In recognition of Pride Month, we’re looking at some of the many oral history projects focused on preserving the memories of LGBTQ communities. The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is connecting archives across North America to produce a digital hub for the research and study of LGBTQ oral histories. The University of Chicago is cataloguing the history of students, faculty, and alumni for its “Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles” project. The University of Wisconsin – Madison continues to collect the histories of Madison’s LGBT Community, and has even prepared mini-movies to make the materials more accessible.
The current issue of the Oral History Review includes reviews of two recent projects that offer innovative uses of oral histories to tell the stories of LGBTQ communities. Lindsay Hager offers an in depth review of the 2012 documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The documentary chronicles the development of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), relying extensively on the materials preserved in the Act Up Oral History Project. Hager’s review is accessible in the current issue of the Oral History Review.
Liam Lair offers a review of Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers by Anne Balay. Lair puts the book into the context of the current “it gets better” narrative, suggesting the world looks very different from the position of working class LGBTQ communities and communities of color. Drawing on extensive oral histories with working class LGBTQ individuals, the book offers a critical contextualization of the progress currently shaping discourses around LGBTQ communities. Lair’s review of Steel Closets can be read in the current issue of Oral History Review, while the book is available for purchase.
And now for something completely different…
Registration recently opened up for the 2015 Oral History Association Annual Meeting in Tampa! You’ve got until August to register for early bird pricing, so make sure you get your tickets ASAP.
We’d love to hear about other LGBTQ focused oral history projects. Chime into the discussion by commenting below or on the Oral History ReviewTwitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and G+ pages.
Image Credit: “2012 06 09 – 0708 – DC – Capital Pride Parade” by Bossi. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.
Andrew Shaffer is a first year PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying gender and sexuality history in a modern U.S. context. Originally from Illinois, he lived in San Francisco for three years before coming to Madison. There he received an MA in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, and worked at a nonprofit that provides legal resources and policy analysis to immigrants and immigration advocates.
Ask anyone who has been to an Oral History Association annual meeting and they’ll tell you that one of the best parts of the conference is the people. The conference offers the chance to meet and learn from oral history veterans, as well as those just getting started in the field. This week on the blog, we’re highlighting the OHA mentorship program, which aims to help newcomers at the meeting to get the most out of the experience by partnering them with mentors. The program paired 47 mentors and newcomers at the 2014 conference, and hopes to connect even more people going forward.
Sarah Milligan, current head of the Oral History Program at Oklahoma State University, agreed to serve as a mentor during the 2014 OHA meeting. At the time of the conference, Milligan was working for the Kentucky Historical Society, and was matched up with Alise Hanson, a recent hire of the Minnesota Historical Society. The similarities in their backgrounds made their partnership fruitful from the start. According to Milligan:
I felt like I understood the infrastructure she was working within and the challenges and benefits that came with working in a state historical society. My focus with her was to speak with her early on in the meeting and get an idea of what her interests were, what her goals with the meeting and her career were, and help point her in the direction I would take at the meeting to best augment her current position needs and her future aspirations in the field.
Mentorship isn’t a purely one-way relationship, however. It offers a chance for established members of the field to hear about the exciting things that newcomers are developing.
I also just wanted to hear about the work she was doing. She was a working on logistics for some of their oral history projects—specifically dealing with immigrant groups. I have coveted Minnesota Historical Society’s ability to utilize specially designated funding to target immigrant groups in the state with a primary focus on oral history and storytelling.
Mentorship allows the mentor to help direct the mentee’s professional development, but it also gives both people a chance to connect with another oral historian on a more personal level.
Alise was great to spend time with. She was interested in the layout of the conference and how to get the most out of her time from a professional development standpoint and a personal growth perspective as well. She had a lot of great questions about the conference layout and who was doing what work. We walked through the conference agenda and talked about sessions that she might get the most out of, and we compared notes on kickstarting careers and our focus on oral history. After our initial scheduled meeting, we checked in a few times as we ran into each other in between sessions, had lunch with smaller groups of people, and met back up at the first time attendees breakfast. It turned out to be a comfortable and enlightening experience, I hope, for both of us.
Mentorship is a great opportunity, but we all know that conferences tend to zip by at the speed of light. Conference schedules make every hour precious, so it’s not surprising that potential mentors feel like they can’t afford to spare the time.
When the second call for mentors came out, I thought “okay, I can do this, I just hope they don’t have high expectations of what they are going to get from me.” Ringing endorsement, I know. I think I had this vague picture in my head of this huge time commitment during the conference, that the person I would be matched with would want to spend more time than I had to give, or that I wouldn’t be able to have the regular catch-up time with colleagues that is always so valuable, because I would be too committed to introducing someone the entire time. Whatever picture I had painted in my head turned out to be completely wrong. Out of the process, I ended up gaining a new friend and colleague who asked very little of me, other than to be interested (which I honestly was) and offer suggestions on people to talk to or suggestions on what not to miss. I enjoyed hearing her take on the meeting as it progressed and I enjoyed learning how OHA was working for someone just entering the field. I hope the experience was as useful for Alise as it was for me. I know I gained a renewed perspective of the conference and the participants and I look forward to checking back in with Alise at the 2015 OHA conference.
To learn more about the program, or to sign up as a mentor or mentee for the 2015 OHA conference, contact Ellen Brooks or Stephen Sloan of the OHA Mentorship Committee.
