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Interviewing with Beer: Navigating the Distinct Challenges of Oral History Research

Recent Washington State University graduate John Tappan Menard reflects on a few of the unique demands of oral history projects that he discovered while completing his graduate thesis on the craft beer movement.

By John Tappan Menard

“I don’t know what you two are planning, but you can’t talk about securities fraud around my kids,” the woman scolded us. Though she did not appear intoxicated, the several empty beer glasses behind her suggested otherwise. I was sitting in the basement of a fruit warehouse turned pub, interviewing a former master brewer of the Yakima Brewing and Malting Co. We were not, as she thought, planning any sort of securities fraud, but we were discussing the financial shenanigans which had ultimately caused the collapse of the company. My interviewee and I, though perplexed by the request—who would have thought finance would be such a controversial topic?—agreed to keep it down. Satisfied, she left and we resumed our discussion. We’d hardly said more than a few words before the woman came back, bellowing this time. “I told you! You can’t talk about that!”

“Perhaps we should move elsewhere?” I suggested, fearing that the situation would escalate.

“No,” my subject objected, “we’re staying here.” Rising from his seat, he began to verbally spar with the woman, asserting our right to discuss whatever we pleased within the confines of a bar. His aggressiveness paid off, she left, kids in tow, and my interviewee was able to finish telling me about how the United States’ first post-Prohibition brewpub came to its lamentable end.

I was conducting research for my master’s thesis on the Yakima Brewing and Malting Company and its founder, Bert Grant, one of the early pioneers of the craft beer movement. Though Grant died in August 2001, many of his former employees and customers were still around to talk to, and I reached out to them as part of my research for my thesis. My intent was to fill a gap in the literature on the birth of craft beer. Grant is venerated in Yakima, which is also the hop capital of the world, and well-regarded as an important pioneer within the industry, yet books on the rise of craft beer usually devoted no more than a sentence or two to Grant and his accomplishments. Why the silence? The absence of thorough corporate records and Grant’s death almost two decades ago are probably the biggest reasons. The company is defunct, extant records may have been destroyed or languish in some dusty basement, and unlike other pioneers, Grant is no longer alive to share his story. Yet the memory of Grant remains alive in the people who knew him, and by interviewing them I hoped to reveal his legacy.

In an ideal situation, an oral historian conducts an interview in a quiet setting, perhaps in an office or conference room, but I had no office or conference room, and regardless, many people are hesitant, reluctant, or flat-out unwilling to be interviewed about their pasts. The mere presence of a recorder and a consent form are enough to make people unwilling to talk. So, you meet them where they are most comfortable, and sometimes that means in dank, dusty bars or loud coffee shops, rife with background noise and interruption. 

A tipsy eavesdropper was not the only challenge I faced conducting research for this project. During a visit to the local museum where a large collection of Yakima Brewing ephemera and memorabilia was held I was informed by the curator that the collection had been taken back by the donor. Apparently, the collection had only been a temporary loan, a fact which had not been communicated to me. The loss of unfettered access to my primary source of information came as a crushing shock, and I briefly wondered if I was going to still be able to complete my thesis. Fortunately, I was able to get in touch with the donor, and he graciously allowed me to come view the collection in his home. As nervous as I was about going to a stranger’s house, I did, friend in tow, and for two hours we frantically photographed as many documents as we could in the dining room, the TV blaring in the background as his two kids watched cartoons.

While many of my interview subjects were difficult to contact because they guarded their privacy, other prospective narrators were too high in profile to easily contact. How does a lowly graduate student get in touch with—and get an interview with—Ken Grossman, co-founder and president of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, one of the largest and most successful breweries in the United States? The answer, I discovered was relatively simple; just fill out the “Contact Us” forms which are ubiquitous on company websites. I had surprising success requesting interviews via filling out web forms. In every instance, my message worked its way up through the corporate chain, and within a few days to weeks an assistant reached out to schedule a phone interview. Only one company declined to put me in touch with its president, but only on the grounds that he was out of the country for an extended period. Typically, I was granted very limited time to conduct an interview; I was, after all, merely the 9 to 9:30 appointment on the schedule of a very busy individual. It was paramount that I conduct the interview efficiently.

A unique trait of oral history is that the interviewer needs to be flexible and adapt quickly to changing circumstances. People, and the environments in which they feel comfortable talking, are often unpredictable, and a researcher needs to be prepared for that. Ultimately, those looking to chronicle living history need to be willing to put themselves in unfamiliar situations, and not be afraid to reach out to anyone and everyone. Particularly in close-knit industries like brewing, expect some people to be reticent about sharing their stories. However, it is important to collect these stories while we can, especially since most breweries do not methodically preserve their records. In just a few decades, telling a story like Grant’s may be possible. 

John Tappan Menard holds a Master’s degree in Public History from Washington State University. His other oral history work includes a biography of Washington State University President Glenn Terrell, appearing in Leading the Crimson and Gray: The Presidents of Washington State University, WSU Press, 2019.

Featured image: “Craft Beer Tasting” by Jonathan Grimes, licensed by CC BY-NC 2.0

Best Practices for Working with a Transcriptionist

We are grateful for the expertise of veteran Oral History Association members who are willing to share their wisdom with our readers. In this week’s post, Teresa Bergen shares tips for producing high quality interview transcripts when working with a transcriptionist, drawn from her forthcoming book, Transcribing Oral History.

By Teresa Bergen

You’ve conducted your interviews and backed up all your audio. Now comes the next step on your project’s journey to the archive: transcription. It’s simple, right? You pay somebody (or if you’re really lucky you have a reliable volunteer) and they type all your brilliant interviews into legible, searchable documents for grateful scholars. What could go wrong?

Well, a lot of things. But a little bit of work upfront can pay off in less editing later, and perhaps develop a wonderful relationship with a transcriptionist who will also help you on future projects.

