The recent passing of Studs Terkel sparked a renewed interest in his interview projects, like Working, Race, and Hard Times. But Studs was not just a broadcaster who liked people; he was a practitioner of oral history, a method of gathering information about the past through preserving individual recollections. It's a subfield of history, with its own ethics, techniques, professional literature, uses, and limitations. Learn how to collect and share oral histories yourself, from interviewing to recording and getting clearances to preserving and disseminating. Oral histories have been preserved as text transcripts for decades; now digital media isreinvigorating the form, bringing new ease to recording and wider opportunities for the public to see and hear the content. Explore oral history projects on the web with stories of veterans, suffragists, Tibetans, jazz cats, Nevada nuclear test site witnesses, Basque Americans, rodeo cowboys and cowgirls, musicians, Katrina survivors, ACT UP activists, Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge, Native Americans, women whose lives were affected by the Pill, survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire,women in World War II, Hawai'ians, workers in Paterson, NJ....
posted by Miko on Dec 11, 2008 - 20 comments

Voice Thread Now the online world can lend support in your family argument about what really happened on your fifth birthday.
posted by Miko on Nov 5, 2007 - 6 comments

The Monumental is My Sickness: a newly translated 1979 interview with German sculptor Arno Breker. Extremely revealing about art, memory, Nazism, and the troubling life story of "Hitler's Favourite Sculptor". For context, read this critical review of a recent exhibition of Breker's work. More Arno Breker resources, including many photos: (in French); the museum of Arno Breker (in German); Wikipedia entry. via
posted by Rumple on Nov 6, 2006 - 5 comments

Sexuality, politics, and memory in Twentieth-Century Germany. The introductory chapter of Dagmar Herzog's brilliant, deeply researched, and beautifully written book, and an informative review by Thomas Laqueur. (via nextbook)
posted by semmi on May 27, 2005 - 7 comments

Debating the Moral Obligations of Memory. Jean Améry inspired Avishai Margalit and the late W.G. Sebald to likewise wrestle with questions of torture, revenge, and memory; questions as the destruction of memory, the obsession with memory, nationalism and memory, false memory, bad memory, opportunistic memory, lost memory, “too much” memory, memory versus reconciliation and, yes, the ethics of memory. In the Boston Review, Susie Linfield observes that for Améry, "the dream time of vengeance is the best place to be." (via the Cultural News Digest, nextbook.org)
posted by semmi on Aug 15, 2003 - 11 comments