As the draft during World War II removed men from male-coded spaces and sent them off to swell the ranks of the US Military, women had a unique opportunity to engage in spaces that would have–and did–exclude women. Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift: “All Girl” Bands of the 1940s offers unique insight into a brief moment …
Author Archives: Claude Ellenberg
Oral History Week 4: Wobbly
In 1977, Rob Rosenthal conducted interviews in Seattle, WA, while researching for his MA thesis. He studied the 1919 general strike in Seattle, interviewing the men and women who were present or had valuable knowledge of the 1919 strike. The interviews generally follow a typical layout of prescribed questions. Still, one interview stands out as …
Oral History Week 3: Raconteur
Between October 1977 and May 1981, the Louis B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky conducted, as part of an oral history project on Robert Penn Warren, forty-three interviews of Warren and his friends, family, and colleagues. The Louis B. Nunn Center processed, transcribed, archived, and published the project over the …
Is it messy? Or is it just Complex? Observations on Oral History, week 2
The Sci-Fi genre has, since my youth, played a prominent role in my extracurricular reading. I took a particular liking to Isaac Asimov’s works, and I often find myself rereading his Foundation series, a major plot point of which is the concept of psychohistory, co-developed by the character Hari Seldon. This fictional study, not to …
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Statement of Purpose
My primary research interest is anti-Americanism in Guatemala from 1950-1960, analyzing political correspondence, media, and artistic expressions leading up to and following the 1954 coup. By examining both US and Guatemalan perspectives, I seek to enlighten the multi-layered perceptions that shaped the era and to understand not only what happened but why it happened. My …