Image Credit: “Hold Hands” by Billy Simon. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.
Andrew Shaffer is a first year PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying gender and sexuality history in a modern U.S. context. Originally from Illinois, he lived in San Francisco for three years before coming to Madison. There he received an MA in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, and worked at a nonprofit that provides legal resources and policy analysis to immigrants and immigration advocates.
After completing my first transcription process using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I was asked to transcribe an interview using Pop Up Archive, an online platform for storing, transcribing, and searching audio content developed by the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). They explain the process in three steps:
1. You add any audio file.
2. We tag, index, and transcribe it automatically.
3. Your sound, in one place, searchable to the second.
I was assigned an interview from the University of Wisconsin collection of interviews regarding the Sterling Hall Bombing of 1970. This was a really interesting interview with a former undergraduate who was working at Sterling Hall on the night of the bombing. The uploading process is relatively simple, fitting well with the overall aesthetic of the website. You can either drag and drop files into the upload box or select one at a time. I chose to upload one file at a time, since I had four excerpts to work with. I later learned that if you choose to upload multiple files at once, they will merge into one large file. This, in my case, wouldn’t have been useful, as I wanted to test how long it took each excerpt to be transcribed.
The upload process was quick and painless, immediately giving me the option to add metadata, including the title, format, collection, images, and any tags. I decided to add a couple of tags (Sterling Hall, Sterling Hall Bombing, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Student protests, 1960s, 1970s) and a picture of Sterling Hall after the bombing. Without any prompting, Pop Up Archive began the transcription.
Here is the screen after the file was uploaded (Figure 1). The picture shows up as a little square next to the title. I find the screen to be a little too sparse. I understand that this website really focuses on being simplistic and easy to use, but I find the information to be oddly placed on the page.
The first excerpt was 4 minutes and 20 seconds long. I uploaded it at 3:20, and when I left my office for the day at 4:30, it was still transcribing. I received an email at 5:20 alerting me that the transcription was done. Whether this was exactly when the transcription finished, I’m not sure, but that seemed like an awfully long time for a short excerpt. Unfortunately, there isn’t a progress bar or anything along those lines to let you see how far along your transcription is.
“Figure 1, Sterling Hall Excerpt.” Photo by Samantha Snyder.
You can listen to the audio while the transcription is running in the background, so if this is an interview you haven’t heard, it’s a fun way to entertain yourself while waiting. I played around with the website to try and figure out what I could do while the file was being transcribed. I found that you can still edit the metadata while it is being transcribed and that there are additional metadata fields hidden away under a ‘more fields’ link, making it possible to add all kinds of information to the file.
When I got back to work the next day, I had the transcription ready and waiting for me to edit. I was incredibly impressed with the results. It did a nice job with the transcription, though I was able to spot some errors. The interviewee was soft-spoken and tended to run his words together slightly, so I was expecting there to be some editing that needed to be done. Besides the transcript, Pop Up Archive automatically adds suggestions for related topics that link to other interviews from other users. These are different than the user-created tags, because you cannot add more related topics, only delete suggestions that are not pertinent to your interview.
The transcription process had an easy learning curve and I felt like I was able to work efficiently. While you are editing the transcription, you can play the audio right along with it. You can stop and start the audio by pressing the Tab key and start the line over by using the command Shift and Tab. The one strange thing is that it splits the audio into separate lines, seemingly without any reasoning behind it, and there is no way to delete any of these line breaks, which sometimes were just a period or one word. You can add and delete words, but it will not recognize added words and move on to the next line if that is where it originally splits.
The software can differentiate between voices, but sometimes it recognizes too many voices. There were two interviewers and one interviewee in each piece, but the software recognized eight different voices in one excerpt. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix; you just assign speakers to the lines and it will fill down until it recognizes the next voice that you assigned. In the picture above, the letters “RW” are the initials of the interviewee.
I really enjoyed editing the transcription of the first excerpt and moved on to the second excerpt, which was a short 45 seconds. This took hardly any time at all. My third excerpt was seventeen minutes long, and I started the upload at 2:15 and received an alert email at 2:45. The fact that this took so much less time than the first excerpt makes me think that the platform may recognize voices after multiple files are uploaded with the same interviewer and interviewee.
“Pop Up Archive Transcription.” Photo by Samantha Snyder.
Though this excerpt was transcribed much faster, it had a larger amount of errors than the first and second excerpts. It also had lines that featured both the interviewer and interviewee speaking. Since there is no way to add new lines, I could only assign one speaker to the already created line. I had to be careful with this excerpt, since it was so long and had the bleed-over from interviewer to interviewee, there was a lot of room for mistakes. The picture above is of a portion of the transcription prior to editing. This section does not have any major mistakes, just some wording and grammar issues. To finish, I went through each excerpt to ensure the metadata was consistent, finished final edits of the transcripts, and confirmed they were all titled in a uniform fashion.
Since I was using this platform for research purposes, I did some searching to try and find exactly what software Pop Up Archive was using to do the transcribing and tagging. However, I had no such luck. This doesn’t worry me, but having a bit more information on how the transcription truly works would be helpful. I am slightly wary of putting faith in an online platform to transcribe and store all of your data, but they do give the option to download the audio and transcriptions which solves that, if you have adequate space to store the digital files. There is a possibility that the data could be lost or corrupt, but the same could happen when using servers and networks.
