From Atomic Fragments to Memories of the Trinity Bomb: A Bridge of Oral History over the Pacific

This paper first introduces the background of the making ofMemories of the Trinity Bomb, a Japanese documentary film basedon the book Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions, authoredby Mary Palevsky. Yoshihiko Muraki, an independent filmmaker,revealed his unique approach in filming the spiritual journeyof Mary, a daughter of the Manhattan Project scientists, inher search of the true meaning of the atomic bomb. While thedocumentary primarily focused on the narratives of Mary Palevskyand several Project scientists, this paper introduces Japaneseperspectives on the film through interviews with Japanese viewersvarying both in generation and background. Through this endeavor,the paper explores the meaning of this trans-media as well astransnational collaboration on the topic of the atomic bomb,which remains at the crossroads of history and personal memories.     

Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions

As an historian of the American West, I find myself in the unusualposition of writing a review of a book, written by an archaeologist,for an audience of oral historians. But Ronald J. Mason's elegantlyprovocative Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North AmericanIndian Oral Traditions cries out for interdisciplinary linkagesand understandings. Mason spent his professional years as anarchaeologist among anthropologists and is the author of thehighly acclaimed Great Lakes Archaeology (1981). In InconstantCompanions, Mason "addresses a fundamental historiographicalproblem in archaeology, history, and anthropology":     

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969

French and Burgess have added yet another book to the enormousliterature on the Space Race. Based partly on oral history interviewsand partly on written and e-mailed statements and other documents,In the Shadow of the Moon focuses on the American side of thesecond half of the Space Race. (French and Burgess dealt withthe first half of the Space Race in a previous work, Into thatSilent Sea.) Between March 1965 and July 1969, the U.S. launched fifteenmanned space missions. In four years and four months, NASA wentfrom     

In Our Own Voices: a Guide to Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women

The valuable oral history guidebook, In Our Own Voices: A Guideto Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women,opens with this quote by Nen Lederkremen, "Without roots wecannot grow." The Jewish Women's Archive, an organization thatwas founded in 1995, has done an excellent job in enabling AmericanJewish women to record their roots. The Jewish Women's Archivefelt that women's contributions had been missing from the accountof the American Jewish experience. To rectify this, they pioneeredthe use of community-based oral history projects with Jewishwomen in Boston,     

The Italian American Experience In New Haven: Images and Oral Histories

Anthony V. Riccio's lavish new coffee table book, The ItalianAmerican Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories,provides a fascinating look at the experiences of Italian immigrantsand their children in one east coast community. The field ofimmigration history has certainly benefited from the wealthof oral histories collected from immigrants and their descendants.Ranging from Al Santoli's New Americans, an Oral History: Immigrantsand Refugees in the U. S. Today (1988) to works such as La Merica:Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (1985)     

Finding Our Place: Reconstructing Community through Oral History

Abstract "Finding Our Place: Reconstructing Community throughOral History," analyzes how oral histories not only give newmeaning to places, but play a significant role in locating sitesspecific in the development of the Spanish-language music industry.These oral histories chronicle the emergence and growth of businesses,particularly their role in maintaining the economic and socialinfrastructure of Mexican American communities throughout southTexas. The use of oral history interviews proved the only avenueof documenting Mexican American rural communities, singers,and businesswomen finding that culture means turning our attentionto parks, church halls, cantinas, and dance halls. These placesgather significance when an experience is attached, and embodya sense of communal or shared space. Focusing on women in themusic industry, cantantes [singers] and businesswomen illustratedhow they negotiated travel, interaction with audiences, andexperiences on the stage. Though many of the interviewees expressedtheir distrust of the oral historian initially, stemming frompoor treatment in the music industry, their reluctance gaveway after hours of interviewing by the oral historian. Importantto this study, their narratives pinpointed the existence ofpopular socializing spots in south Texas small towns and surroundingcommunities.     

Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience

Intellectual cross-pollination between oral history and anthropologyis a long tradition. Editor and contributor Waterson arguesthat the influence of oral history on life narrative researchin anthropology intensified during the 1980s but needs freshemphasis. A primary goal in Southeast Asian Lives is to promotethe thoughtful use of oral history life narratives, especiallyto explore the influence of twentieth-century dramatic historicalchanges on individual lives and cultures. Her "Introduction:Analyzing Personal Narratives" is a useful and thought-provokingsurvey of theoretical issues on oral narratives, especiallyfor anyone doing cross-cultural     

History, Memory, and Identity in Modern Singapore: Testimonies from the Urban Margins

In 2006–2007, I interviewed elderly Singaporeans on theirexperiences of resettlement from an urban kampong (village)to emergency public housing after a great fire in 1961. I learnedmuch about the lives of semiautonomous dwellers in an unauthorizedsettlement and the individual and social transformation followingtheir rehousing. My informants also highlighted what the experiencesmeant to them and their identity in a modern city-state. Thispaper treats the testimonies as both source and social memoryand seeks to avoid the essentialism into which many social historians,oral history practitioners, and memory scholars have fallenin their approach toward the craft. As a source of social history,when used in conjunction with other historical sources, thereminiscences are patently useful for understanding the roleof public housing in transforming a marginal population intoan integrated citizenry. This enables the writing of a new socialhistory of postwar Singapore that departs from the discursiveofficial accounts of urban kampong life and of the 1961 inferno.At the same time, the oral history also underlines powerfulsocial and political influences on individual memory, beingmarked by nostalgia for the kampong and ambivalence toward theimagined character of younger Singaporeans. Statements on therumors of government-inspired arson in the 1961 calamity, however,constitute a significant countermyth in contemporary society,revealing a more critical side to the social memory.     

