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5 Questions About Archiver la mémoire

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, Florence Descamps discusses her book Archiver la mémoire. De l’histoire orale au patrimoine immatériel.

Simon-Olivier Gagnon’s review of Archiver la mémoire is now available online.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

This short book is the result of many years of reflection on the way in which the human and social sciences in France have included and accepted the spoken word and, more generally, orality. History has long resisted oral testimonies for epistemological and methodological reasons, but today, after more than a century of controversy, we can say that oral sources have become a part of the historian’s toolbox.

Archiver la mémoire

How does oral history contribute to your book?  

I have been collecting oral testimonies for more than 30 years and I have observed how this method has progressively developed throughout the French territory. Oral history, which emerged in France in the 1970s, has developed a lot thanks to the creation of oral archives in institutions in the 1990s and 2000s. It has made successful inroads in social history, both “from below” and “from above,” by focusing on “ordinary people,” and on so-called “dominated” social groups (workers, employees, immigrants, minorities), but also on the French governing elites (politicians, senior administrators, business leaders, bankers). Since 2000, oral history has benefited from the success of the notion of “oral heritage” and UNESCO’s concept of “immaterial cultural heritage” which has given new dynamism and energy to field investigations.

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

I believe in the possibility for actors and witnesses to give an account of their own existential and historical experiences and to contribute to the knowledge of the past through their stories.  I like the dialogue between historian and witness. I find great interest in the deployment of individual memory and I study the ways in which this memory is articulated, or not, within the collective one.

I believe in the possibility for actors and witnesses to give an account of their own existential and historical experiences and to contribute to the knowledge of the past through their stories.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

I hope that oral historians will find some elements of reflection, first on the specificities of the French case, and more generally on the debates around oral history and its developments.

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

Contrary to what is often said, there is a French oral history. It has long been invisible, but it is very much alive, even if it sometimes has other names: oral archives, sound heritage, oral heritage, oral memory, intangible cultural heritage, for example. It takes on different forms, depending on whether it is used by historians or researchers in other social sciences, or whether it is used by archive centers or local communities. But it is still alive and growing because there is a strong social demand in France for everything that concerns the past, especially the past that is experienced and remembered.

5 Questions About Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table

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, James Hudnut-Beumler discusses his book, Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table: Contemporary Christianities in the American South.

Read Rachel Lane’s review of Strangers and Friends in our upcoming issue and online. 

What’s it about and why does it matter?

My book is an account of religion in the Now South, a culture that has continuities with the Old South, the New South, and the Civil Rights era, but also features some striking innovations. It is a region that is overwhelmingly Christian, where no other faith represents more than .6 percent of any state’s population, yet also where the various Christians are sufficiently diverse to argue with one another about what the Bible means for law, inclusion, sexuality, ethics, and politics.

Book cover to Strangers and Friends

Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table by James Hudnut-Beumler, University of North Carolina Press, 2018

All this matters insofar as the southern states account for a large number of voters and the membership of nationally significant denominations. To understand this region with the soul of a church—united by a commitment to hospitality but riven by fear of scarcity and various others—is to understand a driving force in American life and religion.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

As a work of contemporary religious history, oral history figures repeatedly as evidence and interpretation from actors and observers of the lived religion of the Now South. Often a voice breaks through the narrative to offer just the right explanation of why something is going on, as when Christians embrace the death penalty. I didn’t have the experience of one of my informants who asked a conservative evangelical how they could be for the death penalty when it was used against Jesus, heard the the reply, “If it was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough those sons of bitches.” This is just one example of the you-had-to-be-there insights available to historians that don’t appear in books, but vividly reveal the interior thought and motivations of one’s subjects.

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

Oral history takes me as a historian closer to my non-written sources, amplifying and correcting their insights. More importantly, there are things that people tell you that would never get written down if you did not ask them. I have two chapters on religious responses to Hurricane Katrina where the inner logic of religion in the face of tragedy, need, racism, and human resilience comes to the fore. I ended up with more total words in transcriptions from my interviews than published in toto in the book itself and they became alternately the leading sources for some chapters and the most vivid voices in other chapters. I learned a lot from listening to preachers and speakers in participant observer situations, but also from asking open-ended questions in interviews.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

I hope most will be interested in the use of oral history in a mixed methodology work of contemporary religious history. I bring together demographic, economic, data, organizations’ self-depictions, visits to church services, and websites and oral history to unpack what the South is becoming and struggling with. One of the features fellow historians may be interested in is that I shared every direct quote with my informants in the narrative context it would be used in the book itself. This led to three requested changes that I accepted. In each of those cases something the narrator said somewhat cavalierly the first time was said with greater, more helpful precision in the final version. I have been on the other end of that equation with journalists for years and I really wanted to get it right. My press also requires quote verification evidence. I also sometimes teach from the WPA Slave Narrative collection and we often reflect on the duties owed to  interview subjects that were and were not observed by the Federal Writers charged with taking the narratives down. I have conducted oral histories for an archive in the past and this reiterative process was more beneficial for all, in my experience.

