Oral History: Media, Message, and Meaning

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford M. Kuhn
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Message ◽  
The City

An immense transformation in oral history and media has taken place over the past few decades. This article draws largely upon personal experiences in culminating media, message, and meaning along with the study of oral history. This article looks at experiences in interviewing people and how memories can be juxtaposed in combining oral history. To convey something of the orality and subjectivity of a radio series, this article also intersperses thirteen longer “profiles,” extended interview excerpts with people found especially informative and illuminating, and whose stories did not always fit neatly within the larger narrative. Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914–1948, published in 1990 is referred to for conveying message and meaning. The advent of the digital revolution by the early 1990s helped spur a resurgence of interest. The plethora of oral history–based media initiatives is astounding which is still mushrooming.

Oral Testimony and the History of Medicine

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Medical History ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
Medical Treatments ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epidemiological Trends ◽  
The Relationship

This article surveys the historiographical trends in medical history that have fostered the rise in the use of oral history. It discusses different approaches that serve to bring individual experiences and human agents into the historical frame, humanizing our understanding of the national and international institutions, professions, governments, and organizations that shape medical history. Oral history reveals the clinicians behind changing medical treatments and the personal experiences behind patient populations or epidemiological trends. This article argues, however, that oral history needs to do more; rather, it should aim to chart and explore the relationship between the structures of medicine and human experience. Furthermore, it discusses that oral testimony does not document the past, but is an individual's interpretation of it; historians therefore need to interrogate it as such, exploring why people remember in certain ways, what is forgotten or misremembered, and what such memories mean for the present.

Case Study: Rome's House of Memory and History: The Politics of Memory and Public Institutions

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Portelli
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Political Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambitious Program ◽  
The City

This article centers around the case study of Rome's House of Memory and History to understand the politics of memory and public institutions. This case study is about the organization and politics of public memory: the House of Memory and History, established by the city of Rome in 2006, in the framework of an ambitious program of cultural policy. It summarizes the history of the House's conception and founding, describes its activities and the role of oral history in them, and discusses some of the problems it faces. The idea of a House of Memory and History grew in this cultural and political context. This article traces several political events that led to the culmination of the politics of memory and its effect on public institutions. It says that the House of Memory and History can be considered a success. A discussion on a cultural future winds up this article.

Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

scholarly journals Lviv as the cradle of Polish independence organizations

2021 ◽  
Vol 201 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-545
Author(s):  
Janusz Zuziak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Social Activists ◽  
The Past ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Lviv occupies a special place in the history of Poland. With its heroic history, it has earned the exceptionally honorable name of a city that has always been faithful to the homeland. SEMPER FIDELIS – always faithful. Marshal Józef Piłsudski sealed that title while decorating the city with the Order of Virtuti Militari in 1920. The past of Lviv, the always smoldering and uncompromising Polish revolutionist spirit, the climate, and the atmosphere that prevailed in it created the right conditions for making it the center of thought and independence movement in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Polish independence organizations of various political orientations were established, from the ranks of which came legions of prominent Polish politicians and military and social activists.

William Bulloch, 1868 - 1941

1941 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
pp. 819-852
Keyword(s):  
Historical Research ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Emeritus Professor ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
The Past ◽  
London Hospital ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

William Bulloch, Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London and Consulting Bacteriologist to the London Hospital since his retirement in 1934, died on n February 1941, in his old hospital, following a small operation for which he had been admitted three days before. By his death a quite unique personality is lost to medicine, and to bacteriology an exponent whose work throughout the past fifty years in many fields, but particularly in the history of his subject, has gained for him wide repute. Bulloch was born on 19 August 1868 in Aberdeen, being the younger son of John Bulloch (1837-1913) and his wife Mary Malcolm (1835-1899) in a family of two sons and two daughters. His brother, John Malcolm Bulloch, M.A., LL.D. (1867-1938), was a well-known journalist and literary critic in London, whose love for his adopted city and its hurry and scurry was equalled only by his passionate devotion to the city of his birth and its ancient university. On the family gravestone he is described as Critic, Poet, Historian, and indeed he was all three, for the main interest of his life outside his profession of literary critic was antiquarian, genealogical and historical research, while in his earlier days he was a facile and clever fashioner of verse and one of the founders of the ever popular Scottish Students’ Song Book .

scholarly journals Thirteen ways of looking at institutional history: a model for digital exhibitions from science archives

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venkat Srinivasan ◽  
TB Dinesh ◽  
Bhanu Prakash ◽  
A Shalini
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Centre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Official Records