Quality recording

The best thing you can give your transcriptionist is a high-quality recording. It amazes me how many times I’ve heard interviewers in a noisy environment laughingly make remarks to the narrator about how they feel sorry for whoever is going to transcribe this. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Sure, the transcriber will suffer in the short run, but ultimately, it’s the project and future researchers who will miss out. Transcriptionists don’t have supersonic hearing. The project will wind up paying extra for a transcript that looks like Swiss cheese with all the parts marked [unclear] or [inaudible]. But don’t think the transcriptionist is happy because she’s charging 50 percent more—it’s probably taking her three times as long to do it.

In short, find a quiet place to record and test your equipment. And remember, it is all about the narrator. Test the recorder with the narrator sitting an appropriate distance from the microphone and talking at their ordinary volume. While interviewing, try to keep your gratuitous “mm hmms” and “yeahs” to a minimum, as too often they obscure the narrator’s words.

Useful documents

Along with the audio, certain documents will make the transcription process much more efficient. These are a:

  • Contract – Whether you work for a big institution that requires a 10-page contract or you’re a tiny community oral history project, have an agreement in writing. Even if it’s just in emails, be sure you cover the expected number of audio hours, the transcriptionist’s rates (including things like difficult audio, more than two speakers, or rush transcription, if applicable), the estimated turnaround time (based on when the transcriptionist receives the files, not when the agreement is made) and how soon the transcriptionist will be paid.
  • Sample transcript – If you’ve already begun your project, send a sample transcript to your transcriptionist so she can match the format.
  • Style guide – Some larger institutions produce their own transcribing style guides. These may include how to deal with nonstandard grammar, use of ellipses, transcribing nonverbal vocalizations, and other decisions a transcriptionist makes on a minute to minute basis. If your institution does not have a style guide, put together your own or use somebody else’s style guide, such as the excellent one written by Baylor. This assures consistency in your transcripts and will cut editing time.
  • Proper noun list – Almost every project has specialized vocabulary, ranging from family and geographical names to occupational lingo. Project managers should require the interviewer to submit a proper noun list along with the recording. The interviewer should make notes during the session, being sure to verify spelling with the narrator either during or after the interview. The narrator may not know how to spell all the terminology or proper nouns. In this case, the interviewer and/or project manager may need to do internet or other research to verify spellings. It’s unlikely they’ll catch everything; the transcriptionist will probably add to the list as she transcribes.
  • Any other paperwork mandated by your institution, such as confidentiality statement, purchase order, or invoice format

Paying mechanism

Project managers should know exactly how the contractor will be paid before they send out audio for transcription. If the person who commissions the work doesn’t plan ahead for payment, they might face bureaucratic obstacles that take months to clear up. Meanwhile, the transcriptionist’s bills are due, and she may have to jump ship in favor of prompter payers.

Prioritize

Contract transcriptionists are probably working on multiple projects simultaneously. Let the transcriptionist know which files are a priority. Perhaps your whole project is a priority because you are writing an interview-based book with your submission deadline fast approaching. Transcription turnaround time may also be accelerated if a narrator is old, ill, and/or has quickly deteriorating abilities.

Teamwork

Project managers sometimes treat transcription as an afterthought, a clerical duty to be dealt with after the more exciting collection stage. And sometimes transcriptionists themselves are treated this way. Not only is this demeaning for the transcriptionist, but it overlooks a big opportunity for the project. Transcriptionists are often well-educated and well-read, and some are also editors and authors. They’re word people—that’s how they got into this business. If project managers treat transcriptionists as part of the team, they may benefit from the transcriptionists’ insights. For example, if you’re making a documentary film or podcast from an interview, the transcriptionist could save you time by marking especially coherent sound bites or other special moments.

Also, remember that the transcriptionist is not a machine, but a human conduit who thinks and feels. If the interview material is emotionally difficult –think war, rape, child abuse – brief the transcriptionist and make sure she’s willing to deal with these subjects before sending out the audio. Your transcriptionist is going to spend many hours alone in a room listening and re-listening to this material. This affects a person.

Share the credit. It may take many people to produce a single hour of interview. So many tasks go into it: identifying narrators, scheduling interviews, doing the interviews, transcribing, auditing, editing, archiving, using the interviews to create exhibits, books, films, podcasts, and other end products. Acknowledge everybody who had a hand in the process, including the transcriptionist.

Teresa Bergen is a freelance writer and transcriptionist. Her latest book, Transcribing Oral History, is due out in August.

Researching emotions in interviews with former IRA prisoners

Oral History Review has a particular interest in the various methods oral history practitioners use to analyze interviews. We are delighted to preview Dieter Reinisch’s work exploring the emotions revealed in interviews with former Irish Republican Army prisoners, drawn from his larger project, An Oral History of Irish Republican Prisoners, 1971-2000.

By Dieter Reinisch

Particularly since the widely read books by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, emotions have become a significant research subject in the humanities and social sciences, making steady inroads in fields such as social movement studies and oral history. I recently studied the role of emotions in my oral history project comprised of interviews I conducted with former IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland. Analyzing the emotions and feelings expressed in these interviews has given me insight into new facets of the Northern Irish Troubles.

I began using oral history with my MA thesis research in 2010. Since then, I have interviewed almost 100 Irish Republicans. Between 2014 and 2018, I interviewed 34 former IRA prisoners for my PhD thesis. All these interviews are life-story interviews, and each session usually lasted between two and three hours. One of the comments that regularly came up in one form or another was: “It was the best time of my life.”

Prison-Protests in Northern Ireland

What these narrators referred to as the “best time“ is the period of H-Blocks Blanket- and No-Wash-Protests of Irish Republican prisoners, which occurred between 1976 and 1981. In official Republican propaganda, it is described – perhaps rightly – as hell on earth. During these years some of my interview partners spent their time in the H-Blocks, locked up 24-hours a day, seven days a week, covered in nothing but a blanket, and sleeping on a dirty sponge mattress in a cell with no heating and broken windows.

