Eddie Glass – Oral History 8800

Can a book be truly considered an oral history if its author wasn’t the one to do the actual interviews, especially given that most of its interviewees have already passed on? If not, can oral history methodologies still be applicable? These are the questions I had when I sat down to read through Garrett M. Graff’s When the Sea Came Alive: An oral history of D-Day. Published in 2024, this book is an exhaustive history of the June 6, 1944 D-Day landings during the Second World War, as well as the wider historical context for such a pivotal event. It tells its story through a series of quotes from people who were there, and in so doing attempts to dispel the pervasive myths and legends that have grown up around D-Day over the past 80 years.

In his foreword, Graff states that his aim for this project was to “broaden the understanding of D-Day itself, and to acknowledge the full scope of the event’s complexities and nuances, as well as its high points.”¹ Though hardly iconoclastic – in the end, his interpretation of D-Day is the same rosy story of liberation and fighting against tyranny that occupies the public imagination – he still takes aim at four pervasive myths about the Longest Day: that the invasion was a near-failure; that the concrete Atlantic Wall was a nigh-insurmountable obstacle; that the infamous Omaha Beach was a disastrous bloodbath; and that the British and Canadian beaches (Gold, Juno, and Sword) were easy “cakewalks.” Additionally, he seeks to uncover stories from otherwise ignored groups, such as the 2,000 Black soldiers who participated in Operation Overlord or the female naval personnel who were also there for the liberation. This is much closer to Donald A. Ritchie’s broader theoretical approach: a history at least in part told from below, through the voices of people who were actually there on that day.

In this, Graff has both successes and failures. The sheer scope of the project – 700 individual voices, on all sides of the conflict – does mean that there is a lot of history to choose from, and the majority of the interviewees and subjects were regular soldiers and staff who were swept up in the whirlwind of events that was Operation Overlord. In contrast to the military historian whom Ritchie cites as “only [interviewing] generals,”² this oral history focuses on the individual experience and eschews “great man history.” But conversely this enormous wealth of sources somewhat dilutes the individuality and thus the impact of these stories, and the dispersal of the sources across the chapters as pithy little “soundbites” worsens this issue. Though effective in telling a coherent narrative of D-Day (and thus in his goal of acknowledging the operation’s full scope), this structure tends to cause individual names outside of the famous ones to sink into a wider milieu of “regular soldiers.” Individual tales of heroism do stand out, but they are often few and far between.

Graff is a journalist instead of a historian, so methodologically this project takes a departure from “academic” oral histories; it would not meet the requirements of oral history as defined by Sommer and Quinlan, especially in the case of sources and interview practices. Of the stages that define their “Oral History Life Cycle,” the “interview” and “preservation” stages are largely absent.³ Graff himself admits as much – his is a compilation of many different types of media, including newspapers, books, archival documents, and more, in addition to traditional oral history interviews; essentially a compilation of human snippets from Operation Overlord. Therefore, When the Sea Came Alive is more than just an oral history – in general it is a research history, done through multiple methods even if oral history is the chosen method of presentation.

Graff also focuses heavily on the sensory aspect of the history, picking snippets that outline the physical experience of those who were there. Smells, tastes, sensations, noises – they feature heavily throughout the text, and they do give a more evocative, personal feel to a lot of the stories. While it is methodologically a classical “fife and drum” history, this sensory aspect does restore the personal feel of the narrative and make a strong case for the use of oral history even in a project that can’t fully aspire to the label.

Portelli or Lynn would likely find this book lacking, especially when it comes to the importance of the oral historian’s direct relationship with the oral author. Graff’s role in When the Sea Came Alive is less oral historian than oral curator – he conducted no formal interviews, and instead based most of his work on archival research or the interviews done by others like Stephen Ambrose or Ronald C. Drez at the Eisenhower Center. Portelli in particular would probably be contemptuous towards his approach to transcription – Graff “lightly edited quotes for clarity striving to balance the speaker’s original words with the precision of recorded history,”⁴ and in so doing removed a lot of the “human element” from the interviews in service of a coherent, “accurate” story. 

Additionally, Graff commits the sin of accuracy; as he puts it, “Those memories captured in these pages… were surely fallible, as we all are. Traumatic memories even more so. I have tried to rely on the most trusted sources possible and cross-checked what details are available to ensure that the memories herein are as accurate as they can be.”⁵ This is where Graff fails to meet the spirit of the method more than the letter; to oral history theorists, the inaccuracy and fallibility of the oral author’s testimony is a feature rather than a bug, as it can offer important emotional and cultural context; oral history is often as much a study of memory and its imperfections as it is a study of cold, hard when-where facts.

