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President’s Letter

by Doug Boyd When I was first agreed to go up for First Vice President, I remember the OHA Executive Director Cliff Kuhn calling me just minutes after I had accepted.  The conversation went something like this: BOYD: Hello, Nunn Center, this is Doug. KUHN: Hi Doug, It’s Cliff.  Thanks for accepting the nomination.  You know as Vice President you […]

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OHA Oral History Association

Share your work at 2017 OHA conference in Minneapolis

The Oral History Association invites proposals for papers and presentations at the 2017 annual conference in Minneapolis.  The meeting will be held Oct. 4-7, 2017, at the Hilton Minneapolis Hotel. The theme of the conference is Engaging Audiences: Oral History and the Public. The submission deadline is Jan. 31, 2017. Oral histories, from their initial

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Genocide testimonies become teaching tools, Shoah Foundation director says

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

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Oral history methods draw scholars from widely different perspectives

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

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Oral history, now (and tomorrow)

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

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Remembering Cliff Kuhn, 1952-2015

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

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Sherna Berger Gluck seen as mentor, collaborator for feminist historians

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

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Scholars, admirers detail oral history contributions of Ron Grele

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

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National Park Service uses oral history to document traditions, guide transitions

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,

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Roundtable offers perspectives on Studs Terkel as oral historian

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

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