The broken windows allowed rain and snow into the cells. Yet, the prisoners deliberately broke the windows to get rid of the stench of their excrement, which they had smeared on the walls to keep the floor dry. They did this as part of their no-wash protest, which also meant they did not shave, cut their hair, or use any bathroom facilities.

Following his visit to the H-Blocks, Cardinal Ó Fiaich said of the conditions that: “The nearest approach to it that I have seen was the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in sewer-pipes in the slums of Calcutta.” The prisoners were living in these slum-like conditions, separated from their comrades, under constant threat of full body strip-searches, brutal shifts of the prisoners from one wing to another, and beatings. It was not only Republican propaganda, but most people would also indeed describe these conditions as “hell on earth.” And yet, almost four decades later, some narrators tell me that this was the best time of their lives.

It was not only Republican propaganda, but most people would also indeed describe these conditions as “hell on earth.” And yet, almost four decades later, some narrators tell me that this was the best time of their lives.

To understand these sentiments, I embarked on analyzing the feelings and emotions expressed in the interviews. Historians, including Debra Smith and Rolf Petri, have discussed the definitions of, and differences in meaning between emotion and feeling. Often, the terms of emotion, passion, and feeling are used synonymously in the literature. For the time being, I take a pragmatic approach by using these terms synonymously.

During my research, I found seven groups of emotions that are particularly relevant to understanding the prison experience: loneliness; bitterness; nostalgia; joy; pressure; and loss. I want to give a brief introduction to two of these feelings, sharing some of my preliminary findings specifically about some of the more positive emotions expressed by former prisoners in their interviews.

Nostalgia

Susan Stewart defines nostalgia as “a longing for an imagined past,” she writes that “nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative.” It is indeed this narrative that is among the central topics expressed in the interviews and best illustrated by the above phrase: “It was the best time of my life.” IRA prisoners were segregated from other prisoners in the internment camps and prisons; this led them to perceive their prison experience as different from ordinary prisoners.

Another aspect that bound the prisoners together and allowed them to remember the prison experience as something positive was the revolutionary wave that swept through the Irish nationalist community during these times.

Malachy Trainor is a former prisoner who took part in the protest from Armagh. He remembers that

“the other bonus thing is that there was still a lot of hope that the war could have been won or the war could have been over. So, you were in between hope and, I would say, providence.”

As Trainor explains, the prisoners hoped that they were part of history, and their imprisonment was part of that historical process. This idea made them understand their situation as a useful and relevant time in the Republican struggle.

Similarly, for Laurence McKeown a former IRA hunger striker, these years were the “most educational of my life”:

“I’ve often said that even though I did go on to various studies and get a doctorate, I consider those years as being the most educational of my life because it was about unlearning. It was unlearning of a lot of the nonsense probably that was in your head that you’d just soak up from parents, teachers, the state, the church.”

Happiness and Joy

Another feeling that feeds the nostalgia in the narratives is joy and happiness. However, it is striking that most of the moments of happiness and joy remembered in the interviews involved incidents when violence was successfully directed against the prison warders or the British Army, as the following excerpt from the interview with John Nixon, another former prisoner from Armagh illustrates:

“When Airey Neave was executed everyone [in jail] cheered because they thought the Provos had done it and they were shouting out: ‘What a good job!’ and ‘Up the ‘RA!’ and it was even people like myself who were INLA [Irish National Liberation Army] saying it was a good job and then there was a lot of confusion over who had done it until the INLA claimed it. There was much pressure after that, more squeezing, more beatings, the denial of privileges, no visits.”

Emotional communities

Barbara Rosenwein explains that emotional communities are social groups that share the same understanding of emotions and how these should be expressed. Furthermore, they are groups of people who have the same or similar interests and values which are connected by the style and assessment of emotions. I consider IRA prisoners an emotional community, despite the different experiences and interpretations of their time in prison, as summed up by Trainor:

“[Imprisonment] can make you a monster in the sense that bitterness takes over and your thinking becomes foggy if you let it if you go as far as it. In other words, it can also help you to have a greater understanding that you haven’t had before. So, it can be a plus in your education even though it is an expensive education. […] It can make you better; it can make you very fundamental; it can make you very suspicious. […] It might be nice even. [Laughing] It is something from a positive aspect, then it can make you a better person if you leave the actual injustices. It can make you a better person in the community even.”

In this excerpt, Trainor sums up a range of emotions, from anger that turns you into a monster to the joy that makes you a better person in the community. I chose this particular excerpt to stress that there is more to imprisonment than pain and fear. In essence, understanding the dynamics described by Trainor and other prisoners in their stories will open a new and interesting avenue of research that might help us to reconsider the motivations and lives of political activists before, during, and after their imprisonment.

While my initial research interest was the informal education of politically motivated prisoners, expanding my analysis to the emotions introduced in this article demonstrates the value of analyzing oral history interviews through several lenses.

Dr. Dieter Reinisch is a Lecturer in History and Gender Studies at the Universities of Vienna and Salzburg and an Adjunct Professor in International Relations at Webster University. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute and is an editorial board member of Studi Irlandesi (Florence University Press). He will join the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University, as a Junior Core Fellow in October 2019 to finalize his book on “An Oral History of Irish Republican prisoners, 1971-2000”. The final chapter of his book discusses the seven groups of emotions presented in this post.

Featured image: detail of “Irish hunger strikers with Frank Stagg,” licensed with CC BY-SA 3.0  by Wikimedia user Hajotthu

Tell Me A ‘History’: Oral History and its Role in the Primary School Classroom

Gosia Brown, one of the Head Teachers at St. Francis Melton Catholic Primary School in Leicestershire, England, discusses the ways that oral history has become a part of its curriculum, a subset of a larger project about the school’s heritage and history within the community.

As humans we are all gripped and drawn in by stories and the hush of storytime is a moment in the school day that reaffirms the power of a story and the way in which children can be transported to another time or place. So, what better way to engage our learners than through the voices of people from across the decades, from different times and places, and from a variety of cultures and backgrounds?

