OHA News

The Oral History Association invites nominations for its 2017 Annual Awards. In 1993, the Oral History Association established a series of awards to recognize outstanding achievement in oral history. The awards include: Doug Boyd presents the 2016 Elizabeth B. Mason award, small project, to Roger Gatchet Article Award  The purpose of the OHA Article Award is […]

The Oral History Association strongly denounces the recent executive order imposing a travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries, and temporarily suspending refugee admissions. As an organization, we reaffirm our fundamental values of respect, empowerment, diversity, dialogue, engagement, inclusion, and the free exchange of ideas, all of which the travel ban makes more difficult. We reject

  OHA International Committee Vice-Chair Michael Kilburn will be attending the Czech Oral History Association (https://www.coha.cz/) in Brno February15/16, 2017. He will be giving a report from the road so watch this space. As well, Michael will also be writing a review of ‘Velvet Revolutions. An Oral History of Czech Society’ by Miroslav Vaněk and

News broke last Thursday morning that the Trump Administration is considering the elimination of NEH, along with other cultural agencies! It is important to remember that we have built considerable support in Congress over the past years and we can fight this proposal. It is time to take action and make clear to the President

New federal government protocols that better define the Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects have been announced in an effort to make more effective the promulgated regulations known as the Common Rule. According to the announcement, “this final rule is intended to better protect human subjects involved in research, while facilitating valuable research and

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

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

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