Collaborative Oral History in a Correctional Setting: Promise and Pitfalls

This article examines the challenges of collaborative oral historyresearch. Collaborative oral history—sometimes called"reciprocal ethnography"—involves the process of engagingour interviewees in the analysis of the interviews we generateand/or the creation of any products drawn from those interviews.The article contrasts the author's earlier experience on anoral history/photographic book with a more recent collaborationon an oral history and performance project in a correctionalinstitution. The author focuses on the difficulties of "sharingauthority" in collaborative research within a correctional setting,raising issues about the promise and pitfalls of collaborativeoral history research more generally.     

Before Columbia: The FWP and American Oral History Research

This article compares and contrasts the approaches of the NewDeal Federal Writers' Project and the Columbia Oral HistoryProgram in an effort to reconsider the paradoxical history oforal history research in the United States and its relationshipto how many oral historians today look at their work and thehistory of their field. As it turns out, the theoretical andsocial concerns of the FWP projects are closer to current theoreticalconcerns of oral historians than the work Allan Nevins conductedin the early years of the Columbia project. The article alsoshows how awareness of the history of the intellectual and culturalcurrents that affect oral history projects in general, and theFWP's work in particular—interviews with former slaves,tenant farmers, industrial workers, and members of ethnic minorities—canhelp us analyze and use those materials. It argues that an awarenessof continuity and discontinuity in the history of oral historymakes it possible for today's oral historians to have a productivedialogue with their predecessors in the field.     

"If I See Some of This in Writing, I'm Going to Shoot You": Reluctant Narrators, Taboo Topics, and the Ethical Dilemmas of the Oral Historian

This essay argues that in the co-creation of the historicaldocument that is the oral history narrative the oral historianmust balance sensitivity to the interviewee with the professionalresponsibility to preserve history, without abdicating the roleof trained interpreter of the past. During the course of a lifehistory interview with a lightskinned African American woman,Marguerite Davis Stewart, the authors confronted a variety ofethical concerns over the shared authority of the interviewwhen the narrator disagreed over the range of topics to be covered—specificallythe issue of racial identity—and the final product. Theauthors conclude that scholars who employ oral history in theirresearch must confront taboo but historically significant topicsthrough an open dialogue with their narrators, but that theyultimately control the interpretation of the resulting information.     

Nation,College, Wartime: Archaeology at a WWI Student Army Training Corps Camp at New Hampshire College

During World War I, the U.S. War Department contracted with 157 universities to form the National Army Training Detachments whose mission was to train college-age draftees in 66 critical army trades (subsequently the Student Army Training Corps). This program is an overlooked part of First World War history and has received little to no archaeological inquiry. This paper investigates the New Hampshire College camp. Working between documentary and archaeological materials, this paper explores how the interrelated duties of educational institutions, businesses, government, and individuals merged with an American wartime imagined community here but also how in their lived experiences of the camp, people materialized the complications of balancing citizenship, difference, duty, and nation. The social lives of the lower-rank men who inhabited these camps, the composite communities formed at them, and the impact of the government’s assertion of control over institutions of higher education all carry material ramifications that deserve further investigation.     

Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak out

At the outset of Ask & Tell, Estes recalls the debates thatproduced the 1993 "don’t ask, don’t tell" policyprohibiting "homosexual conduct or activity in the armed forces"of the U.S. and laments the silenced voices of those most directlyaffected by the policy: gay and lesbian service members. Inresponse, Estes, an associate professor of history at SonomaState University, enlists oral history as an ally in the on-goingcampaign to allow gay men and lesbians in the U.S. to serveopenly in the armed forces. He argues "that historically, thesilence concerning gays in the     

Comparison of DOE and Army Advisory Boards: Application of a Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Public Participation in Environmental Risk Decision Making