As I was reading, it occurred to me that though When the Sea Came Alive was an exhaustive and clearly very ambitious project, it is hardly without precedent. In structure and in intent, it holds a great deal of similarity to another, more famous military-oral history: Christian G. Appy’s Patriots: the Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. Like When the Sea Came Alive, Patriots is a book structured around a large number of individual stories, all focused on the context of a war. Like Graff, Appy set out to tell a more complete story, one that added in traditionally ignored perspectives like women, Black soldiers, and the Vietnamese themselves. It also keeps the interviews generally in one piece, allowing them to stand out more rather than be lost in a sea of other oral authors. And most importantly, Appy was the one to conduct the interviews himself – a luxury that Graff, writing in 2024 after the bulk of D-Day veterans had long since passed on, did not have. Patriots is what When the Sea Came Alive ought to have been, but as stated, Appy had resources and interviewees that Graff had no access to. Though both are well researched, Patriots is a much better example of how to do military oral history.

So in the end – is When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day truly an oral history? Methodologically, perhaps not – it fails to meet many of the standards set out for it by oral historians and theorists, and the fact that Graff was not the one to conduct these histories means that it misses out on one of the dynamics – the interviewer-interviewee relationship – that makes it so compelling and unique among other ways of doing history. Yet it also holds many of the strengths of oral history, from the authenticity of the human voice to its ability to tell a compelling, emotionally-charged narrative to a degree that most “traditional” histories cannot reach. It is committed to oral history’s “history from below” approach, and even if its pool of oral authors can be too broad, Graff’s commitment to seeking out viewpoints and stories that have too often been ignored by history is reason enough to endorse it as a fascinating and important book for any historian of the Second World War.

1. Garrett M. Graff. When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day (Avid Reader Press, New York, 2024), xv. ↩︎
2. Donald A. Ritchie. Doing Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2014), 25. ↩︎
3. Sommer, Barbara W., and Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2018), 17-18. ↩︎
4. Graff, When the Sea Came Alive, xviii. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎

The story spoken about in this book has a personal meaning to me. One of the most enduring memories from my adolescence consists of watching the 14th Street ConEd station blow up from my apartment, followed by weeks of trekking forty blocks uptown to buy any food that wasn’t spoiled. I remember watching cars half-submerged during the worst of the storm, and finding them moved by the force of the water the day after. Superstorm Sandy was a seminal moment for a lot of people, but while my story and that of so many others in Lower Manhattan or Jersey City has been well-trod, other (often more evocative) stories sometimes end up forgotten or downplayed.

Abby Perkiss’ oral history Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore is a gripping and often harrowing look at the Bayshore, a community forgotten in the aftermath of one of the US’s most destructive storms. Over the course of seventy interviews, her book explores topics including the importance of social media to disaster relief, inadequacies of disaster prep at the local, state, and federal levels, the grassroots community rebuilding efforts, and the long-term effects of the storm. It is an excellent example not only of history from below, but also how to engage with crisis history.

The object here – and one that dovetails nicely with prevailing oral history theories, eg. Lynn – is to build history from the bottom up, and ensure that these communities are remembered. As demonstrated in the book, attention often fell on areas outside of the Bayshore, and even within this community the fickle nature of social media meant that there was an uneven distribution of both disaster relief and media coverage. Sandy has since become a major talking point, both as a major disaster and as a wakeup call for politicians and climate activists. However, as Perkiss notes, “These birds-eye political debates and policy decisions capture headlines, individual voices often get lost. This book recovers those voices.”¹ Without the work done by Perkiss and her students, many of these harrowing individual stories would never have seen the light of day.

One thing I found interesting is the immediacy of the oral history. The first interviews were conducted as early as March of 2013, only a few months after the superstorm ripped through the Bayshore. While the interviews themselves were clearly done with a lot of empathy and ethical consideration in mind, there is a lot to consider. For one, answers – is the emotional rawness of so recent an event a bonus to the oral history, or does it detract from the oral author’s accurate retelling of events? As oral history is considered in large part a study of memory, and inaccuracy is expected, this is not necessarily a problem – but it does bear remembering. Additionally, are there any ethical considerations to be had when interviewing recent victims of a tragedy? Many of these people had just lived through what may be the most stressful ordeal of their lives – I am curious to know how Perkiss navigated that.

