Blog

Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency has many authors, including Lyndon Baines Johnson himself.  This enlightening look at the LBJ presidency from 1963 to 1969 is an oral history compiled by Mark Updegrove, director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus.  Updegrove wrote part of the book, mainly setup pieces to establish background on certain incidents and issues. He then steps back and allows LBJ, his family, members of Congress, his staff and other people close to LBJ tell their stories from edited recording transcriptions. There are even telephone conversations with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.  To read more, click here.

The University of Delaware Library has announced the opening of a new digital collection, the Oral History Collection of the Chrysler Corporation’s Newark Assembly Plant.  This oral history collection consists of digital audio interviews with 12 former employees of the Chrysler plant in Newark conducted by UD students in  taught by Roger Horowitz, supplemental faculty in the Department of History in the spring semester of 2011. Additional interviews are planned when he teaches the class again in 2013. For full story and link to the web site, click here.

Last week the British Library announced it is to work with local BBC radio stations to set up The Listening Project, a Radio 4 programme that will create an oral survey of the nation by putting together thousands of recorded conversations from across Britain. Selected daily excerpts will be broadcast on Radio 4 before news bulletins from the end of this month and an omnibus edition will be aired at the weekends.  Listeners will be able to submit their conversation through the project website, launching next week, and the British Library, which already holds a wide oral archive, will create a permanent home for the majority of the conversations that are sent in. For full story click here.

Some remarkable stories have emerged from interviews held to uncover what life was like working in, or living in, the shadow of Sellafield.  Police chiefs, scientists, farmers and nuclear critics all had their chance to contribute opinions on the nuclear plant as part of 300 hours of oral history recordings. For full story click here.

We Are Here, the final exhibition of the project Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations, opens March 8, 2012. The project, based at Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, is presented in collaboration with the Centre d’histoire de Montréal, which is hosting the display. Five years in the making, We Are Here represents an extraordinary university-community research alliance to record the personal stories of 500 Montrealers. According to Steven High, Concordia Canada Research Chair in Public History and the project’s principal investigator, more than 300 academic researchers, community members, students, artists and interns participated in creating the work.  For full story click here.

Craig Taylor devoted five years to collecting the material for “Londoners.” He gathered stories from all 32 boroughs, conducting formal interviews with more than 200 people, running through 300 tape-recorder batteries and taking down enough notes to generate transcripts of more than 950,000 words. Fewer than half the people he talked to made the final cut. Some interviews took months to set up and lasted just a few minutes. Others went on for hours. For full story click here.

The House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution today proposed by U.S. Reps. Martha Roby, R-Montgomery, and Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, to preserve a collection of accounts from  current and former members of Congress involved in the first and subsequent Civil Rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.  For full story click here.

The League of Professional Theatre Women, in association with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, will offer “Celebrating Our Legacy: Oral History Photographic Exhibit of the League of Professional Theatre Women,” which will open March 8.  Through the exhibit, the League of Professional Theatre Women—which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2012—will “honor the oral history legacy, which, since 1992, has documented an outstanding array of women, all of whom have contributed to contemporary American theatre.”  For full story click here.

The Community Oral History Theatre Project – Sham Shui Po District, presented by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department in collaboration with Chung Ying Theatre Company and the Neighbourhood Advice-Action Council and sponsored by the Sham Shui Po District Council, will be staging four public performances in March. Twenty elderly people will take part in the shows, which are based on the project participants’ recollections.  In a series of workshops, the project provided the elderly with drama training and gathered the personal experiences and valuable recollections of the elderly in Sham Shui Po District. Plots were written based on the collected oral history, and elderly participants were given the opportunity to perform their stories onstage. For full story click here.

Professor Hank Nelson of the Australian National University died in Canberra on Friday, February 17, after a long battle with cancer. His was a life focused on both Papua New Guinea and Australia, and it was the relationship between the two that nourished his intellect.  His work on the Japanese occupation of PNG, and Australian involvement in the Pacific War, entailed ventures into oral history involving collaborations with journalists, as with the 1982 documentary series Angels at War, which won awards both from the Australian Film Institute and at the Nyon Film Festival in Switzerland. That work led to his involvement in the preparation of displays and sound archives of the Australian War Memorial. For full story click here.