This article is part of a growing body of literature evaluating public participation approaches and implementation efforts. It compares the characteristics and performance of citizen advisory boards established by the U.S. Department of Energy's Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program (DOE/EM) and by the U.S. Department of Defense's Army (DoD/Army) as a major part of the public participation programs that were undertaken to help the agencies plan and implement the cleanup of their contaminated installations. We first present the elements of the Acceptability Diamond, an evaluative framework developed by the authors through extensive fieldwork on public-federal agency interactions that identify five objectives of agency–public interactions and public participation programs, and link them to existing literature. We then use the Acceptability Diamond as a basis for comparing the performance of the DOE/EM and DoD/Army advisory boards. In the early 1990s, both DOE and DoD participated in the Federal Facilities Environmental Restoration Dialogue Committee (known as the FFER Dialogue Committee) and were influenced by the Committee's recommendations on public participation. However, the Site Specific Advisory Boards (SSABs) subsequently established by DOE/EM and the Restoration Advisory Boards (RABs) subsequently established by DoD and the Army were governed by significantly different policies and management. We describe some of these key differences and compare the performance of the SSABs and RABs. The article draws on a series of research studies conducted by the authors on the DOE/EM public participation program from its inception in the early 1990s through its transition to accelerated cleanup in 2002 and also on a recently completed study of seven Army RABs.     

The Writing on the Wall: The Concealed Communities of the East Yorkshire Horselads

This paper examines the graffiti found within late 19th and early 20th century farm buildings in the Wolds of East Yorkshire. It suggests that the graffiti were created by a group of young men at the bottom of the social hierarchy—the horselads—and was one of the ways in which they constructed a distinctive sense of communal identity, at a particular stage in their lives. Whilst it tells us much about changing agricultural regimes and social structures, it also informs us about experiences and attitudes often hidden from official histories and biographies. In this way, the graffiti are argued to inform our understanding, not only of a concealed community, but also about their hidden history.     

Children’s Burial Grounds in Ireland (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cilliní</Emphasis>) and Parental Emotions Toward Infant Death

Cilliní—or children’s burial grounds—were the designated resting places for unbaptized infants and other members of Irish society who were considered unsuitable by the Roman Catholic Church for burial in consecrated ground. The sites appear to have proliferated from the seventeenth century onwards in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. While a number of previous studies have attempted to relate their apparently marginal characteristics to the liminality of Limbo, evidence drawn from the archaeological record and oral history accounts suggests that it was only the Roman Catholic Church that considered cilliní, and those interred within, to be marginal. In contrast, the evidence suggests that the families of the dead regarded the cemeteries as important places of burial and treated them in a similar manner to consecrated burial grounds.     

An inquiry into the causes for the multiple goals of the United States Antitrust Law from a historical perspective

It is not the case as Robert Bork claims that the U. S. antitrust law had only one goal—maximization of consumer welfare of efficiency—at the very beginning and should have been kept that way for its later development. Partly because of the fighting among different interest groups as well as spokesmen of different regions at the 51st Congress, the Sherman Antitrust Act came out as a legislation with multiple goals, which were also taking shape under the influence of the Republican idea of balance of power, the liberal belief in property rights, the freedom of contract of classic economics, and the price theory of neoclassic economics. In more than a hundred years after that, the U.S. antitrust law has shifted the center of its goals as a result of the change of regulatory regimes with different emphases such as market function, economic stabilization, social concern, and economic efficiency during different periods. From a historical perspective, it is beyond dispute that the U.S. antitrust law has had multiple goals instead of only one. __________ Translated from: Shixue Yuekan 史学月刊 (Journal of Historical Science), No.6, 2004     

Touch and Go

"Oh, to be remembered—isn’t that what this is allabout?" (216). This, claims historian, actor, radio and televisionpioneer Terkel, is the source of his success as an oral historian:logorrhea—the inability to stop talking. And yet Terkel'smemoir, written in collaboration with his longtime friend andassociate Lewis, is nothing short of incredible in its representationas The Oral History of The Oral Historian. Terkel's mesmerizingrecollection of everything from the history of silent filmsto Chicago politics and the impact of reality television, writtenat the age of ninety-four, is a unique and pioneering text. Touch and Go is in effect the     

The Best Game Ever: Pirates vs. Yankees, October 13, 1960

The Oral History Association's 2008 annual meeting was heldin Pittsburgh last October, as the World Series and the 2008U.S. Presidential Election approached. While the PittsburghPirates were not in the playoffs—and had not been since1992—Pennsylvania's other team, the Philadelphia Phillies,were. And with the Keystone State's status as a key "swing state"in the 2008 election, the presidential candidates and theirprospective running mates made stops in myriad cities and townsthere during the summer and fall. The intersection of politics and sports always will give riseto politicians trying     

Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project

Most conventional oral history takes a bottom-up approach tothe past, focusing on settings where there is little in theway of a functional written record. This essay discusses thevalue of oral history in the opposite case of the American presidency.The written archive and journalistic record on each presidentis immense. Yet oral history is a valuable resource in thiselite environment, too. There are routine silences in even thebest of presidential papers, which oral history interviews canhelp fill. Moreover, the White House has become a workplacewhere recorded details can be hazardous to one's political health.Accordingly, few presidential aides today keep diaries or notesof key meetings—impoverishing the archive future historianswill use to study the presidency of our times. Oral historythus fortifies a weakening documentary record. This essay exploresthese broad issues and how they are being dealt with in theconduct of the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project.     

