Haiti Earthquake

In this audio clip, Nunotte Zama talks about how she almost changed her daughter into a vegetarian. Due to the tremendous generosity of the people from their village of L'Asile, Rebecca was given many chickens as presents. Her mother encouraged her to name all of them. Read more: http://www.wickedlocal.com/medford/news/x273426430/HAITIAN-ORAL-HISTORY-PROJECT-Nunotte-Zama-speaks-to-the-Haiti-earthquake#ixzz2Y24n1qWY

 

Boeing Wichita Oral History Project

The “Boeing Wichita Oral History Project” features hours of videotape from 21 people ranging from politicians, Boeing employees and others in the community affected by the plant’s closure in a city that has long defined itself the Air Capital of the World. Friday night’s presentation will be a discussion of how the project came about and what was learned in the process.  For full story including video overview click here.


Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2013/06/26/2863935/panel-to-discuss-oral-history.html#storylink=cpy

Wisconsin veterans remember

Adam Holton's memories of Iraq are still fresh, even though it's been nine years since he served as commander of a Marine Reserves company.  He vividly remembers the days during Golf Company's 2004-'05 Iraq deployment when five of his Marines were mortally wounded, and he recalls the tedium and excitement of living in a war zone. Holton wanted his memories, and those of his men, preserved for posterity.  Because as long as he remembers his five fallen comrades, others will, too.  "Keeping their memories alive is really important to us," Holton said.  That's why Holton participated in the Wisconsin Veterans Museum's oral history project. More than 1,800 oral histories of Wisconsin veterans, dating back to the program's start in 1994, are on cassette tapes, CDs and now digital recordings. For full story click here.

Boston College decision

Boston College has won a significant victory in its legal fight to keep sensitive oral-history records confidential. A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the college must hand over only 11 out of 85 records subpoenaed by the U.S. government on behalf of British authorities.  For full story click here.

Veterans OH Project – Uni. of Oregon

Every year, hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans die without having fully told their stories, taking with them rich experiences of military service that haven’t been formally preserved. For Sgt. Josh Yates, that’s a tragedy.  Yates, 27, who served six years in the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq and Japan, has a deep respect for history. He’s majoring in this field as an undergraduate at the UO, and it’s possible he’ll someday be at the head of a classroom himself, teaching history at a university.  For full story click here.

Tales of the luggers

The Cairns Museum is collecting oral history of all luggers. Jon Burnett is curator of the Cairns Maritime Museum, the contents of which are now in storage, and is a conservation scientist and maritime trainer in MER (Marine Ecology Research & Training), who has taken trips to the Reef to check out its acidity. The HB, originally named for its builder Harry Bowden, and dubbed by Jon as the History Boat, may be the couple's current home but it is also a valuable piece of Far North Queensland history and it hasn't been all plain sailing restoring her. For full story click here.

World War Z

Inspired by The Good War (1984), Studs Terkel's Pulitzer Prize-winning oral history of World War II, World War Z is an unusually intelligent piece of genre fiction, in which author Max Brooks uses the familiar idea of a virus causing a zombie outbreak to examine pressing contemporary issues such as government competence and corruption, racial prejudice, religious intolerance and American arrogance. Even before publication of the book, whose full title is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, it sparked a bidding war over the movie rights, with Brad Pitt's company Plan B slugging it out with Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way for the rights to the big screen. The movie version has moved far from the original story.  For full article click here.

Lightning Ridge Oral History

Mari Metzke and Rob Renew of ASHET (the Australian Society for the History of Engineering Technology) have been recording interviews with inventors of mining and processing machinery at Lightning Ridge, as part of a project funded by the Australian government’s Your Community Heritage grant program, being run in partnership with the Australian Opal Centre and Lightning Ridge Historical Society. For full story click here.

University of Nevada Oral History Program

The 1897 heavyweight title fight between champion James Corbett and challenger Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City has been well documented in the history books of Nevada.  But did you know that Fitzsimmons, while training for the fight, attended church services at Nevada State Prison?  Lucy Davis Crowell knew that. In fact, she and Fitzsimmons "sang out of the same hymn book more than once."  Crowell's recollections of that interaction with Fitzsimmons — and her memories of Carson City at the turn of the 20th century — are part of a treasure trove of Nevada history in the collection of the University of Nevada Oral History Program, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal (http://on.rgj.com/10T7pD5). For full story click here.

Students interview Holocaust survivors

Eighth-grader Benjamin Barth of Teaneck used to think that all Jews affected by the Holocaust were in either ghettos or concentration camps.  Now, as a result of his participation in the oral history film project “Names, Not Numbers,” he understands much more about the Shoah.  “It’s not just a single story of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps,” said Benjamin, who is a student at the Moriah School in Englewood. “There are other aspects, like people resisting all over Europe.”  For full story click here.