Author name: OHA admin

By Kristine Navarro-McElhaney 2016 was a quite a year for the Oral History Association!  We celebrated our 50th anniversary in Long Beach with close to 600 of our fellow members, colleagues and friends from across the globe.  We saw an increase in membership, and a notable rise in the number of students joining OHA.  Our […]

If you want firsthand testimony about the Holocaust, of course you will visit (online, naturally) the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, https://sfi.usc.edu/vha, which has more than 50,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors, collected primarily during the 1990s in more than 60 countries and 40 languages. But Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the foundation, told

The Sioux Indian nation, Southern black gay men and San Francisco’s queer community in the 1940s might appear to have little in common. But three scholars featured in an OHA conference plenary session illustrated how oral history can cross a multitude of disciplinary boundaries. Over the years, said moderator Donald A. Ritchie, a past OHA

An OHA ad hoc labor working group, formed after the Marriott Renaissance Hotel in Long Beach became the target of a labor organizing dispute, spearheaded a number of solidarity actions during the OHA conference aimed at showing support for hotel workers. The labor dispute emerged in January 2016, long after the OHA had contracted with

If you’ve ever been to an Oral History Association meeting, you’ll know there’s really only one theme:  What is oral history? That’s what Stephen Sloan, OHA past president and director of Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, told an OHA plenary session—and he was only partly joking. He and four other panelists at the Thursday

Laughter and tears characterized a memorial tribute conference session for Cliff Kuhn, who died Nov. 8, 2015, after two years as the Oral History Association’s first executive director, and who was remembered as an always-enthusiastic historian, father and friend. OHA past president Stephen Sloan noted Kuhn’s enthusiasm for the wide-ranging content at OHA conferences.  “Cliff

A panel of women scholars whose paths have crossed that of oral historian Sherna Berger Gluck described a woman who inspired them, challenged them and permanently affected their lives. She has been their mentor, they said. “I never, ever identified myself as a mentor,” she insisted. Rather, she prefers calling herself an advocacy oral historian

Ronald J. Grele’s career as a historian took him from a position as a young faculty member at California State University Long Beach to Columbia University in New York City—with a number of prestigious stops in between. And throughout his career, said the five men and women who highlighted aspects of his work, he contributed

The National Park Service was already 50 years old when the Oral History Association was in its infancy, and park service employees had been conducting oral history interviews for years, beginning in 1948, by collecting stories from workers at the Vanderbilt Mansion, now a national historic site in Hyde Park, New York. Over the years,

Louis “Studs” Terkel was 96 years old when he died in 2008. And in his nearly century-spanning lifetime, he confounded biographers seeking to identify him variously as an author, radio talk show host, political activist and black-listed actor, among other professional pursuits. But to oral historians, he popularized what it means to ask ordinary people

This holiday season, the OHA Education Committee would like to highlight Rachel Olson’s blog post “Thinking of Food Workers” from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Olson reminds us about the challenges food service workers have long faced in providing Americans with the food on their tables, in the