacon, the Philadelphia city planner. In many ways, he embodied the kind of “great man” that the editors of Speaking of Buildings are hoping to decenter from the history of architecture. I think there’s a way to do both—to tell Kling’s story while also using him to identify and amplify voices of difference and resistance in a turbulent period of Philadelphia history and American culture. Surveying the various oral history of architecture projects available online has led me to imagine a more open-ended project that I can develop with collaborators and my future students. Catherine Whalen’s “Craft, Art & Design Oral History Project” at the Bard Graduate Center and the Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture, which I address in my review essay, are two helpful precedents.

The resources that I address in my review essay could make great contributions to methodology courses for advanced undergraduates or doctoral students in programs related to architecture, planning, landscape, material culture, art history, or anthropology. They might also inspire students and experienced oral historians who are not working in design- or craft-related fields to reconsider the role of the built environment in shaping the stories that their interview subjects share with them. The oral history of architecture represents a widening of architecture’s historical field. Paul Thompson should be excited!

Kevin Block (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, 2019) has taught at U.C. Berkeley and Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of American architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently working on two book-length projects: a history of the discipline of architecture as part of the modern humanities and a monograph on the Philadelphia architect Vincent G. Kling.

Featured image by Kjetil Ree used with a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. 

5 Questions About: Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Alexey Golubev discusses Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s, which he co-wrote with Irina Takala.

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Read Barbara W. Sommer’s review of Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s online and in issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Our book is a story of enthusiasm, hope, belief, and betrayal. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, for the first time in history, people in North America looked back across the Atlantic at Soviet Russia thinking for the first time that, perhaps, the Old World might after all have a promise of justice and equality, which many of them had failed to find in the United States and Canada. The socialist propaganda of the 1920s intensified this political idealism, which was particularly strong in the Finnish communities in North America, which was a target for multiple propaganda campaigns in support of Soviet Karelia – an autonomous region in the North-West of Soviet Russia which at that time was headed by Finnish Communists (Edvard Gylling, Kustaa Rovio and others) who aimed to build a socialist society based on Finnish language and culture. Soviet Karelia was also rich in natural resources, the most important of which was timber, and had to play an important part in the Soviet industrialization plans (First Five-Year Plan), yet it was sparsely populated and lacked labor force, especially skilled forest works. Unsurprisingly, when the Great Depression broke out in 1929 and many Finnish-Americans and Finnish-Canadians became unemployed, the government of Soviet Karelia decided to use this opportunity to bring skilled and experienced workers from North America, as well as Finland and Sweden. Two recruitment offices were established in New York and Toronto, and the response was so enthusiastic that newspapers spoke of the “Karelian fever” in Finnish communities in North America. Over the next five years, almost a hundred thousand applications were submitted for the immigration program to Soviet Karelia. Only a fraction was approved: by 1935 six and a half thousand Finns moved to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada. While the immigration flow was much smaller than the Soviet Karelian authorities hoped for, the immigrants made an immense contribution to industry, agriculture, and cultural life of Soviet Karelia by introducing new technologies, methods of work, tools and machines; and educating local workers. Yet their hopes for a better life were shattered, first when the Finnish immigrant community became a target of the Soviet security forces during the Great Purge of 1937-38, and later during World War II when Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany and many Finnish immigrants were deported to labor camps in Siberia. Our book provides the first comprehensive English-language account of this fascinating story, and its Russian translation was published in 2019 in one of the leading academic publishers in Russia, Nestor-Istoriya. 

How does oral history contribute to your book?

