Big band “swing” was king throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. Swing skyrocketed as “millions of Americans, isolated from loved ones and far from home, sought diversion, comfort, and social contact through music and dance” during the onslaught of World War II. (p.35). Histories of jazz and swing during this time turn up the …
Author Archives: Matthew Lynch
Thoughts on an Oral History Interview
I selected to review Gladys Peterson’s oral history interview of Evelyn Swant preserved at the University of Montana’s Mansfield Library. Gladys Peterson was an elementary school teacher and public historian, with a resume including many oral histories now preserved by the University of Montana as well as a historic book of the greater Bonner area …
Questions in Oral History
This week’s thinkers – Alessandro Portelli, Allan Nevins, Louis Starr, and Rick Halpern – framed for me three big questions in the field of oral history. The first question concerns preservation and the technologies inherent to the study of oral history. The second question concerns posterity of oral history methodology in historical scholarship. The third …
Statement of Purpose
I am most interested in memory studies, public history, cultural history, and social history. My undergraduate education at Cornell University touched on these sub-fields, especially in a course about modern Iranian culture, but my true foray into them began at George Washington University (GW). There, I pursued my Master of Arts in Museum Studies with …