Readings in Oral History Graduate Seminar
From OHA Wiki
History 708 Seminar: Readings in Oral History Spring 2009 Wright State University Marjorie McLellan
Course description
This seminar offers an introduction to the practice, theory, and interpretation of oral history. Oral history is inherently interdisciplinary, linking historical research to cultural studies and influencing work in a wide range of fields. Oral history interviews enable historians to address the experiences of ordinary people as well as to look at historical events from different perspectives. Oral history interviews provide access to the motivations behind, responses to, and reflections on events. Oral history methods and the analysis of oral histories have raised questions about the practice of history and the construction of historical narratives. The practice of oral history connects the work of the academy with the public practice of history and popular engagement with the past. Oral history blurs the lines between the researcher and subject, raising issues about agency, subjectivity and authority. We will examine meaning, memory, orality, documentary, narrative theory, identity, and public history in relation to both oral history collections and published studies in oral history.
Assignments
All students are expected to complete the assigned readings and to come prepared for discussion.
Students will be responsible for presenting and discussing one of the books during the quarter (2 students for each of the books) with the exceptions of Morissey’s article, the Portelli and Hardy article in the Journal of Multimedia History, Between Generations, and Oral History and Public Memories. Although all students are expected to read these works, we divide up responsibility for individual essays among the students.
Student presenters should plan on doing additional research about the authors’ work and to read review articles about the book in addition to reading the monograph for their presentation. Each pair of students should plan to spend about a half hour discussing and situating the author’s work and a half hour identifying significant issues, insights, innovations, interpretations, methods, and problems in the book.
Students will be responsible for leading the discussion of two additional books during the quarter. The discussion leaders should highlight key passages, prepare discussion questions, and engage the presenters as well as the seminar participants in the discussion. The discussion will generally take up the second hour of class.
The presenters will write a 500-800 word profile of the author and text for the OHA Wiki. The discussion leaders will be responsible for editing, proof reading, correcting and making any additions to that profile.
Students will identify an aspect of oral history as the subject for a historiographic essay. The starting point for this essay maybe one or more books assigned for the quarter but the essay should also involve additional research. In this case, we will expand beyond “the history of how oral history gets written” to include the history of how oral history gets collected, archived, used, interpreted, written, and presented to the public. Identify the major historians, key works, and potentially exemplary journals, institutions, centers, exhibits, and collections related to their topic. The essay should provide an overview of changing interpretations and approaches as well as differences within this field. The essay should also highlight broader connections such as the impact of developments in historiography on the topic. Finally, the research should examine the new questions and new directions that have arisen in this field of study/work. The historiographic essay looks at scholarship, interpretations, disagreement, debate, change, and consensus. Divide up the 12-14 pages essay with sub-headings. Publish the essay and works cited on the OHA Wiki.
Students will sign up to peer review, proof read, and edit another student’s essay either before or after it is published on the OHA Wiki.
Course Outline
April 1: Introduction to Oral History
April 8: History and Practice of Oral History Charles T. Morrissey, “Oral History Interviews: From Inception to Closure” from Thomas L. (EDT)/ Myers, Lois E. (EDT)/ Sharpless, Rebecca (EDT) Charlton, Handbook of Oral History (Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc, 2006).
April 15: Personal Narrative as Testimony David Ngaruri Kenney and Philip G. Schrag, Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2008).
April 22: Sound and Text William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, 3rd ed. (New Press, 2008). Charles Hardy and Alessandro Portelli, “I Can Almost See the Lights of Home -- A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky,” Journal for MultiMedia History 2 (1999), http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/lights.html.
April 29: Documentary Work Studs Terkel, "The Good War: An Oral History of World War II",(New Press, 1997). Documentary: “The Uprising of 34”
May 6: Oral History and Social History Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Documentary: “The Uprising of 34”
May 13: Personal and Family Narratives Paul Thompson and Daniel Bertaux, Between Generations: Family Models, Myths, and Memories (Transaction Publishers, 2005).Oral Autobiography Historiography
May 20: Oral History and Memory Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Kim Lacy Rogers
May 27: Meaning in Oral History Alessandro Portelli, The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
June 3: Oral History and Public Memories Linda Shopes and Paula Hamilton, eds. Oral History and Public Memories. Temple University Press (available in paperback April 28, 2008) Oral History and Public Memories Sources for Memory, Trauma, and Genocide in Rwanda