Still, Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore is a valuable example of how to conduct an oral history while both making a concrete point and respecting the time and agency of one’s interviewees. If oral history’s objective is history from below, to uncover previously ignored stories from a subaltern (sort of, in this case?) perspective, then Perkiss and her students succeeded beautifully.

1. Perkiss, viii ↩︎

Discussion Questions:

1. How did you handle the difficulties of immediacy? Were there any complications involved with interviewing people about such a recent tragedy, and how did you deal with them if so?
2. You mention that Brittany Le Strange and Mary Piasecki, two students local to the area, were the ones who spearheaded the effort to find interviewees. How were they chosen, and was it difficult to find people willing to talk about the disaster?
3. What was the initial reaction of local people to the project? Did you see a lot of enthusiasm, or was there pushback?
4. If you had to revisit this project in 2025, who would you be most curious to speak to? What would you ask?
5. Is there anything you would have done different, either in your interviews or in the construction of the book?

As mentioned in a previous post, I am a former resident of the Lower East Side – and anyone who lived along or frequented its Sara D. Roosevelt Park was familiar with Bob Humber. Born in 1936 to a Panamanian father and an African-American mother, Robert “Bob” Humber moved to New York City from Georgia, into a New York City undergoing a lot of changes.

He received training as a youth social worker and Special Ed teacher, and got his start as an activist up in Harlem. Working for the Children’s Aid Society, he would work with local kids, a tradition passed down by his parents – both of whom would often have neighborhood children over when he was young.

It would be during the difficult years of the 1970s and 80s that Bob made his biggest impact on the community. The area that is now Sara D. Roosevelt Parl was initially a tightly-packed block of tenement buildings; after an expo of their terrible living conditions provoked enough backlash, the City demolished five blocks, intending to replace them with more modern housing. Instead, the strip between Houston and Canal Streets remained a wasteland of urban decay and drug use.

While working downtown at Sara D, Bob witnessed a violent incident – a man came into a basketball court full of children and began firing wildly; though no one was hurt, the incident was a catalyst for his work down in the Lower East Side. He set up Drug Free Zones in the park, creating a safe space for kids to play in – and faced down the gangs and drug dealers in the area with uncommon bravery. I grew up on stories of him and his four Dobermans chasing off drug dealers on his bicycle, an image that is memorable and yet very different of the Bob of today.

At 89 years old, Bob now spends much of his time sitting in front of the local M’finda Kalunga community garden – but that hasn’t stopped his activism. He still makes friends with many of the local young men who frequent the park, helping keep them employed and off the streets. He is almost an honorary grandfather to me in a lot of ways, even if we have not spoken much since my move to Philadelphia – and it would be amazing to interview him before his unique voice is irrevocably lost.

What does a scientist do when an experiment returns unexpected results? They can edit their conclusion as need be – something that historians both oral and conventional can and must do when a thesis is not supported by evidence. But what if the process of getting there – the method – proves more complicated than expected? That is one of the more interesting questions one might ask while reading Sherrie Tucker’s book Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. How does one extrapolate conclusions from what isn’t said, written, or printed? What steps can an oral historian take to both maximize usable data taken in interviews, and also respect the privacy, agency, and comfort of their oral authors? In this book about the all-woman bands of the Swing Era, Tucker faces these questions of silence when examining a topic whose historical record is practically defined by these silences.

Tucker’s book is about the experiences of women musical artists during and after World War II, specifically among all-woman or all-girl – the distinction here plays a notable role – and their struggles for recognition both past and present. As with many traditionally male-dominated fields, swing music saw a large number of women picking up the slack during World War II. Hundreds of all-woman bands played throughout and after the war, and yet when she attempted to begin her research on that topic, Tucker found silence at best and derision at worst. Traditional histories lauded folks like Louis Armstrong or Count Basie, while ignoring leading lights like the International Sweethearts or Ada Leonard’s USO shows. And yet those histories remained available. When beginning her project to unearth these histories, Tucker was inundated with enthusiastic offers from dozens of women from the era – some of whom were still playing – to record their memories.