While there are things that could be improved, such as the ability to add and delete lines, a progress bar on the transcription process, and occasional grammar mistakes, this is a great program for oral history transcription. Transcribing these excerpts, which totaled about 23 minutes, took only about 20 hours to complete from start to finish, though most of this time was spent cutting the clips and uploading them to the service. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it took at least twice as long. I would highly recommend giving this platform a chance, though I cannot speak to the free transcription. I completed this process using the premium transcription.
Disclaimer: Pop Up Archive generously provided a free trial of their premium service for us to test out.
If you’ve tried transcription software, or other creative oral history methods, share your results with us in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.
Image Credit: “Plaque on the south side of Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus” by JabberWock. CC BY SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Samantha Snyder is a Student Assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Library & Information Studies from UW-Madison and will graduate on Sunday, May 17, 2015.
A few months ago, we asked you to tell us about the work you’re doing. Many of you responded, so for the last few months, we’ve been publishing reflections, stories, and difficulties faced by fellow oral historians. This week, we bring you another post in this series, in which Henry Greenspan offers a compelling assessment of the life stories approach to oral history. We encourage you to engage with these posts by leaving comments on here or on social media, or by reaching out directly to the authors. If you’d like to submit your own work, check out the guidelines. Enjoy! – Andrew Shaffer
Oral historians differ on the utility of retrieving participants’ full life stories, but we agree that “full” is a relative term. There is always much unsaid in any life’s retelling, and for a wide range reasons. Drawing on forty years of interviewing Holocaust survivors, I emphasize here that what is unsaid in early interviews often emerges in later ones. Indeed, later interviews may even become counter narratives to earlier recounting—a way for participants to tell us not to “peg” them too easily or too soon.
For example, simply by inviting someone to speak “as a Holocaust survivor” foregrounds the Holocaust as cause and much of the rest a survivor may have to retell as some version of effect. Such attributions of causality may or may not be true. What is beyond dispute is that attributions in any life are complex, that survivors themselves wonder about them all the time, and that their answers change over sustained conversation. When one goes beyond single survivor “testimonies” to multiple interviews with survivors, which has been my own approach, this happens commonly.
Victor, a survivor of Treblinka, initially explained two critical choices of his—working in a factory and marrying a non-Jewish woman after the war—as direct results of the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that was its foundation. Regarding the former, he reflected:
I wasn’t in business. I went to work in a factory. Do you know for what reason? Because I was sick and tired of Polish people saying that Jews are always in business. “The Jews are always in business.”…This pierced my heart. I was one Jew in a factory of a thousand people.
While it evokes more evident conflict, his marrying a non-Jewish woman—“going out of the line,” as he calls it—is similarly explained:
At that time, there was the feeling to get away from all that happened. And, in the future, to keep it away from those who come after me. Because there was the feeling that no one can stop another wave of that.
History can repeat itself. I don’t want that my children should suffer the way I did. I don’t want to have on my conscience that I lead them to another Holocaust.
Victor has specific memories of some who did curse their ancestry in the midst of the destruction. They are part of what informs these reflections.
It came as a surprise, then, that several months into our conversations Victor offered additional—and quite different—explanations for his choices. Regarding factory work, Victor recalled that this was his preference and that choosing it over business was not reducible to Polish anti-Semitism. Indeed, many years before the war, Victor’s preference for working in a factory had been a source of conflict with his father, who was himself a successful businessman.
My father didn’t want me to work in a factory. He wanted me to be a businessman. To do the same thing he does.
(HG: He said that’s what he wanted?) Yeah. He criticized me. That nobody in the family should work in a factory. And I work in a factory….I liked work in the factory. I liked it. My father didn’t like it. But I did like it.
Here, a fully normal father-son conflict was recalled, revealing a choice not attributed to hatred or the Holocaust.
While Victor’s readiness to marry a Catholic woman may well have been conditioned by the destruction, there were also far more affirmative reasons why he married the particular woman he did. Choosing for love and against business were, in fact, related, as he explained regarding his briefly working in in the jewelry business with a surviving brother when he first came to the United States in 1950.
I started with my brother in the business. But then I went back to Italy after three months because I left my heart over there.
(HG: You “left your heart”?) I fall in love in Rome. So I make three trips there and back. I was already here three months, and I go back to Italy. Where I stayed six months with my wife.
I even read, every month there is a Jewish newspaper. And in it they write about some woman, her husband died, and they are looking for someone to marry her and take him into the business. This was Jewish people. I read it. I paid no attention. I was in love with her. You understand?
The word “love” was startling in our conversations because of its complete absence up until that point. As Victor surrendered to the thrall of these memories, his description of his relationship with his son—embattled because of his son’s own romantic relationship (reflecting the cost of phone calls, not faith)—took on an entirely different tone.
I was the same. When I was in love, I was the same. Ardent. An ardent lover. I see me in him. I see, when I look back, I see where I was. Three times, three times I went back over to Italy!…I was also in love. I was also crazy.
What began as an interview with a Holocaust survivor became a kind of “guy talk”—much of which I won’t repeat here, both out of respect for Victor’s privacy and that of all “ardent lovers.”
We are not used to imagining a Treblinka survivor and a crazy, ardent lover as the same person. We almost always assume that having endured the Holocaust or another mass “trauma” must be the axis around which the rest of a life turns, and that presumption tends to be confirmed in single testimonies precisely because they are based on only single interviews. But we will have to move beyond such assumptions if we are to avoid mistaking the “life stories” generated in our projects—and especially those generated early in our projects—for the far more complex ways in which lives are actually lived and, given the opportunity, recounted, whether the lives of Holocaust survivors or of anyone else.
