In a classroom at UC Irvine, Thuy Vo Dang teaches a course called "Vietnamese American Experience" that introduces young Vietnamese to oral history practice. For years, she has collected the personal stories of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants like her own parents, even as she had a hard time speaking candidly with her own father. “When it comes to private life and home space, that’s where we see the silences, and the ghostly haunting of the Vietnam War,” she explains. “If you think about refugee trauma and refugee experience—people have left everything behind and gone through really terrifying experiences in order to build a new life, a better life. And what that actually means is that the new home space that they create is really incompatible for these sorts of stories to emerge.” For full story click here.
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Recording Australian Artists and Actors
Actor Heath Ledger's memory will be honoured with an oral history project at the National Film and Sound Archive which will record the experiences of young Australian artists and actors. Click here for video news story.
Lady Bird Johnson’s Voice
Five years after her death in 2007, the tapes, mostly recorded in the yellow sitting room at the LBJ Ranch, are available to scholars. This week, Oxford University Press releases Michael Gillette’s compact and compelling “Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History.” For full story click here.
Oral History in Disaster Zones
When Superstorm Sandy hit the United States’ east coast in late October, Caitlin Tyler-Richards was struck by the way in which oral historians and other like-minded academics responded to the ensuing chaos. For full story click here.
Report on Oral History Association Conference (USA)
A month ago, the Oral History Association hosted their 2012 annual conference, “Sing It Out, Shout It Out, Say It Out Loud: Giving Voice through Oral History” in Cleveland, Ohio. Through papers, performances, exhibits and roundtables, conference attendees examined “the ways many people express themselves within oral histories, and also the ways in which people craft existing oral histories into other means of expression.” Unsurprisingly, one topic that came up in both formal presentations and casual conversation was the field’s use of the latest tech. Below are two reports from conference by Jeff Corrigan and Melanie Morse that speak to technology’s increasingly importance to the collection and dissemination of oral history research (including QR Codes). For full story click here.
Hurricane Sandy interviews
When Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it fell to the city’s leaders and the thousands of workers at their command to secure our coasts, to rescue those trapped by water and without power, to help the city rebuild. The Observer spent Monday and Tuesday talking with New York’s top public officials about Hurricane Sandy. These are their experiences in their own words. For full story click here.
Retirement Village collects videos
When friends gather over a meal at Carleton-Willard Village, telling “war stories” isn’t just a figure of speech. A look around the table reflects a range of roles during World War II. One repaired battleships. Another flew for the Royal Air Force. Here sits a former Red Cross nurse; there a younger sister who saw her elder brother for the last time as he departed in uniform. The residents of this Bedford continuing care community, now in their 80s and 90s, were young men and women in the days of the war — yet memories of their experiences are as sharp as they were seven decades ago. For full story, including video links, click here.
New library for Docklands, Melbourne
According to Mr Ian Hicks, the Docklands Library and Community Centre will be a place for people to learn, participate and connect in a physical and a digital environment. The facility will combine traditional elements of a library with modern technology and a range of community resources. Mr Hicks said the Docklands Library and Community Centre would be focused on bringing the community together. For full story click here.
Czech’s memories of World War II
Czech and Slovak Americans remember food shortages, forced labor and the horrors of concentration camps as part of their homeland experience during World War II. Oral histories recorded as a project for the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library will shine a spotlight on that history during a special Veteran’s Day event from 2 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 11. Since 2009, the museum’s oral history project has captured the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who fled their homeland during the Cold War. Now, they’re going back further into history and turning their focus to World War II. For full story click here.
Veterans’ stories (USA)
The oral history collection started in the 1990s when local writer and World War II Wilmington Home Front Heritage Coalition chairman Wilbur Jones approached the library to suggest preserving oral histories of veterans, Parnell says. The local Veterans of Foreign Wars arranged for interview subjects, while the library arranged for staff and students to record the interviews and provided space, a camera, VHS tapes, transcripts and a website. I know how important it is to record the history of these men and women before they die, Jones says. For full story click here.