Prefatory Note *Although Caroline West does not explicitly describe Wrong Women: Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin’s Forgotten Red Light District as an oral history, the back cover copy states that the book “draws on oral history” to tell the stories of women who lived and worked in Dublin’s Monto district. My critique, therefore, proceeds from …
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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
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 …
Continue reading “Remembering in Real Time: Oral History, Trauma, and the Ethics of Proximity”
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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My father taught high school history for thirty-seven years. He taught, as he used to say, “the book.” He loved history and wanted his students to love it too, but he often lamented that they didn’t share his zeal. In hindsight, his frustration highlights an important lesson for all historians and teachers: it is not …
Continue reading “Shared Authority, Living Archives, and the Problem of Academic Gatekeeping”
In jazz, the term “big ears” refers to the ability to hear and make meaning out of complex music. One needs “big ears” to make sense of improvisatory negotiations of tricky changes and multiple simultaneous lines and rhythms. “Big ears” are needed to hear dissonances and silences. They are needed to follow nuanced conversations between …
Continue reading ““I Hear You:” Silence, Contradiction, and Sherrie Tucker’s Feminist Ear”
When Octavia Leona Kohner showed up to contract negotiations in little more than “two flaps of fabric … attached by string,” she wasn’t just making a fashion choice. She was embodying the tension between workplace discipline and individual expression — and daring the management of Babeland, the famed New York City sex shop, to call …
Continue reading “From “Great Men” to Babeland: Oral History at the Margins of Labor and Identity”
I made a career centered on arguing and deciding what counts as credible historical evidence. Just because evidence is subjective or partial doesn’t make it incredible. Oral history’s subjectivity and partiality are often framed as weaknesses, but this week’s readings expound those traits as oral history’s distinctive strengths. Oral history does not pretend to provide …
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September 1, 2025 – Happy Labor Day! Engaging with Sommer and Quinlan alongside Richie underscored the complexity of oral history as both a methodology and a product, but also made clear how structured the practice has to be to qualify as oral history at all. Oral history is not simply recording memories or hosting conversations; …
Name/Pronouns: Hi, I’m Marian Braccia (pronounced brah-cha—like “gotcha”). My pronouns are she/her/hers. I use my Temple email address for pretty much everything: tud23980@temple.edu Background/Research Interests: I bet I’m the oldest person in this class and I swear I’m really, really ok with that <<<slathers on undereye cold cream>>>—I graduated from law school almost 20 years …