Image Credit: “Embrace Sculpture” by Eric Kilby. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr.
Henry Greenspan is a psychologist and playwright at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who has been interviewing, teaching, and writing about Holocaust survivors since the 1970s. He is the author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, now in its second and expanded edition; and, with Agi Rubin, Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated. Rather than interviewing survivors in single testimonies, Greenspan’s work has involved meeting with the same survivors over months, years and, with some people, even decades. His play, Remnants, also based on survivors’ recounting, was first produced for National Public Radio, and has been staged at more than 300 venues worldwide.
Can you talk a bit about how this project began? Did you set out to write about safety and nostalgia, or did it arise on its own?
The article arose from an entirely different project. I was actually at the Roganunda Council of Camp Fire Girls in Yakima, Washington researching Native American girls in the Camp Fire Girls, a popular national girls’ organization, for an article I was writing for the American Quarterly. I came across a scrapbook that included newspaper clippings about the disappearance, rape, and murder of a nine-year-old girl named Candy Rogers who had been selling Camp Fire candy. I could not get this story out of my mind and began researching how Camp Fire dealt with the incident. I found no direct public comment on Candy Roger’s case in Camp Fire’s national publications, but the organization distributed more robust recommendations designed to keep girls safe, especially for door-to-door sales. Although some critics called for girls’ organizations to end public sales, implying that girls had no right to public spaces, the Camp Fire Girls never considered renouncing candy sales. (This was from the necessity of fundraising but also from a commitment to girls’ opportunity to learn about fundraising and publicity through interaction with the public.)
Still, I wondered over girls’ perceptions of their safety. In an interview from the 1980s, a Spokane Girl Scout leader spoke of the effect that Candy’s murder had had on her as a child. Hearing footsteps behind her one day, she felt filled with fear that it was “the man who had killed Candy…. You expected strangers to be lurking behind trees waiting to jump” (Spokane Chronicle, 1985). Such comments, however, are difficult to find in the archives, so I conducted fifteen oral history interviews to find out how women remembered safety and vulnerability in their girlhoods.
In the article, you demonstrate the inconsistencies in the interviews and show how your narrators use them to negotiate gender and class identities. Were you able to discuss these inconsistencies with any of your narrators?
I only recently sent the published article to the narrators. Another contemporary who I shared the article with provided another related explanation for the sense of security women remember in their girlhoods that concurs with my idea that the representation of safety is a middle-class strategy of representation. She commented that her own sense of safety came from the silence around sex crimes, which is consistent with middle-class investments in respectability and purity. Without a 24-hour news cycle—and in a culture that regarded victimization as a sign of weakness—parents protected children by not openly discussing crimes. Rape victims, for example, rarely spoke out but often internalized shame instead. Therefore, children might be warned not to take candy from strangers, but their minds did not construct that as fear of sex crimes, but rather as fear of poison.
Nostalgia and the sense of the past are inextricably intertwined with our identities.
The article suggests that the nostalgic past created by narrators serves as a critique of the present, by showcasing the loss of innocence and safety. Would it make sense to think of nostalgic oral history as a history of the present?
I really like that phrase: “oral history as a history of the present.” Indeed, the narrators told me very little about rising crime rates in the 1950s, nor did they seem to be aware that crime rates had been falling in the U.S. since the 1990s. Although I reject the idea that nostalgia represents false consciousness as disingenuous to narrators whose memories are real, nostalgia’s purposes are important for the narrator in her current circumstance. It does reveal more about the present than the past. It may, as Michelle Boyd argues in Jim Crow Nostalgia, provide “a haven from uncertainty, disappointment, and the inadequacy of the contemporary period.” Or it may simply reveal the longings of the narrator. Nostalgia and the sense of the past are inextricably intertwined with our identities.
Moreover, narrators construct narratives about their past based on their current roles and conditions. In one interview, which I did not have space to include in the article, a business woman and mother who had recently sent her only daughter to college reflected on her own childhood and adolescence through comparisons to her daughter’s experiences. She marveled at her memory of her own freedom to roam in 1970s Santa Cruz, in contrast to the tight leash with which she had supervised her child at the turn of the 21st century. For this narrator, the interview became a space for her to explore her parenting rationale, and to question and ultimately justify its outcomes. She commented on her closeness with her daughter while contrasting it to the estrangement she had felt as a girl from her own mother. The timing of the interview as the narrator came to terms with the next stage of her life—as the mother of an adult daughter—marked the narrator’s reflections throughout. At different points in the lifecycle, autobiographical narration certainly performs different functions.
Oral histories are often used to fill in the gaps of ‘official’ archives, but your piece seems to do the opposite. What does it mean to use state archives, like crime statistics, to fill the silences of your interviews?
As I noted above, I viewed the oral history interviews as an opportunity to add girls’ voices to the historical record. Girls’ studies, with the exception of the work of Vicki Ruiz and of Rebecca C. Haines, Shayla Thiel-Stern, and Sharon R. Mazzarella, while centering girls in the research in other ways, have not engaged oral history to the degree that I would wish. Thus, my project was born out of traditional oral history efforts to fill gaps. When I listened back to the interviews, however, I just saw this other dimension. Not only were the women’s memories of their girlhoods multifaceted—remembering safety and the freedom to roam alongside memories of caution and self-monitoring—but also their memories of safety run counter to the discourse of their era. Newspapers and the FBI thought girls were vulnerable, even though the women I interviewed do not necessarily describe any particular vulnerability. They felt safe despite the state statistics and media reports that emphasized their vulnerability.