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

That even now, after air-conditioning, the end of Jim Crow, and massive in-migration from other regions, the American South remains distinctively religious, a Christianity-tinged culture; and yet, the forms that religious activity takes in the region are broader than ever before. Christian homeschoolers, Hispanic Catholics, and the minority of LGBT affirming churches are just as much a part of the Now South as are revivals, altar calls, and church suppers on the grounds.

James Hudnut-Beumler is the Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the author of several books, including In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar.

The Past, Present, and Future of Working

Librarian and oral historian Kae Bara Kratcha has contributed to the Working 2050 podcast, which draws inspiration from the landmark Studs Terkel book, Working, adapting the speculative fiction genre to imagine work in the year 2050. In this guest post, they share the premise for the podcast, and tease their recent OHR review of two other podcasts that draw on the contributions of Studs Terkel.

By Kae Bara Kratcha

Imagine with me the year 2050 in the Midwestern United States. Climate change has remade the geography of the region and the country at large. Infrastructure and government collapse has displaced millions of people. Those who have survived are rebuilding and creating new ways to live. And amid all of this, a trans teenager named Jules joins a youth oral history training program that builds on the legacy of renowned oral historian Studs Terkel. What would it take to build a future in which oral histories from the 20th century are still relevant, instructive, and generative for young people in 2050?

This is the world of the Working 2050 podcast, and Jules is the protagonist of bodyhome maker, the companion project I created for Working 2050. bodyhome maker is a 40-minute audio piece that alternates between clips from two oral history interviewers I conducted with queer and trans tattoo artist Georgia McCandlish in 2020 and fictional voice notes from Jules in the year 2050. Working 2050 is a speculative oral history podcast inspired by Studs Terkel’s book Working that takes ideas from interviews with workers today and projects them into the year 2050. When I think about what it would take to make this future of oral history a reality, I of course think about the archival work of the Studs Terkel Radio Archive. WFMT, the radio station on which Terkel broadcasted his interview show for 45 years, has made many of those conversations available digitally on their website, and they encourage visitors to reuse the audio for new projects.

In that vein, I also think about podcasts that have used the Terkel archive to create new work. I reviewed two such podcasts, Making Gay History Season Eight and Bughouse Square with Eve Ewing, for the latest issue of the Oral History Review. In its first seven seasons, the Making Gay History podcast focuses on creator Eric Marcus’s archives of interviews with queer historical figures. In the show’s eighth season, however, Marcus uses the Terkel archive as material to tell queer histories. In Bughouse Square, host Eve Ewing partners with the Terkel archive and the Chicago History Museum to place Terkel’s archival interviews in conversation with writers and thinkers of the 21st century.

My initial interest in Making Gay History and Bughouse Square stems from my own work on bodyhome maker and Working 2050. Working 2050’s creator, H Kapp-Klote, conceived the show as a way for busy and often burnt-out activists to hear from fellow workers in their own words, while imagining a hopeful future and the means of getting there through short speculative fiction pieces. The show’s speculative fictions aren’t utopian or dystopian. Instead, they’re cautiously hopeful. They depict a world in which horrible things happen but where people are working for years to come to fix problems, make a living, and care for each other. In most of Working 2050’s episodes, Studs Terkel appears only as a reference in the title, but his subtle presence in the future serves as a reminder that people have been struggling for justice, making art, and broadcasting to each other for years and years. It’s worth continuing to do those things today so that people can keep doing them in the future.

For me, works that pull from audio archives like Making Gay History and Bughouse Square answer a question that I found hard to reconcile as I recorded interviews for and worked on bodyhome maker throughout 2020 and 2021: What is the point of taking the time to preserve my work for the future when it feels like the world is in a constant state of emergency? The point, for me personally, is that there are queer and trans people living today, and there will be queer and trans people living in the future. It is important for us queer and trans people to broadcast to each other now. But it is also important for us to be able to layer our own stories over the stories of our predecessors. In their own ways, this is what both Making Gay History and Bughouse Square do with the stories they tell. These shows allow listeners to deepen their experiences of today by contextualizing them in the past. When I feel overwhelmed with false urgency to find ears for my work today at the expense of preservation for tomorrow, I think of how time and reuse have added meaning to the Terkel archive, and I hope that through care, patience, and slowness, my own recordings will enjoy the same future.