At St Francis Catholic Primary School, the stories of past pupils, staff, parents and grandparents are at the centre of a five-year project exploring the heritage of the school’s existence in Melton Mowbray, a project which has been the catalyst for developing the use of oral history across our curriculum. At the start of the project every child in the school was invited to gather a memory about the school or the town from a family member. The children were excited that they were able to engage in this research directly, bringing an immediacy to the historical enquiry that would not have been achievable in any other way. It was a great springboard for our project too, as it engaged families and the wider community who could then post photos and memories to the school’s Heritage Facebook page, which now has over 400 followers.

After an excellent lesson from Colin Hyde on interviewing, an oral historian from the University of Leicester, children from years 5 and 6 prepared to carry out in-depth interviews at a memory sharing morning. The children were fascinated to learn about how the Franciscan Sisters who still reside in the Convent House next door to the school began their ministry in London, serving the community by visiting the poor and housebound. The Sisters came to Melton Mowbray and started a school in the center of the town with just 4 pupils in 1900, before moving to the Convent House in 1904 and then eventually building the school on its present site in 1957. Through listening to the first hand accounts, the children began to make connections between the stories and key concepts they were learning about in History. They quickly recognized that school life was very different in the past and understood the impact of world events as the Sisters described how during World War II evacuees arrived on the doorstep with their gas masks in hand to live in safety at the Convent house.

As an educator, I recognised how the event was something rather special as it brought together so many aspects of the whole curriculum. Not only were the children building on their historical knowledge and understanding, they were also using numerous other skills such as interviewing and recording, and the simple but important skill of starting and maintaining a conversation with someone new. The intergenerational element was a joy to watch as the children and adults, tentatively at first, began to converse with one another. It was surprisingly accessible even for those pupils for whom spoken language is a difficulty; these pupils had the chance to rehearse their questions with a friend beforehand so that they had greater confidence when faced with their visitor, and once they started there was no stopping them!

Teachers quickly saw the potential to extend the work on the Heritage Project into their lessons in the classroom, and not just in History. Not much is needed in the way of cost as there is so much available online through the Oral History Society, the British Library, and BBC School Radio, to name just a few places where oral recordings on a range of subjects can be accessed. In Personal and Social Education lessons for example, we have listened to the voices of those with disabilities, leading our pupils to develop positive attitudes towards others. The discussions that follow listening to such recordings are of a truly high quality as a result of pupils having their opinions and viewpoints challenged through listening to the life experiences of others. As a Catholic school, we made the link between oral history and the oral traditions of the Bible as well as listening to the stories of those from other faiths. And of course, just like any good story, oral histories can be used as a stimulus for creative subjects such as art, D&T (design and technology) and creative writing.

We continue to develop our work using Oral History to enhance our curriculum offer and we are excited as senior leaders to see how much it has engaged our staff and pupils. As we adapt and develop our approaches to suit our developing curriculum, we are confident that the whole community will benefit from our work, not least the children in whom we have seen it further inspire a love of learning. The next stage in our project is a school play about the history of the school. This is rather an ambitious aspect of the project, where we hope to use multimedia to include voice recordings as a way of engaging our audience directly with the interviews. But that’s another story, which we hope will continue to bring oral history further to the forefront in Primary education.

Gosia Brown is Co- Head Teacher at St Francis Catholic Primary School in Melton Mowbray and co-ordinates the Lottery funded Heritage Project, ‘Memories of Saint Francis Catholic Primary School- 60 years in Melton Mowbray’. She has developed a free resource guide for educators who are interested in pursuing Oral History in the classroom. 

Images of St. Francis Catholic Primary School’s memory sharing event are courtesy of Rafal Orzech.

Author interview: Emma Vickers on Unexpected Trauma in Oral History Interviews

In her recent OHR article, “Unexpected Trauma in Oral Interviewing,” Emma Vickers argues that oral historians can draw on psychoanalytic theories to better equip for unexpected trauma in interviews. Here, she answers a few of our questions about ways to navigate trauma when interviewing.

Can you explain what you mean by “unexpected trauma” in the interview process?

I define unexpected trauma as traumatic recall that has a tangential relationship to the content of the interview. An interview could be set up with an interviewee that was framed around a discussion of their work history, for example. Unexpected trauma might occur if the narrator explored a traumatic event that was unforeseen in the context of that interview.

Briefly give our readers an overview of how you draw on the psychoanalytic theory of transactional analysis and how it can be useful to understand for oral history interviewing.

Transactional analysis (TA) can have real utility in situations where unexpected trauma is recalled. TA is built upon the idea of three ego states: parent, adult, and child. When interviewees recall unexpected trauma, they can sometimes experience a collapse into feeling in the child ego state. One way to strengthen the adult ego state and bring an interviewee out of the traumatic memory is to ground them in the here and now reality of the moment using a grounding technique called refocusing. It’s a practice that has been really helpful for me when I have encountered unexpected trauma.

I also think that oral historians could adopt the system of supervision that qualified therapists and those in training work within. This would provide oral practitioners with a means of exploring their practice and offer a forum in which instances of traumatic recall could be discussed and understood.

How do you think oral historians can approach setting boundaries between being a researcher and becoming an unexpected therapist?

Knowing our limits as practitioners of oral history is really important. I am not suggesting that we should all train in TA but that we could mobilize some of its functionality in our practice. Unexpected trauma occurs frequently in the context of the interview scenario and yet we are not taught how we might help interviewees to process it. We need to know our limits, and that means equipping ourselves to assist interviewees who recall traumatic memories, specifically using the technique of refocusing, and knowing when we might gently signpost an interviewee to an external organization or end the interview, for example. Anything more than this goes beyond our practice.

How can interviewers choose whether to engage refocusing techniques or end an interview all together when trying to avoid narrator retraumatization?