My analysis, then, focused on why they felt secure. In part, as middle-class girls, they experienced protective structures in family, community, and girls’ organizations. In addition, the narrative of safety serves to construct a respectable middle-class girlhood and to highlight the problems the narrators see in the world today. We live in a climate of fear even if crime statistics show a drop in crime rates.
Was there anything you left out of the article that you’d like to include here?
In addition to questions about gender and memory that continue to interest me, a theme that appears in the article but did not receive the full attention that it deserves is girls’ senses of safe spaces. My broader research on American girlhood uses girls’ organization records as key sources. Girls’ organizations were, after all, central institutions for the dissemination of ideas about gender and childhood. My interviews indicate that girls’ organizations and other all-girl spaces are remembered as safe spaces and that women perceive the equal partnership of coeducational spaces with some ambivalence. Even as they recognize the feminist achievements of desegregating educational institutions, they yearn for spaces like Camp Fire where they got to be girls. I am working now on a project on the Camp Fire Girls and have found that the longing for the pre-1970s all-girl organization is especially strong among older alumni. By contrast, younger alumni and the women who worked on the transition to coeducation champion the progressive character of the organization.
Image Credit: “NYC MTA Bus Peering Child 1977 70s – 50 Cent Fare” by Anthony Catalano. CC BY NC-SA via Flickr.
Jennifer Helgren is associate professor of history at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She is the co-editor of Girlhood: A Global History (2010) and is the author of several articles on U.S. girlhood including, “A ‘Very Innocent Time’: Oral History Narratives, Nostalgia and Girls’ Safety in the 1950s and 1960s” and “Native American and White Camp Fire Girls Enact Modern Girlhood, 1910–39” in the American Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 2014): 333-360. She is currently researching girlhood and internationalism following World War II. Her 2005 dissertation at Claremont Graduate University examines the Camp Fire Girls.
A few months ago, we asked you to tell us about the work you’re doing. Many of you responded, so for the next few months, we’re going to be publishing reflections, stories, and difficulties faced by fellow oral historians. This week, we bring you another post in this series, focusing on an oral history project from Melissa Ziobro. We encourage you to engage with these posts by leaving comments on here or on social media, or by reaching out directly to the authors. If you’d like to submit your own work, check out the guidelines. Enjoy! –Andrew Shaffer, Oral History Review
“There’s really no excuse for failure, really. You can’t really come up with a reason as to why you didn’t get something done, other than you just didn’t do it. So that’s kind of helped me complete a lot more of my assignments than I probably would have done (before my military service).”
Interview 1: 21 March 2013
USMC, Enlisted, 2005-2010
In the Fall of 2012, I decided to offer to conduct oral history interviews of Monmouth University’s student veterans to donate to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. I hadn’t conducted any oral histories since leaving government service the prior year. I missed the craft, and thought this a truly worthwhile endeavor.
The concept seemed full of potential and I thought it would capture valuable experiences for the greater historical record. I assumed (based on my experience as a civilian historian for the Army) that few, if any, of these men/women had had their stories preserved previously, given that the military’s oral history programs often focus only on senior leaders and not the “boots on the ground.” I thought the program might also help to show the student veterans that the University recognized their unique identity and cared about their military experience. Lastly, a comprehensive analysis of the completed interviews might show the University how better to serve its student veteran population. At the time I devised and first started researching the idea of a student veteran oral history program, I found (to my pleasant surprise) that similar ones existed at several institutions around the country, perhaps most notably in the state of Kentucky university system.
It is one thing for a University like Monmouth to choose to start a program to collect these oral histories, but I’ve found that it is another thing entirely to entice student veterans to sit for an interview. I’d say the Department of History and Anthropology has a good overall working relationship with the Student Veterans Association (SVA), with several of our faculty members regularly attending SVA events. I even won first place in their chili cook-off last year! Oddly enough, although I won a fantastic trophy, my victory didn’t have the vets signing up for interviews in droves.
While the Student Veterans Faculty Coordinator and SVA President have both endorsed the oral history program, only a handful of interviews have been conducted to date. I realized at the outset that many student veterans might be reluctant to participate, particularly those who had served recently and didn’t want to re-hash old wounds. I have taken great pains to explain the process and assure the student vets that they don’t have to discuss anything that might make them uncomfortable. I also realized that many simply might not have the time to sit down with me – and that’s fine. I have found participation even lower than expected, though.
I’d love to hear from anyone conducting similar work. In the meantime, I’ll just continue advertising the program at the start and end of each semester to let the student vets know I’m there if ever they want to share and document their experiences.
Discussion Questions:
Has anyone considered a student veteran oral history project for their campus and decided against it? Why?
How do you advertise your student veteran oral history programs?
Do your student veteran oral history interviews focus on just their military service? On just their college career? Or both?
Has anyone supervised a seminar course in which students learning oral history interview student veterans? I personally felt this ill-advised, but would love to hear your thoughts.
How have you used your student veteran oral histories? Monographs? Campus newspaper articles? Social media? Any reports to the campus administration?
