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oral history



  • Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and Slavery's Descendants

    by Koritha Mitchell

    Public history sites have the potential to spark intellectual engagement because when they make embodied connections between people and the sites they visit—even when those connections evoke the cruelty of the past. 



  • “If Black Women Were Free”: An Oral History of the Combahee River Collective

    Writer Marian Jones gathers together the recollections of the participants in the 1977 efforts to define the relationship between struggles against sexism, racism and capitalist exploitation and reminds that the group's coinage of the term "identity politics" was meant to bring multiple groups together.



  • Pancho Villa, My Grandmother, and the Revolutionary History of the Border

    by Carlos Sanchez

    Conflicting family and neighborhood stories about the life of Pancho Villa – bandit or revolutionary? – showed the author how little of the complexity of the Mexican Revolution and the experiences of ethnic Mexican people made it into his school books in El Paso. Will new Texas laws push this knowledge back into the shadows? 


  • Preserving the Stories of the Second World War

    by Colin Heaton

    Colin Heaton's latest book of oral history (with Anne-Marie Lewis) is based on oral histories he conducted with five significant Allied Airmen from World War II. Here, he discusses his work collecting veterans' stories from all sides of the airborne war and why those stories matter. 



  • In Fury We Trust (Review of Sarah Shulman)

    Sarah Shulman's book seeks to recover the histories of AIDS activists beyond white gay men, using two decades of oral history work to show the breadth of a coalition including women, lesbians, people of color, drug users, and the incarcerated, who all experienced the stakes of AIDS differently. 



  • Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance

    The author reflects on the experience of collecting oral history interviews from Black Brooklynites. The way her respondents understood death offers insight into the communal impacts of the COVID pandemic. 



  • Crowd-Sourcing the Story of a People

    Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the new director of the Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. She discusses the practice, teaching, and value of public history as "a boisterous, crowd-sourced endeavor."