Sometimes a collapse into feeling is sustained and refocusing only works temporarily. If an interviewee continues to display signs of trauma following a refocusing technique or is unable to achieve composure, then the interviewer should consider ending the interview.

Can you explain in greater detail how the “operational model of supervision” used by supervisors of therapists can help facilitate a more effective interviewer and interviewee relationship?

Oral interviewing is a solitary process and although many practitioners might debrief with a colleague following a difficult interview, there is no formal system in place that compels us to engage in that process. In TA, supervision allows practitioners to discuss their practice and identify any concerns. If oral historians were able to access a similar supervisory system I have no doubt that it would improve their practice and therefore improve the interviewer and interviewee relationship.

Emma L. Vickers is a senior lecturer in history at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is a member of the Oral History Society’s LGBTQ special interest group. She has published widely on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and war in the context of Britain in the twentieth century.

Featured photograph courtesy of Philadelphia Immigration.

The Blossoming of Oral History in Greece

Andromache Gazi, author of the recently published “Oral Testimonies as Independent Museum Exhibits: A Case Study from the Industrial Gas Museum in Athens”, shares her perspective on today’s rapidly growing oral history community in Greece.

By Andromache Gazi

During the last decade, an extraordinary interest in oral history has developed in Greece. This has manifested, among other things, in the founding of the Oral History Association in 2013, the blossoming of oral history groups all over the country (more than 12 alone in Athens and more than 15 in the rest of Greece), the proliferation of oral history research projects, many of which culminate in the creation of private or/and public oral history archives, the growing inclusion of oral testimonies in museum exhibitions, and the spread of audiovisual art projects experimenting with oral narratives.

What has been motivating this proliferation of oral history? Most researchers see the oral history boom as a result of the severe and prolonged financial crisis which Greece has experienced since 2009. Riki van Boeschoten, emeritus professor at the University of Thessaly and one of the pioneers of oral history in Greece, credits the phenomenon mainly to the need of people for historical awareness which has been heightened during the years of crisis.

The most visible sign of this need is the amazing increase in the number of local oral history groups within the last eight years. The first group was established in the spring of 2011 in the Kypseli neighborhood in Athens, followed by the Athens Oral History Group in 2013, and the mushrooming of others in subsequent years. Participation in these groups is voluntary and begins with an 18-hour seminar on the principles and methodology of oral history coordinated by historian Tasoula Vervenioti, a pioneer of biographical research and the soul of oral history groups in Greece. These self-regulated, collectively operated, local groups reflect a desire among people to re-discover their identities during times of hardship and generate new insights of history as a richly nuanced lived experience. A tangible example of the vigor of local history work in the neighborhoods is the open fairs organized in 2015 and 2017 in Athens as a celebration of oral history in the public sphere.

Yet oral history in Greece is not new. Interest in biographical narratives and oral testimonies appeared in historical and social research in the mid-80s. The first initiatives may be traced back to the work of social anthropologist Alki Kyriakidou Nestoros, professor at the University of Thessaloniki, who introduced an anthropological perspective influenced by the philosophy of oral history in the study of traditional culture.

A significant advance in the study of “history from below” came from researchers who collected oral narratives in order to bring to light women’s stories and views, not hitherto visible in official historical records. Starting from the early 1990s, much oral history work has focused on the memory of the 1940s and the Greek Civil War (1944-1949), a traumatic period which did not easily fall within official historical research. The study of the period of the German Occupation in Greece and the Civil War as an experience lived by everyday people, and the subsequent process of building individual and collective memories around it became an extremely fertile field for oral history scholars and has produced a rich corpus of published work. At around the same time, the influx of immigrants opened up a new field for oral history projects based on biographical research.

One of the first systematic attempts at establishing oral history as an academic field was the creation in 1999 of an oral history group within EKKE, the National Centre for Social Research. Ten years later in 2009, the Prefecture of Chania in Cretea in collaboration with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki organized a training seminar of 20 volunteers, with the aim of establishing a Museum of Oral History on the island. The project did not materialize, but the seminar acted as a catalyst for the rise of local involvement in oral history and brought together a group of historians and sociologists who contributed to the foundation of the Oral History Association in 2013.

Today the Association plays a pivotal role in oral history theory and methodology training, in archiving and in dealing with ethical issues according to international standards and best practices. So far it has organized four international conferences (Volos 2012, Athens 2014, Thessaloniki 2016, Komotini 2018) and a plethora of seminars, while the first Summer School in Oral History will take place in 2019, in collaboration with the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Thrace. A lot has been done in higher education too. In the 2000s the Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly pioneered the inclusion of oral history in its undergraduate curriculum to be followed later by some departments of Sociology, History, Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies elsewhere.

University departments have carried out several museum oral history projects, such as “Oral histories – The FIX building,” initiated in 2018 by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Technical University of Athens, the University of Athens and Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. This project has recorded first-hand experiences related to the Museum’s home, the FIX building, an important example of Greek modernism and a landmark of the industrial history of Athens. 

Initiatives in using oral history in primary and secondary education emerged in the last two decades, mostly as a result of teachers’ enthusiasm, without any formal support. Several oral history programs designed in collaboration with teachers enable pupils to gain a deeper understanding of the past or particular social issues through the voices of the people who lived the events. “Don’t leave your past behind,” for example, was initiated in 2018 at the 4th High School of Keratisini, Piraeus, as part of a larger project of local history. The organization of the first pupils’ conference on oral history (Athens, May 2019) confirms that the time is ripe for a more inclusive use of oral history in school education.

Publicity for Gazi, Are You Listening? based on a drawing designed by one of the student organizers. See more exhibit images in our accompanying gallery. Image courtesy of Andromache Gazi.