Kae Bara Kratcha is the Entrepreneurship & Social Science Librarian at Columbia University Libraries and a candidate for a Master’s Degree in Oral History at Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Their research interests include oral history as speculative literature, transgender and queer history, and oral histories of labor. Previously they worked as the Job & Business Academy Librarian at Queens Public Library. They received their MLS from CUNY’s Queens College

5 Questions About Poll Power

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, Evan Faulkenbury discusses his book Poll Power: The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South.

Thomas Saylor’s review of Poll Power will soon be available online. 

What’s it about and why does it matter?

My book, Poll Power: The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South (UNC Press, 2019), tells the story of the VEP [Voter Education Project] during the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that the VEP was the behind-the-scenes engine of the southern civil rights movement, working to empower grassroots voting campaigns with funds and support. Between 1962 and 1964, the VEP supported dozens of local campaigns with SNCC, the NAACP, the SCLC, and CORE, as well as many more local organizations. Together, VEP-backed campaigns registered 688,000 African Americans to vote, which sustained the tidal wave of Black protest for voting rights leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Poll Power: The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South (UNC Press, 2019)

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Oral histories provided information and meaning to this story. I drew on many archived oral histories, with individuals including Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and many more well-known Black leaders who were involved with the VEP. And I conducted several of my own, such as with John Lewis, Vernon Jordan, and Julian Bond. The story would not be as rich without these voices.

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

I like to use oral history later in the research process, when possible. I use existing archives and primary sources to sketch out the story and argument as best as I can, and where there are gaps, I can begin to think about what questions remain and who can best answer them. Oral histories give meaning to events, and so these stories can enrich the historical narrative in powerful ways. 

Oral histories give meaning to events, and so these stories can enrich the historical narrative in powerful ways. 

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

I’d hope that my oral historian peers might find the varied use of old and new oral history interviews helpful. I also think that my peers would see that my book isn’t heavy on oral history theory, but rather uses oral history to tell stories and enrich the narrative of the VEP. 
 

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

I want readers to see, after reading Poll Power, that the VEP played a major role in the southern civil rights movement. By the VEP’s own design, it remained in the background doing the grunt work, but my book shows how the movement succeeded behind-the-scenes through fundraising, strategy, networking, and intense voting rights campaigning. 

Evan Faulkenbury is an associate professor of history at SUNY Cortland. His courses and research focus on the civil rights movement, public history, and United States history. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016. He writes a monthly column for his local newspaper, the Cortland Standard, on history and current events.

 

A Year in Review: Our Top Ten of 2021

Before we leave 2021 completely behind us, we wanted to get one last look at some of the blog’s most popular posts. Here is a countdown of the top ten most viewed OHR blog posts published in the past year.

10. OHR Readings on Asian American History and Culture by Mark Vallaro, April 9, 2021

9. Author Interview: Liz Strong on Protecting Interviewers, September 3, 2021

8. 5 Questions About Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, interview with Enrique Buelna, May 28, 2021

7. Memoir: Hillbillies and Black Helicopters, by Alex Primm, April 23, 2021

6. Using Oral History to Preserve Space for Individual Traumas within the Collective Tragedy of September 11th, by Rebecca Brenner Graham, September 9, 2021

5. The Andean Oral History Workshop: Reweaving Narratives of Indigenous Resistance in Bolivia, Part 2, by Benjamin Dangl, November 3, 2021

4. The Andean Oral History Workshop: Decolonizing Historical Research Methods in Bolivia, Part 1, by Benjamin Dangl, October 20, 2021

3. StoryCorps and Crowdsourcing in the World of Digital Humanities, by Aubrey Parke, January 8, 2021

2.  Art, Oral History and Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes, by Sarah O’Brien, April 2, 2021

1. Is Sharing Authority a Cop Out? by Mary Rizzo, September 17, 2021

Featured image courtesy of enterlinedesign 

Letters to the Editors: Thoughts on Who Speaks for Baltimore

Our Fall 2021 issue (48.2) focuses on ethics and oral history. Not surprisingly, the topic has elicited continuing discussions about how we approach or practices as oral historians. The OHR editors intend for this blog space to be a venue for that dialogue. Here we share a letter to the editors we received from Donald A. Ritchie regarding Mary Rizzo’s contribution to the issue, “Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater.”  We invited Mary to respond to Don’s thoughts, which we also share here. We welcome your thoughts and opinions as well. Please comment below, or contact us to share your own responses.