It is silence that Tucker primarily attempts to combat in Swing Shift, and she does so through a number of examples that she personally interviewed. For example, women musicians were derided as sex objects and (to quote journalist Robert Toney) “fanatical housewives.” Even when they were allowed to play, all-girl bands often found their talent subordinated to their looks and demeanor. In an interview, band leader Peggy Gilbert noted women being removed from the stage because she “doesn’t smile enough, or is too fat, or her hair doesn’t look just so” (Gilbert in Tucker, 12), and that such practices were in no way conducive to a good sound. Though many opportunities were opened, and many women did forge notable careers, the patriarchal hierarchy began to reassert itself once the war ended – in large part burying the womens’ bands under the veneer of postwar conformity.

Tucker’s interviews were, thus, about breaking through this interference. As discussed in theories of oral history before (Ritchie comes to mind), the importance of documenting and maintaining these waning voices becomes all the more important; this is especially true given that this book is now a quarter-century old, and so many of these voices are now irrevocably lost to us but for Tucker’s work. Furthermore, the silences of historical records despite the availability of sources allows her to draw a logical conclusion: “The flaw of the swing narratives is more likely the uncritical reproduction of dominant gender ideology than a case of careless omission“ (Tucker, 6). When conducting background research for an oral history, it would be interesting to see how the “conventional” history of any topic 

However, as Tucker demonstrates throughout, even this sharper picture cannot be considered complete until one also considers the intersection between race, sexuality, and gender among the all-girl bands. A white woman and a black woman would have faced many of the same stigmas and yet still have very different experiences. Furthermore, women in the all-girl bands faced a great deal of heteronormative suspicion. Both race and gender proved to be complicating factors in her research, and she has tackled both. For the former, she talks about the difference in opportunities between black and white performers, as well as noting the discrepancy in memory between black and white performers on the same tour. 

In a later article, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” she discusses the silence of so many of the interviewed women on the topic of sexuality. As mentioned, and as demonstrated in awkward pauses and evasion, the heavy-handed attitude (especially in the military) towards any who resisted enforced heterosexuality silenced a lot of these stories. A major part of her 2002 article is having to come to terms with the fact that, for some, their sexuality was a private thing, not least because of the prior risk of exposure and ostracism. Having to read these silences is another important part of oral history, especially with narrators who may not be fully forthcoming. It also demonstrates the need for empathy when interacting with oral authors, especially when it comes to guaranteeing their privacy and respect for their boundaries.

It is clear that for all they are ignored, all-women bands did play a significant role in the homefront struggle during World War II, and that they did “It did not matter which way the applause meter swung,” Tucker notes. “Women’s bands were constructed as inauthentic for a variety of ideological, social, and political reasons.” (Tucker, 4). Swing Shift is, for this reason, as much a history of silence as it is a history of music.

For most of my life, I lived on Forsyth Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. By the time I was born, the LES was on the march to gentrification, and many of the immigrant families who once called its tenements home have long since left for greener (and less pricey) pastures. But institutions like Orchard Street, the Bowery Mission, and the Tenement Museum still cling on, and so the legacy of immigration persists. Therefore, I was especially interested to hear the stories from the New York City Immigrant Labor History Project – and I was not disappointed.

The Immigrant Labor History Project, undertaken between 1972 and 1976, sought to record and save the voices of hundreds of NYC immigrants from the early 20th century, with the stated goal of “challenging the prevailing theories in social history at the time.” The early 1900s were a period of radical change for people who had until recently been agrarian laborers and subsistence farmers, and CCNY history professor Herbert Gutman set out to document those experiences. 

The aim of the interviewers was to get a sense of people’s daily lives as strangers in a strange land, with topics of conversation varying widely from union politics to (among many other things) culture clashes and personal relationships. They generally kept to Quinlan’s benchmarks, with every participant announced clearly and with questions that were topical to the general narrative of the time – if not always to labor history itself. 

I will note that having listened to this project, the transcripts were helpful, but I find myself agreeing with Portelli’s sentiments to some degree. While my learning style makes it preferable to have a written transcript alongside to ensure I didn’t mishear, as I listened along I felt that there were a few mistakes made (eg. writing “gingiva factory” – nonsensical in this context- while the oral author rather clearly said “ginger ale factory”). The argument in favor of a transcript is, according to Starr, that it is more accurate and allows for after-the-fact corrections, but the example of the Labor History project does show that they are hardly infallible. Additionally, as the authors came from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the authenticity of their accents and voices is an experience that can’t be matched by the blandly functional presentation of the transcripts. It is likely that whoever organized the archive agreed to some degree, as the transcripts aren’t really advertised. They are only available through a link in the audio file embed itself, and so it’s made clear that the audio itself is the main product.

