The Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill is the subject of a new oral history project by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. KDLG’s Chase Cavanaugh has more on how the project got started and what perspectives it can offer on the incident. For full story click here.
Category: Uncategorized
Fishing Tales from Maine
The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association has preserved some of those fish tales through its Oral History Initiative, a multimedia presentation opening Wednesday at Harpswell Heritage Land Trust. Read the full article with links to videos here.
Memory & History by Bridget Brereton
"The outbreak of World War 1—the events of July and August 1914—is being commemorated in this centenary year, and for the next four years, there will be events marking the various episodes in this terrible conflict. But the history of the war can now only be written from written sources." To read the full article which argues for the importance of oral history, click here.
Living with Schizophrenia
The Oral History Review on OUPblog podcast is back! Today’s episode features OHR contributors Drs. Linda Crane and Tracy McDonough answering OHR Managing Editor Troy Reeves’s questions about the Schizophrenia Oral History Project and their article, “Living with Schizophrenia: Coping, Resilience, and Purpose,” which appears in the most recent Oral History Review. – See more and listen here.
Tasmanian Fishermen Stories
Tasmania's amazing coastline and abundant fisheries give the state a unique legacy of stories from the sea. Not just the 'tall tales' fishermen are famous for. Real stories of the life, the times and the livelihoods around finfish and scallops and crays. For full story with audio click here.
Fishing History in New Zealand
The port of Timaru has been home to a thriving fishing industry for many years and now part of its commercial history will be recorded, thanks to a $20,000 New Zealand Oral History Awards grant. Timaru women Linda Hepburn and Ruth Low will use the grant to fund research and audio interviews with families who over the years have contributed to the industry.
Oral History of the Internet
In many ways, the world we inhabit today isn’t so dramatically different from the one that existed in 1994. The roads were full of Americans SUVs and Japanese sedans; Congress was mired in partisan dysfunction. Americans vaguely roused their enthusiasm for soccer as their team surpassed expectations in the World Cup. At night you flicked on cable, with hundreds of channels. And then there was the way you used a computer. If you had a computer, and many people did, it sat on your desk and ran programs on floppy disks. It connected to the printer and—if you were very tech savvy—to a dial-up service like America Online or Compuserve. For full story click here.
Oral History in Iran
The oral history project manager Vahid Tabaei elaborated on oral history definition as well as his current projects in this area. For Tabaei, oral history is a part of contemporary history at whose heart is incident. “We take an incident and interview the people who have taken part in it or have been its eyewitnesses,” he said. In an interview with IBNA, Tabaei said that the difference between oral history and memory is that when someone talks on his memory or writes on it, he retells some part of the incidents that has had impact on him/her. For full story click here.
Cooma Oral Histories
The Big hART theatre company is brewing up the ingredients for a new production involving the Cooma community, the band Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, and a cast including Lex Marinos, Anne Grigg and Bruce Myles. Local high school students are recording oral histories in the community to provide stories and themes for the music and script being directed by Scott Rankin. On Sunday 29 June the community is invited to a special performance of the material developed so far. The completed show will be performed at the Canberra Theatre Centre in 2015. For full story from the ABC click here.
Alzheimer’s and Oral History
Alex Kingsbury writes – Long before my grandmother lost all her memories, she told me one of her earliest. “My grandfather liked to watch French movies, and he would take me along when I was a very young child,” she told me. “To babysit me, I suppose. I couldn’t understand the words, but I loved to sit there and watch the pictures.”
These were family stories that no one had heard when she told them a decade ago, and it was a good thing she shared them when she did. She was always the family historian, a duty that she relinquished to me over time. Not long after she passed along her collection of documents from many generations of relatives, she let me make some audio recordings of her own memories. Read full story here.