October 20, 2021

To the Editors,

Mary Rizzo’s article, “Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater” (OHR, September 2021), is puzzling. It would seem reasonable to assert that if the stage production drawn from the Baltimore Voices oral history project was being crafted today it would adopt a different approach. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, oral historians in Baltimore were strongly influenced by progressive theories on class and ethnicity, which scriptwriters wove into the stage adaptation of their interviews. If conducted today the project would most likely be influenced by the theories of race and whiteness that Rizzo cites. But to accuse them of “eliding,” abdicating, fumbling, and ceding authority based on theories that did not develop until decades afterwards is anachronistic.

Theory provides a lens to see things more clearly but can also obscure evidence that does not fit inside its scope. While Baltimore Voices wanted to let the people “speak for themselves,” the scriptwriters edited the interviews for the stage production within the prevailing theoretical framework, fitting African Americans into the same patterns as white ethnic communities. Fortunately for oral historians, Rizzo demonstrates that the interviews conducted in the 1970s also lend themselves to reinterpretation based on current racial theories. This suggests that the more than two hundred interviews that Baltimore Voices recorded and preserved will likely continue to be reread, re-analyzed, and perhaps re-presented whenever the paradigm shifts again.

Donald A. Ritchie

December 14, 2021

To the Editors, 

Donald Ritchie has raised 2 issues in his letter to the editor in response to my article. First, he suggests that it is “anachronistic” to evaluate the play Baltimore Voices through the lens of whiteness studies because that field was developed later. Second, he suggests that it was common sense for the play’s creators to fit the Black experience “into the same patterns as white ethnic communities,” because it was the “prevailing theoretical framework.” I’d like to respond to both points.

First, as I wrote in my blog post, “Is Sharing Authority a Cop Out?” I struggled with the issue of applying ideas from whiteness studies to this case, not because it seemed anachronistic but because I did not want to ungenerously critique people who, I believe, were genuinely trying to wrestle with the complications of race and class in Baltimore. As I wrote, “My goal is not to point fingers at the past, but to use this case study to help those of us today who care about our oral and public history work making a political difference to think through the complexities of sharing authority and community collaboration.” I stand by that point. As scholars, it is important to evaluate past work and learn from it in a spirit of compassion and generosity.

But, as I show in the article, while whiteness studies didn’t exist as a field in 1980 when the play was performed, critiques of whiteness as material privilege did. They just came from African American thinkers, scholars, and activists. From CLR James to Malcolm X, many Black public figures argued that whiteness was a privileged identity that was often utilized to divide working-class people of different races. Issues of whiteness were even raised through theater in this era. Martin Duberman, a white writer, wrote the play In White America, which was performed by the Free Southern Theater, a civil rights group, by using historical documents to show how white privilege—and anti-Black racism—was woven into the fabric of American democracy in 1963, almost twenty years before Baltimore Voices.

Secondly, the choice to frame Baltimore’s African American history through the narrative structure of white ethnic immigration may have been common sense, or, to put it another way, the hegemonic way to think about this issue, but it was not the only option. The story of white ethnic immigration, as scholars like Matthew Frye Jacobson have shown, is a distortion of the past. In this version, white immigrants succeeded in the US solely through hard work and strong communities, ignoring material support gained from access to government programs like subsidized mortgages. Any discrimination they experienced was argued to be the same as that experienced by African Americans, a perspective that ignores systemic racism. Again, local scholars at the time offered a different take. As I note in the article, Roderick Ryon, a history professor at Towson University in Maryland, used the same oral history interviews as the play’s creators to publish an article in Maryland Historical Magazine in 1982 about African American history in Baltimore. Rather than use the immigration narrative, he instead acknowledged that white immigrants were privileged as a group due to their race in employment and housing. Black Baltimoreans fought back by creating their own institutions and vibrant neighborhood in Old West Baltimore.

Finally, I don’t know that I agree that if the play was created today the end result would be different. My goal in writing this article now is to argue that oral and public historians need to think more about whiteness than we often do and use our historical knowledge as scholars to illuminate this complicated past. It’s not a given, but a call to action.