My first encounter with the topic of the book occurred in 2004 when I became Director of the Oral History Center of the Petrozavodsk State University (PetrSU) in the Republic of Karelia (former Soviet Karelia), and some of my first respondents whose oral histories I took were Finnish immigrants from the US and Canada. From 2006 to 2008, the PetrSU Oral History Center published four volumes of oral histories recorded by the faculty and students affiliated with the center. The second volume (in Russian) published in 2007 and co-edited by Dr. Irina Takala of PetrSU and myself included five interviews with the Finnish-American and Finnish-Canadian immigrants to Soviet Karelia, who were, perhaps, the last living witnesses of the “Karelian fever.”  Their testimonies inspired us to launch our book project in the first place. While the book itself relies primarily on archival sources and press due to the time span of seventy years between the immigration (1930s) and our work (late 2000s), as well as the heavy losses in the Finnish immigrant community in Russia due to the Stalinist repressions and World War II, oral history still adds a valuable perspective from below that archival sources would be unable to provide. Oral histories were particularly valuable for the last chapter of our book that deals with the life in the immigrant community after World War II: we were able to learn about such aspects as food, education, leisure, and cultural activities in the community only through oral history.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

Oral history provides access to those parts of the historical experience that written sources often ignore, address only in passing, or intentionally silence. For example, the Soviet Union had a heavily centralized bureaucratic system that left a heavy paper trail – a blessing for historians – but at the same time the interests and biases of the Soviet bureaucratic machine meant that many important historical questions, e.g. pertaining to class in Soviet society (which was proclaimed “classless” as early as the 1930s), remained almost unaddressed in official documents. Another example is marginalized groups, which in the Soviet context included working-class youth, peasants working in collective farms, and sexual minorities, who were often invisible in the official discourse. Oral and family history helps to address the historical experience of these groups giving us knowledge that would otherwise have been lost. 

The second reason is that oral history avoids the hierarchy of genres that written personal sources (diaries, letters, memoirs) cannot escape. As a Russian Formalist scholar, Vladimir Propp, suggested for folklore, and Hayden White later expanded to historical narratives, writing always involves certain narrative structures that organize the material and can interfere with how historical experience is presented, i.e., what should be told and what should not be told (the dictate of the form). Sure, oral history interviews have their own narrative structures, but they also have an important advantage of being a collaborative product between the interviewer and the respondent, where the interviewer has a luxury to be able to intervene in the narrative.

Third, as a university professor I value the pedagogical potential of oral history. Since recently, I started introducing oral history interviews as optional course requirements. For example, in my course Europe since 1900, instead of writing a course paper, students could opt for interviewing members of the Czech immigrant community in the Greater Houston area. In addition to contributing to the archive of the Czech cultural center of Houston, this assignment gave students an important experience of dealing with the course subject through personal perspectives of their respondents.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

This book is an interesting example of a comprehensive historical project (which included extensive archival and library research) that was inspired and driven by oral histories of the very few living members of the North American immigrant community in Soviet Karelia. In this sense, our book shows how even relatively distant (Great Depression era) historical events could be traced back through oral history.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

Even though Soviet history is often treated as a historical deviation and a civilizational “dead end,” our Finnish-American and Finnish-Canadian respondents made it very clear that they do not think of the contribution to the Soviet project in terms of failure. Instead, they were proud for the work in Soviet Russia, and they recognized that socialism did provide them and their children with the opportunities that were unavailable for them at that time in North America including, most importantly, education. It was the difference between socialism and Stalinism that they emphasized suggesting that Stalinism was an aberration, rather than a historical destiny of the Soviet project. This is an important lesson that I learned from them and would like readers to remember about the book.

5 Questions About: Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust

We’ve asked creators of non-print and media projects reviewed in the pages of Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore them. In our next installment of this series, the co-producers of Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust, a podcast from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, tell us about their project.