Greek museums have been rather hesitant in including oral history in their galleries. “Volos – Nea Ionia: So far away – So close” an exhibition about the neighborhood of Nea Ionia at the outskirts of Volos, launched at the Museum of the City of Volos in 2014, was perhaps the first museum exhibition which intertwined oral history decisively into the exhibition narrative in the form of sound stations and sound showers along with text excerpts from interviews. “Gazi, are you listening?” a 2016 temporary oral history exhibition at the Industrial Gas Museum in Athens displayed oral testimonies as autonomous exhibits (read much more about it in my recent OHR article). The exhibition, comprised of memories, narratives, and stories of people who have lived and worked in the old gasworks, or in the neighborhood, had a high degree of originality as oral history rarely stands alone in museum exhibitions.

Greek artists and curators also exploit the potential of oral narratives in their work. Inventory was a 2018-2019 project of performing arts and multimedia by Jenny Argyriou and Vasilis Gerodimos presented at Eleusis (Cultural Capital of Europe 2021). The artists created a temporary social area/workshop at the waterfront of Eleusis where they carried out archival research on-the-spot, collected material and testimonies from the residents of Eleusis, and experimented with participatory workshops.

Finally, one should also mention the rise of sound walks such as the 2018 “Memories of an occupied city. A sound walk in Athens 1941-1944” which sprang out of a research project carried out by Marilena Koukouli at Panteion University.

Andromache Gazi is associate professor of museology at the Department of Communication, Media, and Culture, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.

Featured image: Exhibition visitor in one of the listening posts at the exhibit, “Gazi, are you listening?” at Industrial Gas Museum, Athens. Photo by Andromache Gazi.

5 Questions About: Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution

 

We’ve asked authors of books reviewed in the pages of Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read them. In our latest installment of the series, Mary Adkins discusses Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution.

Read Thomas Saylor’s review of Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Florida’s 1968 Constitution was the product of dramatic change in Florida. In the 1960s, the space program was centered in Florida; Disney was building its Florida theme park; but Florida’s government was stuck with a structure born of the post-Reconstruction South. The Constitution called for segregated schools, had no unified court system, and enshrined nineteenth-century population patterns in its legislative apportionment, preventing new growth centers in South Florida from adequate representation and therefore sufficient services. How a group of reformers turned the government around and drafted a new Constitution is an entertaining and absorbing story.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Adkins, Mary E., Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2016.

My first “mother lode” of information was a batch of oral histories I found in University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program’s digital collection. The interviews were recorded on the occasion of the twenty-year anniversary of the Constitution Revision Commission that drafted the new constitution. From these oral histories I branched out to find other documentary evidence and conduct oral histories of my own.

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

Oral histories almost invariably provide a personal touch or a small detail that has been left out of the official history. These anecdotes add life to the narrative of a story. I was concerned that a history of a constitution could be expected to be dry. I knew that it was much more interesting than it sounded. The personal stories the oral histories provided gave me many opportunities to add a human touch or a personal perspective.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

My book not only has earlier oral histories and those I conducted, but also has excerpts from less formal conversations and excerpts from the transcripts of the Constitution Revision Commission meetings. Oral historians can compare and contrast the uses of all of these forms of oral contributions to history.

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

That constitutions are the products of people living in their times but trying to think long-term. They are interesting. They are vital. They are worth your time. 

OHR Conversations: Rina Benmayor and Linda Shopes on Ron Grele

Last week, Digital Editor Janneken Smucker virtually sat down with Rina Benmayor and Linda Shopes, the guest editors of Oral History Review’s Winter/Spring 2019 issue special section, “The Contributions of Ronald J. Grele to Oral History.” In this installment of OHR Conversations, our guests share what all oral historians should know about their friend and colleague Ron.

View or listen to the recorded conversation featuring Rina Benmayor and Linda Shopes, interviewed by Janneken Smucker. 

Don’t miss our Tribute to Ron Grele gallery featuring primary sources and candid photographs supplementing the special section. 

Listen to audio only.

 

Read the entire special section, “The Contributions of Ronald J. Grele to Oral History.”

Author interview: Alexander Freund on Oral History in China

In the latest issue of OHR, Alexander Freund’s “Long Shadows over New Beginnings? Oral History in Contemporary China,” adds to our knowledge of the global history of oral history, exploring twentieth and twenty-first century oral history practices in China, asserting that oral historians have much to learn by investigating the uses of oral history in China. Here he answers a few or our questions.

Briefly give our readers an overview of the current state of the field of oral history in China.

I think oral history in China is in an exciting but also somewhat precarious state. I do want to repeat that I am not an expert – far from it; my knowledge is really limited to a short visit to a major oral history center in Beijing and my review of the English-language literature on the history of oral history in China.

After a long period in which Chinese historians used oral evidence (as they did elsewhere), it seems that oral history came to play a more important role from the 1930s onward. Whatever form oral history took from the 1930s onward, it was shaped by the political conflicts at the time. Chinese researchers used oral history, as did outsiders studying certain aspects of Chinese society; best-known is Red Star Over China by the American journalist Edgar Snow.

Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, 1937. (The Swedish edition, because its cover is just so cool).

After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, oral history was influenced by the government’s attitude to history and memory, and, according to some scholars, the state abused interviewing and life-story telling as an instrument of disciplining and controlling the population. From the 1980s, Chinese practices became more influenced by Western, and particular American, scholarship. According to a number of Chinese colleagues I met in Beijing in the fall of 2017, oral history entered a new phase of massive expansion and popularization in the early twenty-first century.

There are now several oral history centers and many oral history projects at universities throughout the country. Several handbooks and oral history guides are available. Oral history is widely practiced outside of academia, in communities and schools. There is a steady stream of academic monographs and popular books, there are conferences, and there is an increasing use of oral history in public media, especially in television documentaries.

The history of oral history is much more interesting and complicated than we usually believe, and that we need to begin to research this history in much greater depth than we have so far.

As we know, oral history lends itself to undermining official narratives, be it intentionally or unintentionally. In the current political climate in China, it is unclear how this upsurge in oral history will fare in the future. As in past decades, much will depend on the government’s attitude. But it will also depend on the oral historians, and those I met were highly motivated, enthusiastic, and courageous.

