Filled with liquid confidence – with an urge to test your luck – you enter the casino’s shining double doors to embrace the cacophony of bells and yells. You sidestep an overburdened housekeeping cart to grab a drink at the beautiful mahogany bar to your left, before hitting the Pit (gaming floor). The bartender parries …
Author Archives: Matthew Lynch
The Care in Crisis Oral History
Professor Lynn Abrams, in her work Oral History Theory, illuminates what she calls crisis oral history. This “significant sub-genre in oral history practice,” she explains, includes “the collection and analysis of histories of extreme human experiences [that] offer a way of deepening understanding of events and experiences that have had such profound consequences” on people. …
My Method, Man
After weeks of learning theory, it’s time to begin fashioning my own method for conducting oral history interviews. Scholarship from leading oral historians like Lynn Abrams, Michael Frisch, Jeremy Brecher, and Alessandro Portelli will inform my multidisciplinary methodology. C. Joyer categorizes oral history interviews as “communicative events.” (Abrams, 16). They take place in real time …
Applying Theory, to Listening and Cooperative Memory-Making
Lynn Abrams, in her work Oral History Theory, demonstrates what makes an oral history interview a unique historical document. The distinction lies in the practice, during the interview. Abrams describes the interview “is a communicative event,” where the worlds – or “subjectivities” – of the interviewer and subject/narrator collide. (p. 10). Analyzing oral history interviews …
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With Whom Would I Conduct an Oral History Interview?
Corning, NY, is a peculiar town. Although demographically small (about 10,000 residents by 2024[SL1] ), its local businesses enjoyed an international reach. Most people are familiar with Corning Glass, but sartorialists like Tommy Hilfiger and golfers like Jack Nicklaus fondly remember a small family-run clothing store on Main Street called the Hub. My great-grandfather, Francis J. …
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Listening To, and For, the Dissonance
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 …
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 …