Headline image credit: Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ. Photo by Sinead Friel. CC BY 2.0 via sineadfriel Flickr.
Melissa Ziobro is an instructor of history at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. She serves on the executive council of Brookdale Community College’s Center for World War II Studies and Conflict Resolution in Lincroft, NJ; and as the Book Reviews Editor for the forthcoming New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She worked as command historian at the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Life Cycle Management Command, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey from 2004-2011, during which period her duties included conducting oral histories on behalf of the Center of Military History.
I am a child of the internet age. I have never not had a computer in my house. Being in Columbia’s Oral History Master’s Program (OHMA), I’ve read articles for class that describe how oral historians recorded and edited audio in the past. Every time I read one of those articles, I call my mom, who used to work editing tape in the 70s and 80s. “How did you do it?” I ask. “How did you edit with a razor, with no undo button? If it was still like that, I would never have entered this field.” She always laughs, saying they didn’t have that technology and didn’t know how easy it could be.
It’s really a moot point though. We do have this technology. Oral history is now something that more people can create and consume. People can record audio on their phones, later uploading it to a program like Hindenburg or even Garage Band to make edits. So when people ask me what I’m studying, why does the following exchange occur?
“I’m studying oral history.”
“World history?”
“Oral history.”
“Oh. What’s that?”
To the general public, oral history is a thing you do when you have an assignment in school to interview someone in your family, for the purpose of preserving either family history or local community history. But oral history could potentially engage a much broader audience made up of producers and consumers. Not only can people easily record oral histories themselves, but the ability to listen to audio pretty much anywhere means text isn’t the only way to access oral histories.
For class, we recently listened to I Can Almost See the Lights of Home. Beautifully constructed—somewhere between documentary and sound art—the piece describes life in Harlan County, Kentucky. Even so, we learned it wasn’t widely heard because, at the time it was produced, there was no easy way to download and listen to a long-form piece. As someone who frequently traverses the entire length of Manhattan on the A train, I can imagine half the people in the train car would listen to this if it were available as a podcast.
OHMA is interested in pushing the boundaries of what oral history can do, as indicated by the diversity of interests and expertise in this year’s cohort, which includes a former book publisher, a journalist, and a social worker in a methadone clinic, to name a few. We all come with different goals and the program encourages us to take oral history in any direction that interests us. One year, a student’s thesis combined oral history and advocacy through the creation of Groundswell, a movement for social justice oral history projects.
In addition to my work, the OHMA blog invites students and community members to reflect on oral history workshops or events they attended as a way of extending our work beyond people who are physically in New York City. We encourage partners to share new developments or events in the field with our readership.
Oral history deserves to be shared. I think most of us who do oral history can agree that what we do is valuable to the wider public. After partnering with the Tenement Museum and discovering the complete lack of African Americans in the historical record of the Lower East Side, I chose to do my thesis on the predominantly African-American community of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. By making clips of my interviews easily accessible online, people will be able to see that there has been a vibrant African American community that contributed to the larger community of the Lower East Side, despite its small size.
I hope that the outward focus of OHMA’s blog encourages readers to think about larger audiences and different forms of oral history. Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Center for Oral History Research, says, “The great strength of oral history is its ability to record memories in a way that honors the dignity and integrity of ordinary people.” As oral historians, we have the responsibility to not just record these histories, but to ensure that ordinary people—not just researchers and academics—have the ability to be enriched by oral history too.
Image Credit: “OHMA students performing oral histories in public with the Sankofa Project” by Amy Starecheski. Photo used with permission.
Kate Brenner is a current student at Columbia University’s Oral History Master’s Program. She is studying the history and importance of St. Augustine’s Church in the African American community on the Lower East Side of New York and exploring the use of story circles to record community history. She received a BA in Chinese and a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies at UW-Madison, and works at City Lore to promote and preserve New York City’s culture.
In the most recent issue of the Oral History Review, Linda Shopes started an important discussion about changes she has seen in the field of oral history in “‘Insights and Oversights’: Reflections on the Documentary Tradition and the Theoretical Turn in Oral History”. Linda’s article sparked many interesting arguments on curation versus collection, critical analysis versus volume, and framing individual experiences in wider contexts. Below, we bring to you a continuation of this conversation through an email interview.
In your article you suggest oral historians should focus on curating as opposed to collecting. Can you talk a bit about what that process looks like? What would it mean to create an oral history project that sets out to curate instead of collect?
What I am suggesting here is something like “less is more” or maybe “less so we can do better.” While there’s always room for more interviews on poorly documented subjects, do we really need more interviews to add to the hundreds – probably thousands – we already have with World War II veterans, for example? Maybe we do, but before embarking on them, I’d like to hear a justification. And I’d like planners to think about creative ways of getting in and around the topics at hand, of extending them outward. It seems to me that many interviews are very constricted in scope. Of course, I understand why a classroom or local history project might like to undertake a veterans project, but then I’d ask, is the quality of these interviews sufficient to warrant the time and money necessary to preserve them permanently and make them accessible? How many collections are already languishing in archives with little attention to what’s needed to maintain their physical integrity or to develop appropriate finding aids and means of access – not because staff are careless or inattentive but because there simply aren’t the resources to do so?
