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February, 2009

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America I AM

America I AM: The African American Imprint is currently on view at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.  I heard about it on NY1 yesterday where they quoted the exhibition’s press release:

An interactive component of the exhibition will allow visitors to leave their own video “imprints,” and this collection will grow throughout the life of the exhibit to become the largest recorded oral history project in U.S. history.

And that got me thinking about the meaning of oral history.

Recording the impressions of museum visitors certainly creates an excellent video document that future scholars may find useful – but is it Oral History?  Do we need more information about the narrators, greater context within which to understand their lives and their stories, in order to constitute an Oral History? Where does a project like StoryCorps fit in?  Maybe we need a broader term for these multimedia primary-source documents we’re preserving?

Ideas?

Federal Writers’ Project

Oh wow, this is a treasure: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 – 1940.*

There are 417 stories in the New York City collection.  In one titled Brooklyn Streets the worker (that’s how the WPA writers were cited) William Wood describes The Hundski Pickers he heard many tell about:

The Hundski Pickers were a strange occupational group whose scattered membership plied their business in Brooklyn during the early years of the present century. Their calling was definitely unconnected with the harvest fields; nor was it related with the garnering of some strange genus of flora. In terms of today, it cannot be regarded as having been either an alluring or a romantic profession. It is not believed to have been especially lucrative. Admittedly odoriferous, the Hundski Pickers diffused a redolence in nowise suggestive of the autumn woods; and this is one of the reasons that persons of delicate sensitivity avoided rather than courted their society.

Wood goes on to explain that Hundski Pickers collected dog droppings to sell to a “company who manufactured pills and powders”.  Hmm?  Wood’s descriptions of German Street Bands and a prosyletizing fruit peddler are just as rich. 

*Thanks to Ann Hepperman for engaging my curiousity!

New Oral Histories

Islam, Women and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan by Nyla Ali Khan

I have chosen to deploy oral evidence in my book, which has allowed me to approach events, notions, and literatures about which there was meager evidence from other sources. The use of oral history has empowered my interviewees/correspondents, people of Jammu and Kashmir, in significant ways, bringing acknowledgment of hitherto disregarded opinions and experiences.

Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art by Debra Blake

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers’ radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicana women. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of the U.S. Mexicanas with the fictional and artistic representations of academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists including Alma M. López and Yolanda López.

The Oral History Project at the Zayed Center for Heritage and History, United Arab Emirates

In the back room of an old villa in Al Ain, 500 voices speak of a forgotten world and a lost way of life. They tell simple tales of making charcoal, ploughing the land with oxen and of how they thought the United Arab Emirates would remain a land of sea-fringed desert and dunes forever.

The Lost World of Communism: An Oral History of Daily Life Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Molloy

Peter Molloy, producer of the accompanying BBC series, collects first hand testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era, and reveals an astonishingly rich tapestry of experience that goes beyond the headlines of spies and surveillance, secret police and political corruption – in fact, many of the people remember their lives under communism as ‘perfectly ordinary’ and even hanker for the ‘security’ that it offered.

Citizen Soldiers

While We Lie Sleeping, a silent short film by Monica Sharf, is a tribute to those who have served or are still serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It’s a provocative addition to the ‘support the troops and oppose the war’ conversation.

Relatedly, we’re hosting a discussion with women who have served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam:

Women Veterans: Citizen Soldiers in Changing Times
Thursday, March 5th
6:30 – 8:30pm

Collective History of LGBT Groups

Spreading the word about a good public history project:

OutHistory, an educational website produced by CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies is collecting histories of LGBT Employee and Other Groups.

Jonathan Ned Katz, director of OutHistory.org, says:

We’d especially like to have histories of LGBT employee organizing at Google and IBM, at other electronic media companies, and at other corporations.  We are also asking users to create histories of organized LGBT groups within unions, and among LGBT professionals.