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. …
Author Archives: Edward Glass
Oral History Reading Blog: 10/28, Perkiss
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 …
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Bob Humber: Neighborhood Superhero
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, …
Blog Post 4: Silences and Sexuality in Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift
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 …
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Blog Post 4: New York Immigrant Labor History Project
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 …
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Blog Post 3: History of Oral History
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 …
Blog Post 2: Sommer, Quinlan & Ritchie
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 …
Statement of Purpose
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 …
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