1. Methodology and Practice 2. Ethics and Power 3. Emotion and Empathy in Fieldwork 4. Public History and Impact 5. Lessons for Emerging Oral Historians
Monthly Archives: October 2025
Remembering in Real Time: Oral History, Trauma, and the Ethics of Proximity
Reading Abby Perkiss’s Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore alongside The Oral History Manual by Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan and Donald Ritchie’s Doing Oral History has made me think deeply about the delicate intersections of memory, trauma, and ethics in oral history work. I was especially struck by the fact that Perkiss …
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Hit, Smashed, or Contacted: The Language of Memory and Meaning
When I teach my students about the importance of deliberate word choice in questioning witnesses, I often begin with the Loftus and Palmer (1974) experiment on reconstructive memory. Participants watched car-crash videos and were asked to estimate the vehicles’ speed. Those who were asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each …
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