In the final chapter of Sisters and Rebels, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall quotes directly from a 1974 diary entry penned by Grace Lumpkin, one of the book’s protagonists: “A Jacquelyn Hall [had written] from Chapel Hill, N.C., asking if I would let her come & interview me for a job she is doing on ‘Southern Oral History’ whatever …
Continue reading “‘sisters & rebels’: what oral history captures and conceals”
I dived into Abigail Perkiss’ Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, after listening to a short podcast episode with the author about the book hosted by the New Books Network. I appreciated the conversation for the context it helped provide about the oral histories featured in the book and more specifically, how her own …
While every week of this course thus far has provided me with the opportunity to think about the practice of oral history alongside my own experience as a journalist, this week’s reading of Lynn Abrams’ Oral History Theory put it in most stark relief. The chapter on trauma in particular brought up a lot of …
Jammin Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1961 and spent her earliest years living in East New York as the middle child of four siblings– two brothers and one sister. From her youth into adolescence, her life was marked by tremendous shifts, namely the death of caregivers and the need to relocate and …
In the spring of 1968, parents living in the predominantly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood of Brownsville submitted demands to the New York City Central Board of Education. Disillusioned and frustrated with the quality of education given to their children attending the district’s still largely segregated public schools, parents requested the right to hire and …
Continue reading “Exercise #1: a labor history of the recent past”
In addition to learning about the history and background of formal oral history education in the US, namely Allan Nevins’ development of the oral history project at Columbia University, this set of readings was most intriguing to me in their discussion of the role of the interviewer and specifically the interviewers’ relationship with their subject. …
My name is Tamar Sarai Davis and I’m currently a second-year History PhD student at Temple University. My primary objective for this course, The Theory and Practice of Oral History, is to gain firsthand experience with producing an oral history project. I’m also really excited to continue pulling on some of the threads established last …
Welcome! As a part of our course on Oral History, I’ll be maintaining this blog to capture my thoughts, reflections, and learnings. Thank you for joining this journey with me, and I’m excited to share as I learn and delve into the past.