Case Study: What is it That University-Based Oral History Can Do? The Berkeley Experience

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cándida Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Oral History Interviews

University-based oral history needs to undergo a transformation. The process of going out and interviewing people for first-hand knowledge of historical events is as old as the historical discipline itself. This article focuses on a case study on what university-based oral history can do when it comes to the study of oral history. Interviews continued to be one of the most important tools for historians studying recent topics, but oral history as practiced today had its beginnings in the early nineteenth century when researchers began compiling and preserving stenographic records of the interviews they carried out. Modern oral history has centered on making the words of the historical informants accessible, so that narrators can continue to speak of their experiences to subsequent generations. Oral sources have been an important part of scholarly life for the past two centuries because they have made visible forms of collective life that are difficult to document in other ways.

scholarly journals Agrarische Waldnutzungen im Walliser Föhrenwald – die letzten 150 Jahre | Agricultural use of pine forests in Canton Valais over the past 150 years

2006 ◽  
Vol 157 (9) ◽  
pp. 395-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urs Gimmi ◽  
Matthias Bürgi
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Pine Forests ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wood Pasture ◽  
Management Plans ◽  
Special Weight ◽  
Agricultural Use ◽  
Forest Use ◽  
Oral History Interviews

In recent years, pine forests in the Canton of Valais (Switzerland)have shown an increase in mortality, which raises the question of whether changes in forest use have had an impact on this phenomenon. Using oral history interviews and various sources from the forest administration (e. g., management plans), forest use in these pine forests has been reconstructed. Special weight was accorded to agricultural uses. In-depth analyses were carried out in two case study regions, i. e., the municipality of Salgesch, Visp and Eyholz. The results show that many of these forest stands have been used intensively for wood-pasture and litter collecting. The article discusses the rationales behind these uses of the forest, as well as the reasons for the abandonment of the same in the second half of the 20th century.

scholarly journals From the ghetto to the Gulag, from the ghetto to Israel: Soviet collaboration trials against the Shargorod ghetto’s Jewish Council

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Mitigating Circumstances

Beginning in 1944, Soviet authorities arrested former Jewish Council members of different ghettos and put them on trial for collaboration with the Axis powers. This case study examines the 1944 trials of Meir Teich and Isaak Sherf, two leading figures of the Shargorod ghetto’s Jewish administration. Drawing on trial documents, oral history interviews and memoirs, this article focuses on two aspects: how Soviet courts selectively accepted support for the partisans as mitigating circumstances, and how survivor networks among the witnesses influenced the trials. These aspects are discussed in the context of the (re-)Sovietization of formerly occupied territories, in this case Transnistria, the Romanian occupation zone.

Solar Sacrifice: How an Arizona Church Lost Money by Going Solar—and Solutions for When Energy Incentives Fail to Serve the Needs of Nonprofits

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Krantz
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Policy Design ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Solar Photovoltaic ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Photovoltaic Panels ◽  
Key Stakeholders ◽  
Oral History Interviews

By policy design, consumers are supposed to save money when they invest in solar energy. This paper presents a case study of what happens when a church goes solar and the finances go wrong. Following the installation of solar-photovoltaic panels, the Arizona church—in the Valley of the Sun, among the sunniest places in the country—decreased its energy consumption, but its electric bills went up. Through oral-history interviews of key stakeholders, the author investigates what happened, and what could be done to prevent other religious institutions and nonprofits from experiencing the church’s fate.

scholarly journals Researching around our subjects

2021 ◽  
pp. 166-188
Author(s):  
Frances C. Galt
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Television History ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Concentric Circles ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Union Activism

This article explores the opportunities and obstacles of researching women’s trade union activism in the British film and television industries between 1933 and 2017. The surviving material on women’s union participation is incomplete and fragmented, and so my research has combined an examination of archival material—the union’s journal and the meeting minutes, correspondence and ephemera of three iterations of its equality committee—with new and existing oral history interviews. Sherry J. Katz has termed this methodological approach “researching around our subjects”, which involves “working outward in concentric circles of related sources” to reconstruct women’s experiences (90). While “researching around my subjects” was a challenging and time-consuming process, it was also a rewarding one, producing important insights into union activism as it relates to gender and breaking new ground in both women’s labour and women’s film and television history. This article concludes with a case study on the appointment of Sarah Benton as researcher for the ACTT’s Patterns report in 1973, revealing the benefits of this methodological approach in reconstructing events which have been effectively erased from the official record.

The living conditions of Gypsy slaves in early nineteenth-century Wallachia

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
DAVID GAUNT ◽  
JULIETA ROTARU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Size ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Majority Population ◽  
Ethnic Attitudes

Very little research has been done specifically on the condition of the Gypsy slaves in Wallachia. Most general histories ignore them, and few contemporary observers studied them. This is just one more sign of their discrimination and neglect. This study draws on the exhaustive nominal lists of the Romani population from the database MapRom which draws on the first preserved count of the population of Danubian principalities (1838). Many aspects of the rob-slave condition have been analysed, the household size, the socio-professional and juridical categories and the Gypsy owners, the degree to which the Gypsies in Wallachia were integrated into the majority population and the ethnic attitudes of the surrounding population, and a case study of formation of a Gypsy settlement.

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.

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

Enshrined Fortification: A Trialogue on the Rise and Fall of Safed

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-290
Author(s):  
Uri Zvi Shachar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Military Architecture ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Dialogue ◽  
Ritual Spaces

The study of castles has formed a major part of crusade historiography since its inception in the early nineteenth century. Fortification has been taken to represent the magnificence of the efforts to rule the Holy Land and the battle between Christianity and Islam. Recently, however, scholars have recognised that, inasmuch as castles were celebrated as the epitomes of resilience and hostility, military architecture was far more dialogical than previously noticed. The design of castles involved a highly nuanced familiarity with the culture from which they were intended to defend. This article seeks to show that not only the physical characteristics of castles but also ideas about what made them religiously successful, in their capacity to enact and protect ritual spaces, were shaped through a dynamic inter-religious dialogue. Taking Safed as a case study, this article brings together three narratives—in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew—that share the attempt to laud the castle by drawing a dialectic between its strategic might and the sanctity of the soil upon which it is built. While the three accounts differ radically in their political stakes, the rhetorical strategies they employ in order to contemplate the spiritual efficacy of the castle is profoundly entangled.

WOMEN, MARGINALITY AND THE ZULU STATE: WOMEN'S INSTITUTIONS AND POWER IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN HANRETTA
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Government ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Definition Of

For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has been dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history of women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged gender relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct women's history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses of the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes in the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society, even during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane in the early nineteenth century.More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa. Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective and of focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction among them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted their position and were contented’. In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in the new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition of traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also hides dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those relations are and have been.

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