Read Jonathan C. Friedman’s review of the Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust podcast, from issue 47.1 of OHR. Podcast producers Eric Marcus, Nahanni Rous, and Stephen Naron were kind enough to answer our questions. You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust brings history to life through the voices of the people who lived it by drawing on the priceless recorded interviews from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies with both survivors and witnesses to the 20th-century’s most infamous genocide.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

The 4,400 videotaped testimonies housed in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University provide a rich resource for creating a podcast. These testimonies were recorded beginning in 1979 and are still being recorded. It was the first project of its kind to capture such testimonies on videotape. Interviews range in length from about 60 minutes to 30 hours (recorded over multiple sessions). For the podcast, we’ve used the audio portion of the recordings in order to craft accessible episodes of 25 to 30 minutes each.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

Recorded oral history offers a direct link to powerful stories that would otherwise be lost to history. Each testimony at the Archive is like a spoken autobiography. The Archive’s methodology gave survivors the opportunity to tell their entire life story from their earliest memories, at their own pace, and in the form and language they preferred. For decades, survivors of and witnesses to the Holocaust shared their experiences to document the atrocities of the Nazis and their allies.  As the generation that lived through the Holocaust dies, these recorded stories become ever more precious and the only direct link to eyewitness accounts.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in the project?

The podcast we’ve created from videotaped oral histories offers an example of how recorded testimony using one format can be re-purposed for use in a new format to reach new audiences of potential listeners. Podcasts are one of the fastest growing methods for reaching listeners, especially young people, who may not have learned of this history previously.  

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

The Holocaust is a deeply complex and harrowing topic to approach. The numbers—six million murdered—are, for most people, simply incomprehensible. We hope that what we achieve with this podcast is to make clear that the Holocaust was a real historical event, one that can best be understood by learning that each one of the six million dead was an individual, with a family, loved ones, a profession, a home. Survivors, although the exception, can help represent that loss, effectively replacing an abstraction with personal stories—with one person’s story at a time.

5 Questions About: To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In this week’s installment of the series, Jessica Wilkerson discusses To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice.

Read Joanne L. Goodwin’s review of To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice online and in issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

To Live Here, You Have to Fight tells the story of Appalachian women activists in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily through the lives and histories of a group of white, working-class women based in eastern Kentucky. They joined democratic movements that are familiar to many, like the Poor People’s Campaign, the welfare rights movement, and the women’s and labor movements. But they also joined and led others that might be less familiar, like the community health movement and what they called the “Appalachian Movement,” defined by the efforts to challenge the deeply unequal class system of the coalfields. By following these activists’ lives and their involvement in these overlapping movements and campaigns, I show how they connected with white and black women across Appalachia and the South to form a gender-conscious, region-wide democratic movement that challenged the constraints of a capitalist society. In particular, they made pointed arguments about how corporate capitalism relied upon women’s caregiving labor at the same that it devalued that labor and made it difficult to perform, thus raising broader historical questions about women’s labor, the history of labor and capitalism, and battles for gender justice in the twentieth century.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

My book would have been impossible to write without oral history interviews, as many of the major archival collections on Appalachia in this period do not fully capture the range of women’s experiences. The book’s roots lay in an oral history project on the women’s movement in the South (for the Southern Oral History Program at UNC). In those interviews, feminist activists talk about “the women in eastern Kentucky” who led the way and were an inspiration to women throughout Appalachia. Many but not all of those women had died by the time I was working on the project. I interviewed who I could, and then turned to the rich trove of interviews conducted by documentary filmmakers at media centers like Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and oral history projects housed at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky and other regional colleges and universities, some of them created as part of class projects. Fortunately, oral historians had recognized the historical significance of many of these women’s stories as early as the 1970s, and I’m grateful that they took the time to record them.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

I am invested in telling women’s life stories, and I am always curious about the broader context for their activism. For me, oral history methodology has been the primary way to think about how women made sense of their activism, what motivated them to become politically active, and how they envisioned a better, more just world. Oral historians of other social movements, especially the Civil Rights Movement and LGBTQ movements, have been especially important guides for me.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

My book implicitly brings up a couple of questions or points of debate that I would love to think through with other oral historians. The first is how narrators can help to provide the intellectual framing for a book. Two major concepts in my book come directly from interviews. The first, grassroots feminism, was outlined by one of my narrators, and the second, caregiving, was described across numerous interviews. I would like for us to think more about oral history documents as deeply intellectual sources, not simply stories that a historian analyzes or mines for meaning. Second, I did not quote at length from interviews and instead wrote a narrative, in my own voice, based on the interviews along with many other sources. Thus, I did a great deal of interpretive work, which brings up many questions about sources, authority, memory, and archives.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

My main concern with this book, as a woman and historian from the Mountain South, was narrating the histories of a group of women in Appalachia and how they navigated the regional and national politics of their day. If a reader remembers one or more of the women as a complex actor in Appalachian history, their nuanced approach to politics, and the vision they had for fairness and gender justice, then I will be satisfied.