Mary Rizzo

Former Oral History Association President, Donald A. Ritchie, is Historian Emeritus of the United States Senate and is the author of many books, including the influential Doing Oral History (2014). 

Mary Rizzo is associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) and Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle (University of Nevada Press, 2015). She is an advisor for the Queer Newark Oral History Project and founder of the Chicory Revitalization Project.

OHR Call for Submissions for Upcoming Special Issue on Disrupting Best Practices

The Oral History Review invites submissions with a special focus on ways that oral historians have disrupted our field’s “best practices” and challenged the status quo. Submit full articles by 1 June 2022.

Update: deadline for manuscript selections extended until June 15, 2022. 

As oral historians, we define our field by a set of commonly-held best practices — the conventions that distinguish our work from journalism, ethnography, folklore, and amateur recordings. 

But what if our best practices prevent us from innovating, reaching new communities and audiences, and more thoughtfully listening to and preserving stories? How do practitioners in the field of oral history–whether interviewers, archivists, community organizers, activists, historians, folklorists, or other scholars–approach and adapt these guidelines? OHR’s mission is to interrogate the methods and theories of the discipline, and at times this may mean reimagining conventional standards and upending the way we approach our practice.

Many practitioners have already engaged in these processes of questioning our methods, including authors in our recent special section on oral history and COVID-19 and our special issue on ethics in oral history. Likewise, through recent initiatives and in informal conversations, practitioners are considering how we can do our work better. For example, Jess Lamar Reece Hollar’s proposed new guidelines for equity budgeting, the Oral History Association published the Independent Practitioners’ Toolkit for Oral Historians created by the e Independent Practitioners’ Task Force to address alternative ways of working in the field without institutional affiliation, and the Oral History in the Digital Age project has published new guidelines that respond to the digital environment. Mary Rizzo’s recent blog post, “Is Sharing Authority a Cop-Out?” questioned one of the most revered tenets of oral history; Crystal Baik’s recent OHR article “From ‘Best’ to Situated and Relational: Notes Toward a Decolonizing Praxis,” challenges ideas including copyright and archival ownership, while Fanny Garcia has focused on distinct practices for interviewing migrant families.

The Oral History Review invites oral history practitioners to submit articles considering ways they have disrupted best practices in order to adapt and change the mold. Questions prospective authors might consider include, but are not limited to:

  • When might it be appropriate to compensate narrators for their testimonies? What are the logistics, challenges, and benefits of such practices?
  • How have digital technologies changed approaches to disseminating and analyzing interviews? How have scholars used interviewees’ words as data? How can we examine oral history at the macro level instead of at the micro level?
  • In what ways have oral historians attempted to decolonize the archive? 
  • How can practitioners adapt the tenets of shared authority and informed consent when necessary? How does anonymizing interviews change these practices?
  • Should oral historians embrace institutional review, or embrace being treated as journalists?
  • How do social media and easily shared video and audio change the gold standard of the life history interview?

We ask that all completed article manuscripts be submitted to the Oral History Review no later than 1 June 2022 through Routledge’s ScholarOne system. Please include “(Special Focus on Best Practices)” at the end of the title of your piece. Should you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

Featured Image: “Headphones in Black and White” by Image Catalog. Public Domain via Flickr.

5 Questions About Chasing the Harvest

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, Gabriel Thompson discusses his book Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture.

The review of Chasing the Harvest will soon be available online.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Chasing the Harvest is an oral history collection from California’s fields, with a focus on the farmworkers whose work feeds the nation. I packed a notebook and recorder and traveled throughout the state, interviewing farmworkers in their living rooms for hours and, occasionally, in the fields while they worked. The result, I hope, is a chance for readers to hear directly from farmworkers as they share details about their hopes and fears, their struggles and their victories, the moments of seriousness along with silliness…all the messiness and beauty that makes up human lives.

Lots of writing about farmworkers is one-dimensional—they are exploited and miserable—and by letting farmworkers tell their own stories the result is much richer and intimate, more human. This book matters because every day we rely on farmworkers. As I write this, I’m munching on an apple that was picked by someone. That someone has a story. Chasing the Harvest gives the reader an opportunity to invite farmworkers into their homes, sit back, and listen (or read, in this case).

Lots of writing about farmworkers is one-dimensional—they are exploited and miserable—and by letting farmworkers tell their own stories the result is much richer and intimate, more human.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Well, except for the intro, the book is a book of oral history, so I’d say the contribution is pretty hard to miss. I wasn’t really schooled in the practice of oral history and still can’t really say what rules exist within it as a field beyond the obvious ones, like not making stuff up, but I have worked as a journalist for many years and so interviewing isn’t new to me.