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.     

Trace,incident, and testimony: The story of Amano Kozo,lieutenant of the 33rd regiment of the 16th division of Japan’s China expeditionary army

ABSTRACT

Instead of writing on the grand narrative of the Nanjing Massacre, this article studies a much smaller and lesser known event, or the incident of Amano Kozo, a lieutenant in Japan’s China Expeditionary Army, who (or his soldiers) slapped John Allison, an American consul. It ignited a serious diplomatic dispute between the United States and Japan and led to Kozo’s own indictment by a Japanese military trial. The author analyzes the circumstances surrounding the incident, using the Japanese trial records and telegrams from the American side. He discusses the problematic testimonies from Japanese war veterans made half a century later and concludes that it is impossible to understand the details of history by simply bringing known facts into causal relationships; rather, combing through the traces left behind from the incident and analyzing their semantic meaning may well be a better way to deepen our understanding of history.     

The Face of Decline: the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century

The term "deindustrialization" did not come into popular usageuntil the late 1970s as American heavy industry went into aprecipitous decline and the industrial heartland became the"rust belt." For the people of the anthracite coal mining regionof eastern Pennsylvania, deindustrialization came much earlieras Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht graphically demonstrate inThe Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in theTwentieth Century (2005). This work joins a growing body ofliterature that examines the rise, decline, and fall of communitiesimpacted by the slow erosion of heavy industry. Recent workssuch as Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's RustBelt (2003) by Steven High,     

Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project

With the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal in 2008,Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’Project takes on a meaningful and significant role in the recoveryand interpretation of the Federal Writers’ Project. Itprovides an opportunity for us to think about the historiographyof oral history. Hirsch's essential question deserves an answer:"Who do oral historians want for ancestors? And why?" (142). Seventy-five years ago, in 1933, the newly elected presidentFranklin D. Roosevelt and his administration addressed the nationalcrisis of the Great Depression by creating the innovative "alphabetagencies" and programs, a series of     

The Oral Historian as Memorist

This paper explores some issues in relation to oral historyand memory that emerge in Alessandro Portelli's The Order HasBeen Carried Out. I examine the contemporary role of the oralhistorian, the relationship between the present and the pastin memory work, and make some comments about how we might articulatethe field of oral history with memory studies more closely forthe enrichment of both.     

Chicanas in Charge: Texas Women in the Public Arena

Chicanas in Charge is a collection of individual profiles ofsignificant women in Texas politics and activism from the 1940sto the present. The book is arranged in four parts—"Adelitas:Warrior Trailblazers," "The Chicano Movement Activists," "Puentesy Lazos: The Hispanic Connectors," and "Twenty-first CenturyEntorchas/Torchbearers." Each part features a short introductionthat identifies the period's historical zeitgeist, identifiessimilar themes in the women's stories, and points out uniqueaspects of the leaders followed by from five to eight individualprofiles. The profiles of each woman are somewhat concise: they includea sketch of the background     

When Subjects Talk Back: Writing Anne Braden's Life-In-Progress

Subversive Southerner is an oral history-based biography thatleans toward being a full critical biography of Anne Braden,a southern white woman (Kentucky-born, Alabama-reared) whoseracial justice activism spans nearly six decades. The book representsan enterprise of shared authority between Braden and authorCatherine Fosl, and this essay explores the evolution of thatenterprise and reflects on the relationship between oral historybiographer and living subject. During the thirteen years thatit took to complete the book, Fosl's relationship with Bradenwent through transitions that altered the structure of the book,and raised fundamental questions—such as who but the personliving it can or should have authority over a life? One of thecentral issues in writing the book was how to address a questionthat many historians of the 1950s South have pondered: was AnneBraden ever a member of the Communist Party? Braden chose notto answer that question, and Fosl respected her decision.     

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     

The Oral History Project: Connecting Students to Their Community, Grades 4-8

The Oral History Project describes a middle school project thatbegan with a statewide effort to improve students’ languagearts achievement scores. Pennsylvania educators proposed anintegrative instructional model that would involve adolescentsin intergenerational interviews. Teachers implemented the modelin a variety of settings. This book represents Pennsylvaniaeducators’ attempt to share the integrative intergenerationalinterview model with others. Donald Graves, a nationally known expert in language arts educationand author of the Foreword, asserts the instructional modelrepresented in The     

Historia, Antropologia, Y Fuentes Orales

Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales (HAYFO) is aSpanish-language journal for the study of oral data across diversedisciplinary traditions, such as history, anthropology, andsociology. The journal is edited by Asociación Historiay Fuente Oral, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona,and Editorial Universidad de Granada. HAYFO first saw the lightin 1989 and is published biannually in Spain. The thirty-seventh issue of the journal is an exciting mix ofarticles with a variety of theoretical and empirical merits.This issue is divided into four main sections. The first sectionis entitled "Denouncement and opacity." This section