As I think I said in the article, “to create an oral history project that sets out to curate instead of collect” means that, at the outset, the value of the project is clearly articulated – the “so what?” question answered carefully. This would include a search for other interviews on the subject and, if they exist, an assessment of whether more interviews are really needed. It means rigorous assessment of interviews during the course of the project – not just at the end, and based on that assessment, appropriate adjustments of method. It means that the scope of the project includes making the interviews accessible – not just physically accessible but intellectually accessible, adding value by developing mechanisms for facilitating and encouraging use. To me “curate” means both caring for interviews and exercising critical judgment about quality, a measure of selectivity. But to be clear, I understand that repositories may have missions and collecting practices that aren’t especially hospitable to this approach. I am speaking more or less of what to me would be a preferred practice, not a policy that everyone might wish or be able to implement. But I think it’s an idea worth discussing.
I just wish people would slow down a bit and consider the urge to collect.
It seems like there are two problems with the drive to collect oral histories: a lack of critical analysis of the interviews, and the sheer magnitude of interviews available, making it harder to find the “good stuff.” Which problem are you more concerned with?
It seems to me that they are inseparable: If by critical analysis of interviews you mean that we have collections that have never been assessed for quality, that has certainly been the case, a situation related in part to the “sheer magnitude” problem. If you mean that interviews themselves have never been used in a critical study, that too is certainly the case and linked in part to both the lack of access and the “sheer magnitude” issue. Of course, saying this doesn’t obviate the fact that someone working on a given topic may be frustrated by the lack of extant interviews pertinent to that topic. The reverse is also true: finding the “good stuff” is in part related to “lack of critical analysis,” especially in the first sense noted here.
More generally, I’d say doing interviews is the “sexy” part of oral history. I just wish people would slow down a bit and consider the urge to collect. Particularly they need to ask: Why is it important to interview on this particular topic? What are the unanswered questions and how can interviews address them? How can we incorporate quality control in the oral history process? How can we facilitate access and use once the interviews are done? I know that sometimes the urgency of the moment may make consideration of these issues a luxury, but I believe it’s necessary to do so.
But if pressed to choose between the two problems you point out, I’d have to say the former. Partly it’s temperamental – quality at the outset seems of primary importance to me, with the challenge of wading through piles of material to find the gold less so. It’s a problem researchers often face with sources in general. But I also think that if we were more rigorous in developing high quality interviews, we’d have fewer interviews to have to work though. And more “good stuff” in those that are available.
Towards the end of your article you say, “part of our job, I submit, is to make clear the connections between the ‘I’ of the interview and the ‘we’ of the rest of the world.” Can you talk about ways or places you’ve seen this done well?
I’m still working out what I mean by that statement – it points towards what I’ll take up in a second essay. Partly, I mean that we need to get oral history out of the archives and do something with it. And that can take many forms, from books to websites, films to dramatic presentations, public dialogues to walking tours. Partly, I mean that while each person’s story is, of course, unique, it’s also part of a larger story of life at a particular time and place and encodes a whole range of underlying relationships and structures. We need to draw attention to that. Partly, I mean what Paul Thompson said: “All history depends ultimately upon its social purpose.” Of course, even an interview buried in an archive for decades serves a social purpose, but I mean something more active. We need to put oral history to work in the present to inform and inspire, to give depth and meaning to everyday experiences, to engage with and support broader issues and concerns.
But thinking about what you’ve quoted back to me, I’d have to confess that it was, at least in part, provoked by my discontent with the sort of so-called theoretical work I critiqued earlier in the essay – obscurantist work that does little work in the world. But perhaps I implied that oral historians aren’t making the connections I’m suggesting – they are. The Densho Project, which uses oral history to raise awareness about the incarceration (their preferred term) of Japanese Americans during World War II and larger questions of equal justice in a democracy, comes to mind immediately. And the work of participants in the Groundswell network, who use oral history to further social change. I just read Amy Starecheski’s article in the current issue of the Oral History Review – that’s another example. Also the work of winners of OHA’s Stetson Kennedy prize.
I’d like to think that the books published in Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Oral History series, which I co-edited for several years, have social meaning. D’Ann Penner and Keith Ferdinand’s Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond has been used in various public forums addressing the social – as opposed to environmental – consequences of the hurricane. Also, interviews in Desiree Hellegers’s No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance are being crafted into play to raise public awareness about the causes and conditions of homelessness among women. In each case, the oral historians were motivated by a clear social purpose. And going back a few decades, there’s the work of people like Jeremy Brecher, whose Brass Valley project relied largely on oral history to reframe the public debate about deindustrialization in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, and Jack Tchen, whose interviews with Chinese laundrymen in New York in the 1980s were the seed of what became the Museum of Chinese in America.
There is something intrinsic to oral history that matters beyond simply adding to the store of information we have about our world.
I hear rumors that you’re working on a follow up piece to “Insights and Oversights” for an upcoming issue of the Oral History Review. Care to tease us with some of the details here?
As I’ve suggested, I’m still working out the ideas in that piece. But in general, what I’m doing is considering some of the issues that arise when we move oral history out of the archives and into the public sphere, looking at the presentational form I’m most familiar with – that is, publications. I’ll look at some of the ethical issues at stake, the sometimes conflicting claims on our work, and how various authors have addressed them. What I’m arguing, I think (and I have to thank OHR editor Kathy Nasstrom for seeing this in an early draft), is that there is something intrinsic to oral history that matters beyond simply adding to the store of information we have about our world. And that has consequences for our work.
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Image Credit: “Video Tape Archive Storage” by DRs Kulturarvsprojekt. CC by SA 2.0 via Flickr.
