Follow our weekly series, Throwback Thursday, designed to help celebrate 50 years of OHA. We’ll profile a year in the life of the organization 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.
OHA in 1976…
Alice Hoffman, Penn State, first woman President of OHA
President: Alice Hoffman, Pennsylvania State University
Site of the Annual Colloquium: outside Ottawa, Canada
Newsletter: Tom Charlton, editor; Adelaide Darling, Judy Edquist, and Margaret Miller, associate editors
Editorial office: Baylor University, Waco, Texas
Annual individual membership: $10
Highlights of the year from the Oral History Association Newsletter…
- The OHA and the Canadian Oral History Association jointly co-sponsored the annual Colloquium at the Chateau Montebello outside of Ottawa. 1976 was Canada’s Olympic year, American’s Bicentennial year, and International Oral History Year.
- The first meeting of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) was held in May, 1976.
- An oral history of the U.S. Congress was announced, sponsored by Former Members of Congress, Inc., an organization of 450 men and women who have served in the House and Senate. Charles T. Morrisey served as procedural consultant and an interviewer.
- The American Jewish Committee completed a two-year project involving 250 Holocaust survivors living in the U.S. Louis B. Cowan of Columbia University directed the project entitled “A Study in American Pluralism Through Oral Histories of Holocaust Survivors.”
Who we were interviewing…
- New York University…formed the American Left project to record the experiences of veterans of radicalism in labor, politics, and culture
- Program of Oral History at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City…eyewitnesses of events in the sound movie industry in Mexico since 1930
- The French government’s first oral history project…bureaucrats, union officers, doctors, and employers connected with social security.
- Radcliffe College, Cambridge, received a grant to support an oral history project on the lives “older black women in entertainment, writing, social work, and government who began their careers prior to the 1930s.”
Check back next week for 1977…