Over the past decade, there have been many efforts to streamline the accessibility of archival material on the web. This includes easy display of oral history interviews and archival records, and making their content more amenable to searches. Science archives wrestle with new challenges, of not just putting out the data, but of building spaces where historians, journalists, the scientific community and the general public can see stories emerging from the linking of seemingly disparate records. We offer a design architecture for an online public history exhibit that takes material from existing archives. Such a digital exhibit allows us to explore the middle space between raw archival data and a finished piece of work (like a book or documentary). The National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) digital exhibit is built around thirteen ways to reflect upon and assemble the history of the institution, which is based in Bangalore, India. (A nod to Wallace Stevens' poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”). The exhibit tries to bring to light multiple interpretations of NCBS, weaved by the voices of over 70 story tellers. The material for the exhibit is curated from records collected to build the Centre's archive. The oral history excerpts, along with over 600 photographs, official records, letters, and the occasional lab note, give a glimpse into the Centre's multifaceted history and show connections with the present.

A Critical Period in American Catholicism

1973 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay P. Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Madison Avenue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Looking Back ◽  
Area Of Study

Historians are fond of looking back over the panorama of the past and writing about periods of cultural change that altered the continuity of history. The age of discovery and the rise of the city are phrases that describe such pivotal epochs. These are not Madison Avenue-inspired book titles, but legitimate interpretative descriptions of past ages that provide a key to understanding the development of American civilization. Although the history of American Catholicism does not lend itself to such epochal descriptions, interpretative concepts are applicable in this area of study as well and they can provide useful keys to the analysis of the past.

Discovering dimensions of research ethics in doing oral history: going public in the case of the Ghent orphanages

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lieselot De Wilde ◽  
Griet Roets ◽  
Bruno Vanobbergen
Keyword(s):  
Research Ethics ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

In this article, we argue that research ethics in the doing of oral history research are inadequately addressed in the existing body of research. Although oral history researchers have paid considerable attention to procedural ethical issues, there is currently a lack of attention on situational research ethics in the doing of oral history. We address particular ethical challenges that we experienced while reconstructing the history of three remaining orphanages after the Second World War in the city of Ghent (a city in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) by drawing on oral history research from former orphans and ex-staff members. Their rather surprising, yet pertinent, questions enabled us to discover the political nature of research ethics, and prompted us to engage in ‘going public’. We discuss the complexities of our attempt to provide a ‘questionable’ historical interpretation for the ambiguous history of these childhood institutions in the recent past.

scholarly journals Oral Tradition as a Source for Digging Up the History of Parakan as a Heritage City

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 01001
Author(s):  
Purwantiasning Ari Widyati ◽  
Kurniawan Kemas Ridwan ◽  
Sunarti Pudentia Maria Purenti Sri
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Small City ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
Brand Name ◽  
The Past ◽  
Central Java ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strong Attachment ◽  
The City

This research was aimed to explore the history of Parakan City, a small city of Indonesia, located in Central Java. Parakan City has been regarded as a heritage city in Central Java and is well known as a Bambu Runcing City. Bambu Runcing is a sharpened bamboo that has been used as a traditional weapon in the past hundred years in Indonesia. This research was to conduct in oral tradition as a source for digging up the history of Parakan, particularly the reason why the community of Parakan using the words “Bambu Runcing” as a brand name for the city. This research was also to describe to what extent the community in having a strong attachment to the founder of Bambu Runcing known as KH Subuki. Some relevant and credible sources were interviewed using this oral tradition, and some of them are the second and third generation of KH Subuki.

scholarly journals LA CATTEDRALE, CUORE RELIGIOSO DELLA CITTA'

1970 ◽  
pp. 11-30
Author(s):  
Paola Vismara
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The City

Riassunto.–Si ripercorrono alcune tappe del ruolo del Duomo di Milano nella storia della città, per grandissime linee. In tale sede, almeno sino alla fine dell’ancien régime, avevano luogo i grandi eventi della vita politica e civile, seppur non senza tensioni. La cattedrale era il cuore della città, in primo luogo il cuore liturgico e pastorale della vita religiosa. Si segnala lo sfarzo delle cerimonie straordinarie che vi si svolgevano, il ruolo della musica e, in particolare, la funzione del luogo e delle sue cerimonie nel contesto dell’azione degli arcivescovi. Seppur in forme diverse rispetto alpassato, alcuni aspetti della ritualità e della centralità del Duomo giungono sino ai nostri giorni.***Abstract.–The article offers an overview of the history of the cathedral of Milanin the context of the city. For a long period - at least until the end of the ancien régime - the Duomo housed the most important events of the city and was often thetheatre of tensions between ecclesiastical and political authorities. The cathedral wasthe heart of the city and the center of pastoral activities and of religious life. Splendid ceremonies, often accompanied by music, took place in the Duomo, highlighting the importance of the bishops in the city. Even thouh in a different way compared to the past, some aspects of the rituality and centrality of the Duomo are stillrelevant today.

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