One thing I also found interesting was the way the interview often rambled and meandered; while it did not happen with every interview, the older oral authors like Victor Christianson had a tendency to either forget the line of questioning or trundle off on a tangent. Still, the interviewers did a good job of humoring these distractions, and then refocusing their attention to the question at hand. They also refrained from “leading” questions, ie. seeking out specific answers; as this project is meant to be a picture of how immigrants see their early experiences, this is important, and from the recordings I listened to they did very well.

One question I do have is regarding additional speakers – a caretaker/helper, in the case of the Abraham Belson recording. In that recording, the caretaker does take pains to keep quiet unless needed, but she does occasionally interject to help jog Mr. Belson’s memory; are there protocols and best practices for such a situation? How should an interviewer involve a caretaker? Should they be involved?

This week’s readings are primarily concerned with the history and development of oral history as a practice. First, two chapters of oral History: an Interdisciplinary Anthology provide insight from and about the originators of modern oral history oin the US, Allen Nevins and Louis Starr. Their perspective is on the early evolution of oral history as a methodology and as a medium, recounting the early days of the practice since the 1930s and 40s and up into the oral history renaissance in the 1970s. The other readings represent more specific case studies. Most prominent is the extensive and fascinating Slave Narratives recorded by the Works Progress Administration, described by Nevins as an early antecedent to modern oral history and containing a wealth of over 2,000 interviews of those who still remembered what it was like to be trapped in bondage. There is also the wealth of labor histories that used oral history as their methodology, as described in Halpern’s article – though Halpern does describe a fundamental disagreement over the role of the oral historian in two labor case studies. Finally there is Portelli’s paper, which focuses less on individual case studies and more on the theory and methodology of oral history.

A common theme is what Starr, Portelli, and the Library of Congress have called “history from the bottom up,” the idea that history is incomplete without the perspectives of those usually forgotten in the history books. From former enslaved African Americans to the radical laborers of America’s mid-twentieth century factories, proponents of oral history advocate for this sort of people’s history as a way to give agency and depth to traditionally marginalized groups. Halpern notes that oral history gave scholars the opportunity to push back against “an earlier historiography that regarded mill workers as passive victims of a suffocating corporate paternalism” (Halpern, 609). For the Slave Narrative project, in addition to saving many priceless voices from what Nevins might call “death’s dateless (and undatable) night” (Nevins & Starr, 30), this bottom-up approach did provide invaluable information and context on the historical understanding of slavery. But it should be remembered that the Slave Narrative project was conducted by the largely-white WPA for a largely-white audience, and thus raises a number of questions about the role of an interviewer in the interpretation of oral sources.

In that vein, Halpern in particular focuses on this, relating the disagreements between authors Peter Friedlander and David Brody over the appropriate level of interviewer involvement. Brody, for example, was critical of Friedlander’s practices, such as the use of pseudonyms and what Halpern calls “explicit theorizing” – in Brody’s eyes, the interviewer as active participant would lead to bias and inaccuracy. On the other hand, Friedlander considered his oral histories to be “collaborative projects:” in his interviews with CIO president Edmund Kord, Friedlander noted that he did not simply ask questions and let Kord lead the debate; instead he served as both guide and active participant at the same time.There is also the debate over the ideal final form of the oral history project: Tape or transcript? Some projects, especially those operating outside the US, do not add a transcript to their database or archive. Instead, they argue, an oral history should remain oral – without the emotional nuances and cultural markers present in the actual voice of an oral author, historians like Potelli claim that much value in oral histories will be lost. By contrast, Starr notes (without taking a side) that those in favor of transcription laud its relative accuracy and staying power; after all, a transcript allows for project iteration. 

These were fascinating reads, and the chaotic, very ad-hoc birth of modern oral history is well outlined and described by the authors. I am curious how modern technology – the fall of the tape recorder and the rise of the laptop and phone – has altered oral history best practices, if it has at all.