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

I like that you, as an oral historian, have to learn to shut up. I considered myself a good listener, and then I went over the first couple of interviews and wow did I talk way more than necessary. That got better as time went on, and I found that letting the conversation or interview or whatever you want to call it breathe and have pauses and sort of jump around without too much effort to constrain it can make for beautiful moments. I also like that it demands that you slow down. And related to the other two points, I appreciated handing over the steering wheel to the narrators themselves.

In journalism, you tend to focus on a certain aspect of a person’s life: the one that relates to the particular story that you’re working on. Everything else gets shoved out of the picture. I remember working on a story a few years back about wage theft in the fields—which is endemic—and I spoke to a farmworker who was owed a bunch of money. But as he talked it became clear that the wage theft wasn’t all that important to him. It was just a small slice of his life. He wanted to share about other things—his family, his story of migrating from Mexico, his favorite soccer team, his new girlfriend…and of course none of that was why I was interviewing him and none of that was particularly relevant to my project. Chasing the Harvest had a really broad purview: farmworkers talking about their lives. I found that liberating.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Well, different books appeal to different people, so I hesitate to make any pronouncements about why they will be interested, aside from, well, if you’re an oral historian, you’re probably interested in oral history. I can at least say that oral historians are intimately involved with the types of lives and stories that are shared in Chasing the Harvest, even if they don’t know the details yet, because each time we eat we’re on the receiving end of their work. Oral historians are a curious bunch. So if you’ve ever wondered, while filling up your grocery cart with fruits and vegetables, who made it all possible, Chasing the Harvest is one place to start.

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

Probably that, despite all the technological innovation in the fields, farmwork remains physically punishing (I spent two months harvesting lettuce, so I know from personal experience) and that the last person to touch the apple or head of lettuce that you pick out at the store was the farmworker who harvested it, so that in a real way they are handing it to you. They are handing you the healthy food that you eat and that you serve your family. Remembering that relationship is key. From it, a bunch of questions arise about what responsibilities that relationship might imply for us, as beneficiaries of their labor. 

Gabriel Thompson is an independent journalist who has written for The New York Times, Harper’s, New York, Slate, Mother Jones, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Nation. His articles about labor and immigration have won a number of prizes, including the Studs Terkel Media Award and the Sidney Award. His most recent book is America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press).

Grateful

It’s that time of year again. 

From Nicole Strunk

I’m thankful to be working alongside this editorial team for the second time. I feel lucky to be able to collaborate and connect with this fantastic OHA community (you!) as a budding oral historian; I have learned things that I didn’t know I didn’t know more times than I can count. 

We wouldn’t be able to have this extended OHR platform without the generous contributions of our guest authors who have gifted us with their time, reflections, and analyses. This past year, we’ve heard about their projects, books, thoughts on self-care, and ethics. 

I’m thankful for our social media outlets like Twitter, which you should definitely follow, or our Youtube channel where our one-of-a-kind co-editor Janneken Smucker hosts OHR Conversations. Oh yeah, and subscribe to the blog, of course.

Nicole Strunk started working with the OHR team as their editorial assistant intern in 2018, and, after a brief hiatus, has returned this year as their assistant editor. During the day, she is the Oral History Program Assistant at the Science History Institute’s Center for Oral History and is pursuing an MLIS degree at Rutgers University. 

OHR Conversations: Lana Dee Povitz on Shared Authority, Oral History, and Literary Journalism

In this installment of OHR Conversations, Oral History Review co-editor Janneken Smucker welcomes Lana Dee Povitz for a conversation about ethics in oral history, the delicate relationship between interviewers and narrators, the differences between oral history and journalism, and and what happens when you love your narrator too much. Povitz authored the recent, “Warm Distance: Grappling with Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism,” an academic article that reads like the best New Yorker essay, published in OHR’s Fall 2021 Special Issue on Ethics.
 

Listen to the audio here, or watch the recorded interview on the OHR’s Youtube channel

Lana Dee Povitz is a writer and social movement historian. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Middlebury College and is currently working on a biography of the feminist Shulamith Firestone. Her first book, Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice, was published in 2019. Her work has appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, Feminist Studies, Histoire sociale/Social History, and the Canadian Historical Review, and her research has been supported by the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Mellon Foundation, and the New York Council for the Humanities. Learn more at www.lanadeepovitz.com.

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