It’s All About Principals: Oral History in Graduate School Administrative Training

The OHR archive is replete with examples of how oral history can inform disciplines outside of the field of historical study. In today’s post, educator Patrick Carlton shares how a trove of oral histories conducted with school administrators has impacted graduate education in the field.

By Patrick Carlton

I believe oral history captures life information, the pieces of data that might otherwise be lost. It serves to fill in the gaps in formal learning, often providing “the rest of the story.” Use of this approach offers the listener a sense of the respondent’s personality, providing a greater understanding about who this person really is, and offering hints concerning the respondent’s inner thoughts. Intonation, voice timbre, and delivery are helpful in assembling a mental picture of a subject.

The project that generated my collection of transcripts began as a result of a pair of coincidences which occurred to me in 1986. First, I was exposed to the ongoing oral history project then being conducted at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. I served as Acting Director for Educational Services for several months, gaining an appreciation for this collection effort. Soon after returning from this tour to Virginia Tech’s College of Education, I came in contact with the Harvard University Principals’ Center. The Center suggested that there was need for more in-depth and less superficial research on the principalship. This raised questions concerning the utility of research which was then “a mile wide and an inch deep”—like the Platte River in Michener’s book Centennial. My obvious conclusion was that research characterized as “a foot wide and a mile deep” would be more useful. 

School principals, as is true with other public officials, are subject to constant pressures, inadequate time for decision-making, the requirements to be responsive to internally and externally-based individuals, and a lack of time for reflection and contemplation. It is not surprising then that so few of these principals record their experiences in oral or written form. In most instances, the insights of these people are in danger of being lost. I believed we needed to design and effort to preserve the information possessed by these educators. I determined that the most effective way to collect such data was through in-depth interviews with those people capable of providing assistance to generations of new educational administrators. Thus, I initiated the Oral History of the Public School Principalship at Virginia Tech, with data collection beginning in early 1986 and continuing at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The purpose of the project was to gather the recollections and wisdom of veteran principals, most of whom hadn’t been invited to contribute to the literature of educational administration. I believe these men and women constituted a treasure of immense proportions. We based the interviews on a standard question set, with modifications designed to suit the interests of the person interviewed and the interviewer. Thus, there is some variation in content. Some of the topics covered in the interviews include decision-making in education, ethics in administration, and  the characteristics of effective schools. Due to the modest level of funding, collection was, during early years, limited almost exclusively to the four-state area around Washington, D.C. (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina), with a few from other parts of the country. Since then, the project has conducted a substantial number of interviews in Nevada, Colorado, and Ohio.

Respondents were elementary, middle, and secondary principals who retired during the decades extending from the 1950s through the present. They vary in age from the mid-50s to the 90s. They are male and female, black, brown, and white. Their academic training varies from the baccalaureate to the doctorate. Participants vary in degree of articulateness, knowledge of current educational issues, responsiveness, and general attitude toward education and to the principalship. While most respondents seem to have enjoyed and valued their administrative experiences, some are quite bitter about working conditions and are outspoken in criticism.

In 2000, I joined the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In that capacity I continued working with advanced graduate students in the collection of oral testimony of former principals from Nevada and surrounding states. Construction of a UNLV-based website housing regionally collected interviews, along with copies of the original Virginia Tech collection, was accomplished through the outstanding work of UNLV personnel.