Upon my first reading of both introductory chapters in Sommer & Quinlan’s The Oral History Manual and Donald Ritchie’s Doing Oral History, it’s clear that my preconceived notion of what oral history entails is both broader than reality and yet simultaneously insufficient to describe it. Prior to this class, I thought that “oral history” was the general term for spoken/recorded stories and histories – interviews, stories, oral traditions, and the like. It was especially interesting to read the definition that both readings supported: “Oral history is primary source material created in an interview setting with a witness to or a participant in an event or a way of life for the purpose of preserving the information and making it available to others. The term refers both to the process and the product.” 

One particular thing to note is Sommer and Quinlan’s distinction between oral history and the interview-based research done by scholars for specific historical projects. The key difference comes in the accessibility of the interviews: they say that oral history must be available to the public and those who gave them needed to have given consent to donate their words and stories. But Ritchie’s definition seems to be broader – he casts a relatively wide net in terms of what is and isn’t oral history, even if he does specify and rule out a number of methodologies and techniques such as journalistic interviews done for a specific purpose and publication.

In a lot of ways, Ritchie defines oral history as a counter to “great man” history and other, more traditional methodologies. He quotes Joseph Gould, a lost pioneer of the discipline: “What people say is history… What we used to think was history… is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.” Though Gould did not see success, his definition – a people’s history – comes up often and prominently in Ritchie’s work. Where Sommer and Quinlan focus on the technical aspects of conducting oral histories, Ritchie in this first chapter appears more concerned with the purpose, results, and implications of oral history.

One question I do have, however, is about presentation, something that the two articles appear to disagree on. For example – Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus is a harrowing tale of a Holocaust survivor based on audio interviews taken from Spiegelman’s own father Vladek. If presented simply as the audio recordings of a survivor, it would be a perfect example of a life interview – a historical tale told through the perspective and the real words of a single person. Of the five steps in the oral History life cycle, Spiegelman’s book – and others like it – display four of the five basic “benchmarks” as described by Comner and Quinlan. Though the idea is plain, the plan (if often improvised) followed, the interviews conducted, and his work preserved in graphic novel form, it does fall short in terms of Access/Use; as far as I know, the full interviews conducted by Spiegelman are not available to the public, instead being presented in comic form.

But Ritchie seems to use a slightly different and more broad definition, what Sommer and Quinlan might call “vernacular” – he includes things like Zhou dynasty court records, Herodotus’s often inaccurate writings, and the Spanish records of their conquered peoples as types of early oral history. The big difference between the two perspectives appears to be in the Access/Use section – where Sommer and Quinlan would likely say that the interviews themselves need to be available in full as an archive to be considered a proper oral history, Ritchie’s definition appears to be more flexible in how these interviews are presented. To that end – would books or other media like Maus be considered an oral history based in Ritchie’s definition? I would call it likely.

Hello!

My name is Eddie Glass, a second-year Masters student in History here at Temple University. My undergraduate degree, earned in 2018 from Allegheny College, was political science, although my career path since has diverged from that original idea. I have always had an intense interest in history, having started as a kid with one of my dad’s old Civil War books and moving on to more complex topics as I grew older. While I spent much of my early post-BA years working for nonprofit organizations in my home of NYC, in 2023 I made the choice to swap vocations and pursue a career in a field I was most interested in: History. Since then, I have worked as a Visitor Engagement Associate (or tour guide) at the Museum of the American Revolution in Old City. I hope to continue this career direction, and I’m confident that a full understanding of the theory and practice of oral history

My particular historical interest at the moment is in naval history, particularly regarding developments in doctrine, technology, and the treatment of naval personnel over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries. That said, my experience with professional history-making has been limited to my time at Temple – while important for my political science degree, I had few chances to really dig into history while working at a volunteer clearinghouse for half a decade. With my shift in career, I’m hoping to turn my passion into not just a job, but an investment in my own future.

My career goals are somewhat up in the air at this point, but my current trajectory seems to lead me towards public history and museum administration. As mentioned, I currently work at the Museum of the American Revolution in Old City, and I hope to further pursue a job either there or at another historical institution upon my graduation. MOAR is of particular interest to me, not just as it is my job, but also because my project for Dr. Bruggeman’s Managing History class last semester was a history of MOAR’s predecessor – the Valley Forge Historical Society and its accompanying museum.  While my experience with recording oral history is limited to practically nonexistent, I look forward to learning about its methods, theories, and best practices in this class while completing the project I started with Dr. Bruggeman.

I look forward to getting started!

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