Linda Shopes currently works as a freelance developmental editor and consultant in oral and public history. For more than a decade she served as coeditor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Oral History series and is co-editor of Oral History and Public Memories (2008). She also teaches oral history via distance learning in Goucher College’s Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability program. She is the author of “‘Insights and Oversights’: Reflections on the Documentary Tradition and the Theoretical Turn in Oral History” in the most recent issue of the Oral History Review.
Andrew Shaffer is a first year PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying gender and sexuality history in a modern U.S. context. Originally from Illinois, he lived in San Francisco for three years before coming to Madison. There he received an MA in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, and worked at a nonprofit that provides legal resources and policy analysis to immigrants and immigration advocates.
A few months ago, we asked you to tell us about the work you’re doing. Many of you responded, so for the next few months, we’re going to be publishing reflections, stories, and difficulties faced by fellow oral historians. This week, we bring you the first post in this series, focusing on a multimedia project from Mark Larson. We encourage you to engage with these posts by leaving comments on the post or on social media, or by reaching out directly to the authors. If you’d like to submit your own work, check out the guidelines. – Andrew Shaffer
I believe that “all stories are partial” and that “we need a multiplicity of stories to tell the whole story of our democratic experiment,” as author and poet Keith Gilyard has said. I curate a website, American Stories Continuum, the purpose of which is to share the voices of people I am listening to across our country as they explore aloud their own thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and experiences. The conversations revolve around specific topics like teaching in the 21st century, our personal relationships with money, and change. I am not a pundit, analyst, or debater. My aim is to hear them so I might briefly view the world through their eyes and share what I have heard.
I have undertaken this project for two reasons: I was interviewed twice by the great interviewer Studs Terkel and have seen him work. I know what it is like to be listened to for an extended session and with intense curiosity. I believe everyone deserves a chance to be heard that way. Secondly, I have grown weary and cynical of the cacophony of arguments that pose as discussion on television and radio. In Studs’ tradition, my message is: I am here to listen. I want to know what you make of your life, of life itself, of what is happening in our world. Like Theodore Zelden, I’m interested in the kind of conversation in which “you start out with a willingness to emerge a slightly different person.” I believe it’s possible to better know ourselves, both collectively and as individuals, when we allow ourselves to better know one another.
Most of my interviews generally take 60 to 90 minutes, with follow-up for clarification or to delve more deeply into previously glossed over topics. Some are phone interviews, but I make a rule of insisting on face-to-face conversations as often as possible.
I have a few prepared questions, but I am not seeking particular responses. I derive great pleasure in seeing where conversations will go within the framework of the topic–discovering, along with my interviewee, the story that he or she has to tell. It is always a fresh process of discovery, which is repeated in the editing phase, then again as the interviewee responds to the edited text, and finally as readers respond to what they read. The final pieces posted on the site are the version both they and I agree most accurately represents their voice and their story.
I take liberty in constructing the narratives from verbatim transcripts for the sake of teasing out the story that I sense is emerging. This requires rearrangement and elimination. But I adhere to the interviewees’ actual words and each person has vetted and approved them. This is a partnership in which my singular aim is faithfulness to what the subject feels and expresses.
Included here are brief clips from two of my interviews. The interview with 97-year-old Civil Rights activist and author, Grace Lee Boggs, came about when I heard that a 36-year-old teacher named Julia Putnam planned to open a school in Detroit based in Grace’s writings and philosophy. I have always been fascinated by the interplay between generations, so I asked to interview both of them together to talk about the aspirations for this school, which had not yet opened. We met in Grace’s living room in Detroit on a hot afternoon. As you listen, tune into the way these two generations, separated by half a century, play off one another. They’d known each other for 20 years, since Julia was 16 and signed on as the first member of Detroit Summer, which Grace and her husband, Jimmy Lee Boggs founded.
The interview with educator and author Gloria Ladson-Billings was one of my first. When I was a student of education, Gloria’s writings were highly influential to me. I wanted very much to meet her. The interview was almost just an excuse to spend time with her. She quickly granted the interview and we met in her University of Wisconsin-Madison office. In these clips, she talks about how she always views world events in an historical context. I reposted these interviews after the Ferguson, MO, Grand Jury Decision in the shooting of Michael Brown because she had offered a useful and comforting way to consider troubled times.
I was pleased recently to see that Gloria posted the clips to her Facebook page and said, “I really like the photos he chose. He got it.” That’s my aim. Faithfulness.
Image Credit: “Mark and Terri.” Photo used with permission from Marc Perlish.
Mark Larson is a professor of education at National Louis University in Chicago. Previously, he was Manager of Educational Partnerships at The Field Museum, then Director of Education at Lincoln Park Zoo. Prior to moving to the museums, Larson was an English teacher at Evanston Township High School for 14 years. He has published articles for professional journals and written two books, Making Conversation: Collaborating with Colleagues for Change; and, with Betty Jane Wagner, Situations: A Casebook of Virtual Realities for the English Teacher, both by Heinemann Books. He curates a website, American Stories Continuum, which compiles over two hundred of his topics-based interviews with a wide range of people across the country.
This week, we’re excited to bring you another podcast, featuring Mark Cave, Stephen M. Sloan, and Managing Editor Troy Reeves. Cave and Sloan are the editors of a recently published book, Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, which includes stories of practicing oral history in traumatic situations from around the world.