In order to gather the views of students participating in oral history activities, I queried a group of graduate students on their involvement in ongoing oral history activities. Here are some of their comments.

Most felt the information gathered was useful and likely to be helpful in future assignments.

“Learning what was successful for the Principal interviewed was extremely interesting.”

Some said the interview was more labor intensive than a regular term paper.

“Oh my gosh, yes! This was a huge task that took patience and lots of time.”

Most said the extra effort involved was worthwhile.

“The opportunity to have an in-depth conversation with an experienced administrator is invaluable.”

One respondent indicated difficulty with the interviewee.

“The interviewee refused to let her information be used after I submitted it to her to be proofed.”

Most respondents agreed that oral interview is a useful graduate instructional technique.

“I think it is such a valuable project. It really allows us to live through the eyes of someone with experience”

“Life experience is a valuable addition to textbook information.”

“Both principals I Interviewed were delightful, honest and a joy to work with.”

Most respondents agreed that they would recommend participation in interviews to other graduate students.

“I think this is so valuable. It should be required at least once in a Master’s program.”

“Not only for personal growth, but also for honoring retired administrators.”

Many respondents agreed that participation in oral interviews affected them personally.

“I was influenced by the fact that you can hear first-hand what happened. You can take their triumphs and failures and add them to your repertoire.”

“It has been the best, and possibly the most relevant part of my program.”

“I strongly feel … this activity was one of the most valuable learning experiences of my graduate program.”

“I have read many books on school administration, but none of them has been as helpful and as influential … as the interview I conducted….”

Clearly most of the respondents agreed that oral history interviewing is a useful instructional technique and recommended participation in such activities should occur. It offered a chance for students to capture the craft wisdom of former school principals in a way not known before. This procedure exposed students to knowledgeable former administrators, with an emphasis placed on real world experiences which complemented classroom presentations. The U.S. Army had “gotten it right” and I agreed!


Colonel Patrick Carlton was a faculty member at Virginia Tech from 1974 -2000, and Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas from 2000 to 2018. Beginning with an emphasis on quantitative research, his interests have “morphed” into a focus on historical and case study work supported by oral history data collection and analytical activities. The collection is based upon the model developed by the US Army Institute for Military History, in Carlisle Barracks, PA, where he served as Colonel, Acting Director for Educational Services.

The Oral History of the Public School Principalship, directed since 1986, is a nationally available data source housed in UNLV’s Lied Library. At present the collection is composed of 467 first-person interviews with former public school principals from throughout the country. Offering a trove of valuable information on past and current educational issues, the database has been employed by a number of doctoral students and other scholarly researchers in the conduct of their work.

Featured image from interview with Mary Belton, Youngstown, Ohio. Oral History of Public School Principalship, UNLV.

5 Questions About: Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Loh Kah Seng discusses Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments.

Jessica Martucci’s review of Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments is available online and in issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s your book about and why does it matter?

The book contains contributions from Southeast Asia, a diverse region where oral history work is still not widely known, and where it often (but not always) contends as fragments against dominant state narratives. 

How does oral history contribute to your book?

The volume draws upon oral history fieldwork in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and deals with memory politics among a varied group of Southeast Asians: workers, communists, rebels, massacre survivors, villagers, and former leprosy patients.

Kah Seng Loh, Stephen Dobbs, and Ernest Koh (eds). Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

In an academic sense, oral history in the region is incredibly rich and capable of disturbing dominant narratives. But it does not always do so, possessing a sometimes ambivalent relationship to power. Speaking about the past in the context of Southeast Asia—a bundle of nation-states with conflicted recent political and social histories—is both rewarding and challenging work.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Southeast Asia offers interesting ways to understand oral history in the context of decolonization, the Cold War and counter-insurgency, rapid industrialization, and medicalization of the state. Our book is a small (and old) one, and hopefully will spur further regional perspectives and trans-regional comparisons on oral history.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

That oral history remains relevant and valuable today in many places in the world, particularly due to some of its original impetus, namely the relationship between memory, power and social change.

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