What is the relationship of oral history in China to the discipline/method in the Anglo-American (or Western) culture? What makes oral history distinct in China?

That is difficult for me to judge, because I had almost no opportunity to see oral history “in action” or to listen to interviews. My impression is that the scholars I met at the oral history conference in Beijing wanted to ensure that their own standards of scholarship conformed to Western standards, both in terms of interviewing technology and methods, and in terms of theorizing narrative and memory. Translation is still a big obstacle, but an increasing number of oral history guides and handbooks are being translated. There are also some Chinese scholars whose Chinese-language works are based on the American and British literature.

I can only speculate about what makes oral history in China distinct, but I think that under the current government conducting research is becoming increasingly difficult. Our colleagues at the Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History at Communication University in Beijing seemed to feel somewhat protected by the reputation of Cui Yongyuan, who until recently was a popular television host, and his personal interest in the center, but the South China Morning Post reported on 1 March that he has now been implicated in a judicial scandal. I hope this won’t have a negative effect on the oral history center named after him.

Some Western media report that the current government is increasingly shutting off access to non-Chinese websites. In the latest issue of Die Zeit, Xifan Yang reports that a whole army of censors in state agencies and private companies is turning the internet into a Chinese intranet where many internet users have never heard of Facebook, Google, or Youtube, all of which are blocked in China. And, according to Xifan, many don’t feel the need, because there are major Chinese platforms and apps that provide the same services.

While many academics use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to access blocked websites, and the government tolerates it to some degree, it is nevertheless increasingly dangerous. Even in the one-and-a-half years since my visit, internet access seems to have become much more restricted. I have not been able to access the website of the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center since December 2017, and now I can no longer find it in a Google search. In fact, the Center is no longer listed on the Communication University’s website. I am still in sporadic email contact with the Center, so I know it has not been shut down. In mid-March, Hui Lin told me her center’s website has been down because the CUC’s website has been updated. She also told me that they use the popular Chinese social media platforms WeChat and Weibo to disseminate their research.

Can you describe how oral history was practiced in China during the era of Mao?

History, and with it oral history, went through several phases. The biggest memory project has been going on since the early 1950s, recording memories of the period before the Revolution of 1949 and later memories of life after 1949. Until 2000, thousands of interviewers collected some 300,000 narratives. But there were also other projects. From the late 1950s, there was a focus on the so-called Four Histories that collected memories of village, factory, local, and family life. From early on, the government removed the practice of history from the university and placed it in the community, encouraging and training peasants and workers to research their communities. From what I understand, the goal of the interviews was to celebrate the achievements of the Communist Party of China, but it is unclear whether or how these interviews were used. They do not seem to be publicly accessible, and it is not clear whether the interviews were used as “confessions” that could be employed for charging narrators with anti-communist activities and consequently punishing them.

How has the Cultural Revolution impacted the use of oral history as a research method in China, both during that period and in the decades since?

I think that it is really impossible to say at this moment, at least for an outsider like me. Was oral history repressed during the Cultural Revolution, as some historians suggest, or was it used to extract confessions? There is a range of interpretations, but it seems that at least between 1949 and the death of Mao in 1976, oral history was very clearly scripted by the Communist Party. We can only speculate about how such official scripts have shaped both interviewers and narrators in their oral history practices since then. But whether consciously or subconsciously, it must have had an effect on how people talk about their lives (and how interviewers ask about other people’s lives), in a way that is perhaps not too different from the ways in which popular and dominant scripts shape our own oral history practices in Canada, the United States, or Germany.

You write about an interesting connection between Studs Terkel and oral history in China. Please describe this to our readers.

Jan Myrdel, Report from a Chinese Village, 1965.

According to Luke Kwong from the University of Lethbridge, the Swedish journalist Jan Myrdal published an oral history about a Chinese village in 1965 that inspired Studs Terkel to write Division Street: America in 1967. In the 1980s, Terkel’s books were translated and published in China and in turn inspired Chang Hsin-hsin and Sang Yeh’s Peking Man Projekt. Bruce Stave, who lived in China in the mid-1980s, called Chang and Sang “the Studs Terkels of China.”

Studs Terkel, Division Street: America, 1967.

I think this just goes to show that the global history of oral history is much deeper and interconnected than we usually admit or know. I think more than any other survey, Paul Thompson’s and Joanna Bornat’s fourth edition of The Voice of Past document this fascinating history and global diversity of oral history. The more we delve into this history, I am sure, the more such connections we will find.

Can you describe the shift in the practice of oral history in China that occurred in the 1980s?

The way I understand it is that along with China’s opening in the post-Mao era, especially on the economic front, Chinese academia also tried to establish connections with the West. Visits by Bruce Stave and Paul Thompson in the 1980s seem to have had a lasting impact on oral history practices in China, at least in terms of method.

This accelerated in the early twenty-first century, perhaps as a result of China’s increasing digital economy. The Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History has a full-time staff of about forty people, including television-trained camera teams responsible for filming interviews. I can’t say anything about the content of the interviews, but the recording quality and the resources available for research and archiving are astounding. The only comparable research center I can think of is the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, which apparently was the inspiration for Cui, who, similar to Steven Spielberg, made his fortune as one of China’s most popular television hosts. Our colleagues at that center and from other oral history centers throughout China have a real desire to connect with colleagues from around the world to learn about oral history and to ensure that their practices meet international standards. I just recently heard from Hui Lin, the associate director of the center, that they currently have five teams interviewing people throughout China on the Chinese power system, the Beijing Museum, and the Vietnam War. Other teams will be training people from throughout the country during a four-day workshop in April, and prepare exhibits in their own, quite large exhibit space. They also seem to have established connections with colleagues at the British Library and the OHMS team at the University of Kentucky.

What is the relationship between oral histories of national narratives and those that are personal narratives?