"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming": NASA, Oral History,and the Contemporary Past

Over the forty-five years since its creation, NASA has completedliterally thousands of oral histories with people involved inthe agency and its programs. These include formal oral historiesthat collect information on the career of the individual, andshorter oral histories focusing on specific activities. Whilemany were done by scholars working on book projects there havebeen many, and increasingly so in recent years, completed tocapture the recollections of space scientists and engineerswithout a larger project envisioned. This presents a major resourcefor understanding the history of the U.S. space program.Thisarticle discusses the nature and extent of the oral historycollection at NASA, the processes in place for the colRoger     

Union Army veterans,all grown up

This article overviews the research opportunities made possible by a National Institute on Aging-funded program project, Early Indicators, Intergenerational Processes, and Aging. Data collection began almost three decades ago on 40,000 soldiers from the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War. The sample contains extensive demographic, economic, and medical data from childhood to death. In recent years, a large sample of African-American soldiers and an oversampling of soldiers from major U.S. cities have been added. Hundreds of historical maps containing public health data have been geocoded to place soldiers and their family members in a geospatial context. With newly granted funding, thousands of veterans will be linked to the demographic information available from the census and vital records of their children.     

墨西哥人移民美国的历程

墨西哥移民在美国移民史上占有重要的地位,是当今美国最大的移民群体。作为一种历史现象,墨西哥人向美国较大规模的移民开始于20世纪初前后,概而观之,除20世纪30年代因大萧条而短暂中断外,墨西哥移民一直呈现出持续的高水平特征。墨西哥人移民美国的历程大致可以划分为四个阶段,与之对应的是四次移民浪潮：第一次浪潮从19世纪末20世纪初到1929年美国经济大萧条;第二次移民浪潮从1942年美墨双方签署《布拉塞洛计划55301964年该计划终结;第三次浪潮从1965年移民法颁布到20世纪80年代中期,此间大量墨西哥无证件移民流入美国;第四次浪潮从《1986年移民改革与控制法》颁布至今。墨西哥人移民美国源于一系列历史、地理、经济和社会因素,根植于美墨两国总体社会经济背景之下。     

Officer Country: Clothing and Personal Items From Cantonment Wilkinson (11PU282) in Southern Illinois

Abstract

Cantonment Wilkinson (11PU282) was a large but temporary U.S. Army post located on the banks of the Ohio River in present-day Pulaski County. Occupied by over 1,000 soldiers and their dependents for 18 months in 1801–1802, the post was abandoned in late 1802, with the post buildings subsequently occupied by Cherokee Indians and Euro-American squatters. Excavation of seven features at this site by SIUC archaeologists in 2003–2005 recovered a large artifact assemblage associated with the U.S. frontier army. This assemblage is particularly important in that it provides information on the poorlydocumented clothing and other items of the U.S. Army in the transitional period between the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The presence of officer-related silver, silver-plated, and gilded buttons within the clothing assemblage suggests that the features excavated by SIUC were primarily filled with refuse associated with the officers of the post rather than the enlisted men. The recovery of two unique personal items—a gold earring and an amber glass bead—attests to the minor presence of high-status officer's wives and possibly Cherokee Indians or other Native Americans at the post.     

History Is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona's San Pedro Valley

The San Pedro Ethnohistory Project is a collaborative researchinitiative between the Center for Desert Archeology and fourIndian tribes whose ancestors lived along this ancient naturaltravel route (4). Realizing the substantial data about the SanPedro River Valley reflected few native voices, a team of archeologistsand anthropologists designed the project to include participationfrom four area tribes with ties to the area—the TohonoO’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and Western Apache. Each of the tribeshave "distinct oral traditions that provide an anthropologicalcontext for interpreting the history and archeology" of thevalley (6). The project included fieldwork