Oral History Review

OHR 40.2 now available to online subscribers

Good news, gentle readers! Oral History Review Vol 40, no. 2 is now available to online subscribers. In addition to numerous book, media reviews and a piece on OHR’s online adventures, we’re happy to share the following articles:

“Vodou and Protestantism, Faith and Survival: The Contest over the Spiritual Meaning of the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti” by Claire Payton;
“To Talk or Not to Talk: Silence, Torture, and Politics in the Portuguese Dictatorship of Estado Novo” by Miguel Cardina;
“Memories of an Unfulfilled Promise: Internationalism and Patriotism in Post-Soviet Oral Histories of Jewish Survivors of the Nazi Genocide” by Anika Walke;
and “Macho Nation? Chicano Soldiering, Sexuality, and Manhood during the Vietnam War Era” by Steven Rosales.

This issue also marks the return of our pedagogy section, which includes Ken Woodard’s “The Digital Revolution and Pre-Collegiate Oral History: Meditations on the Challenge of Teaching Oral History in the Digital Age” and Elizabeth Stone’s “Teaching Oral History in a College-Level ‘New Wave Immigrant Literature’ Course."

Enjoy!

P.S. Not sure how to access your online subscription? No worries, we have an excellent tutorial (with pictures!) here.

How did they make that? | Miriam Posner’s Blog

Many students tell me that in order to get started with digital humanities, they’d like to have some idea of what they might do and what technical skills they might need in order to do it. Here’s a set of digital humanities projects that might help you to get a handle on the kinds of tools and technologies available for you to use.

I’ve tried to include a few different types of projects, but it’s hard to provide a really representative list. If you’d like to see more digital humanities projects, you can find directories at art-humanities.net and DHCommons.

Here, I discuss:

a gallery of primary sources

a digital scholarly edition

a mapping project

a network visualization

computer-aided text analysis

a historical 3D model

a longform, media-rich narrative

This may be the most useful thing to exist on the internet ever.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood

Marie Curie 1867–1934, Polish-born French physicist

Mapping the Long Women’s Movement

uncoralhistory:

uncoralhistory:

“During my growing up time period, which would have been mainly the 60s and 70s, a huge women’s movement and yeah, I did feel a part of a big movement, which was a great feeling. I can remember one Christmas, my grandmother gave me this book that I wanted. It was a women’s, not just a novel reading book, but more like a catalog kind of thing about the women’s movement and I was so thrilled to get that and that my grandmother gave it to me.”

An oral history project on women’s grassroots and labor rights activism in east Tennessee has been transformed into an interactive map. The women’s work — as they traveled the Appalachian migration trail, sought work in new towns, and forged connections between rural and urban areas — was deeply inflected by space. This new digital initiative brings the women’s paths to the surface and allows for revolutionary visualization of previously invisible connections between interviews.

The interviews are indexed by keyword and location, and then color coded on the map.

stacylwhitman:

Ask a Slave: The Web Series (this is ep. 1—click through to see more)

“Ask A Slave is a comedy web series directed by Jordan Black based on the actress’ time working as a living history character at the popular historic site, George Washington’s Mount Vernon. All questions and interactions are based on true events.”

And a historian’s follow-up.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

archivesofamericanart:

High kick!

Kit Kat Club program for the 3rd Annual Artists’ Masque Ball, p. 13, 1909. Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

A troubling result from publishing open access articles with CC-BY | You’re the Teacher

Here Be Duck Trees and Sea Swine: A Gorgeous [Interactive] Renaissance Map

The first time one looks at a color print of Olaus Magnus’ 1539 Carta Marina, the eyes scan the crowded landmass and fix on the creatures in the western part of the map. Larger than the other images and framed by open space, they dominate the chart visually and stir the imagination. To us, the quaint figures rising in the northern waters of Olaus’ map of Scandinavia could be illustrations in a children’s book. However, given that maps chart human knowledge, that they provide glimpses of our understanding of the world at any point in time, Olaus’ 16^th-century contemporaries would have regarded the Carta Marina sea monsters differently than we do.

Fall cleaning with OHR – OUPblog

Hello, everyone! Have you missed us? Of course you have, we’re fantastic and full of helpful, oral history related information. Speaking of, please direct your attention to our first blog post of the season for a few Fall announcements.

There is no doubt that story-telling can be therapeutic. But, we as oral historians are trained to document while therapists are trained in their field with entirely different goals. Oral historians record stories that offer experiential information in order to create primary sources that are preserved and made available to the public. It is wonderful when, through the course of an oral history interview, we can help the interviewee heal as perhaps part of their therapy, but I believe that it’s best for oral historians to stick to the overall goal of documenting — while being especially careful with respondents who have recently experienced trauma.

Jennifer Abraham Cramer, director of Louisiana State University’s T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, “Oral History in Disasters Zones."

[Staff note: In light of today’s anniversary, an excerpt from an interview we conducted with our media review editor about conducting oral history research following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.]