I am not sure those can be easily disentangled. We live in a world that is still shaped in fundamental ways by national narratives, some of which are more dominant than others. They don’t determine our personal narratives, but they influence them in certain ways, similar to how local and family narratives as well as more global cultural narratives shape how we view ourselves and the world around us, and how we can talk about and narrate these worlds.

What do you hope Western oral historians—the English language readers of OHR—will take away from your article on the historiography of oral history in China?

I think the main point is this: The history of oral history is much more interesting and complicated than we usually believe, and that we need to begin to research this history in much greater depth than we have so far. Academic research requires continuous reflection on one’s methods. Such reflection is much more difficult if we do not know the history of our method and our field. I have been trying to contribute to this history in my own articles on the links between oral history and confessional practices and the storytelling industry. In one sense, this article on China is another part of this broader history. I am continuing this work by looking at the connections between oral history and the history of surveillance, and I also want to learn more about possible links between our post-World War Two “interviewing society” and interviewing practices in the decades and centuries before 1945. Not to push to Paul Thompson’s and Joanna’s Bornat’s book, but I really believe that chapters 2 and 3 in The Voice of the Past are a fantastic starting point for anyone wishing to unearth other histories of oral history and its many global interconnections.

Alexander Freund is a professor of history and holds the chair in German-Canadian studies at the University of Winnipeg. He coedited Oral History and Photography (New York: Palgrave, 2011) and The Canadian Oral History Reader (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). He received the 2016 OHA Article Award for “Under Storytelling’s Spell? Oral History in a Neoliberal Age,” Oral History Review 42.1 (2015). 

Featured image: Detail from “Advance Victoriously Along Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line in Literature and the Arts” (1968).

5 Questions About: Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371

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, MK Czerwiec discusses Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371.

Mark O’Connor’s review of Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 is currently available online and in issue 46.1 of OHR. 

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 is a graphic memoir (non-fiction, long-form comic) informed by oral history interviews. Taking Turns tells the story, in comic form, of a new nurse (me) coming into her professional identity in a dedicated HIV/AIDS care hospital unit in Chicago at the height of the crisis years. It also provides a primer on the AIDS crisis in the United States, showing why unique care was needed, and how a community was formed to provide that care during years of profound loss and fear, yet also great compassion and connection.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Nearly ten years after our AIDS care unit closed, I was pursuing a master’s degree in Medical Humanities & Bioethics. In the course of my studies, I came to realize that the history of our Chicago AIDS Unit 371 was not formally recorded anywhere. I was shocked. Our AIDS unit was a model for compassionate, connected care. During our unit’s fifteen-year lifespan, people came from throughout the country to benefit from the excellent care we provided. Hundreds of people died there. Thousands of families and friends spent endless hours there. New treatment methods and new models of care had been developed there. Yet no history had been recorded. My goal was to change this. So as my thesis project, I interviewed former nurse colleagues, physicians, patients, our art therapist, social workers, volunteers, hospital administrators, family members, friends—anyone who could give me insights into this unique and important place. After transcribing and organizing these interviews, I then integrated my own memoir of being a nurse on this unit to create Taking Turns.

I decided to present it in a graphic form because while working on the unit I had started making comics to process experiences I’d had there. Additionally, a new field now known as Graphic Medicine had emerged and was quickly proving the important role comics could play in the discourse of health, illness, disability, and caregiving. I was convinced more than ever that comics were the perfect medium to convey the unique story of Unit 371. Adaptation from oral history and memoir to comics was a bit tricky, but my narrators were great supporters, generously allowing me to illustrate their stories in my child-like drawing style, while helping me integrate their experiences into a broader narrative of the unit.

Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. By MK Czerwiec. Penn State University Press, 2017. 224 pp.

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

First and foremost, I learned how much I did not know about the people and a history I thought I understood. Interviewing former colleagues taught me about their backgrounds, about how they thought of the work we’d done together, and what it meant for their lives years later. Oral history is a powerful tool for learning, teaching, and creating connections. This past year, one of the oral history narrators, who had become a great supporter of this project and character in this book, died. I am so grateful that because of oral history, this project gave me a means to include his memories, to share his expertise and insights. When he died, his family reached out to thank me as well. Through this book, and because of oral history, he will continue to be a teacher for generations to come.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

It is my hope that Taking Turns serves as an example of adaptation—a way to combine oral history with an artistic medium, in this case, comics. When I first completed the oral history of Unit 371 and gave it to friends and colleagues to read, they felt it was far too overwhelming as a text. “Like drinking from a firehose,” as one friend described it. Using the medium of comics, and the visual narrative tools it makes available, I was able to present the material and characters of this story in a way that was unified, manageable, and accessible. For example, people often speak in metaphors when describing their bodies, health, and traumatic experiences. Comics can easily make those metaphors visual. Further, from our earliest classes in English, we learn that the best storytellers “show, not tell.” Comics allow for this, literally. Comics also created room for silences in a way text-alone could not. All of these benefits were very important to me in this project.

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

My hope is that the accessible graphic format will open doors to curiosity about one of the larger themes of the book, balancing cure and care. Our health care system relies heavily on technology, pharmacology, and incessant intervention. While 80% of people say they want to die at home, only about 20% of people do. Instead they die in ICUs, or long-term care facilities, often hooked up to invasive, painful technological interventions they likely said earlier that they did not want. There is much our current moment could learn from the kind of compassionate, connected care provided during the AIDS crisis. We were forced to accept death as the inevitability it was for our patients at that time (and is for all of us as humans) and we developed skills for making it easier. We were forced by the severity of AIDS and the marginalization of our patients to strengthen our human skills. As providers and consumers of health care, we must not neglect the human skills that are used in conjunction with technological interventions. If we fail to do this, we are not providing care for, or as, humans. One last point: as someone who was intimately involved in responding to the AIDS crisis in Chicago, it always bothered me that artistic and popular culture representations of the AIDS crisis ignored the middle of the country, as if AIDS only happened on the coasts. It felt important to share these stories, and with this book hopefully place a pin in the center of the country and say, “it happened here too.” 

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