Join us as OHA kicks off a new weekly series, Throwback Thursday. We’ll profile a year in the life of OHA each week with photos, logos, and highlights taken from the Oral History Association newsletter. We welcome your memories, photos, and comments at oha@gsu.edu.
From Volume 1, No. 1, June 1967
Excerpts from “Meeting on High – The First National Colloquium”
The germ of the idea of founding a national association of oral historians took root high in the mountains above Los Angeles at the First National Colloquium on Oral History. Meetings were held September 25-28, 1966, at the California Conference Center at Lake Arrowhead. The colloquium, sponsored by UCLA Library’s Oral History Program and organized by James V. Mink, director of the UCLA program, convened to define the functions and objectives of oral history and to establish a permanent and productive relationship among oral historians. The result was a total success.
More than 80 interested participants, including librarians, archivists, professors, and men of medicine from all over the country and as far away as Beirut, Lebanon, entangled themselves in complex considerations of terminology, techniques, goals, and standards. In the keynote address, Jim Mink emphasized his expectation of active participation by those attending, and participate they did. Dr. Philip C. Brooks, Wayland Hand, and Louis Starr led a divided and unresolved discussion of appropriate oral history terminology. Is the individual who agrees to submit to an interview a “respondent,” an “interviewee,” a “subject,” or a “victim”? Professor Allan Nevins, “the father of modern oral history,” generated a lively response with his exploration of the uses and abuses of oral history…
At the final session the groundwork was laid for the establishment of an international organization of oral historians. Jim Mink was elected chairman of a steering committee to get things under way.
Check back next Thursday for highlights of 1967 and the first OHA logo…
Lake Arrowhead, California
