Who Owns Oral History?

Who “owns” oral history? When an oral history narrator shares her story in response to questions posed by an interviewer, and the recording and transcript are deposited in an archive, who holds the rights to these historical source materials? Who decides whether or not they may be shared with the public, quoted in a publication, or uploaded to the web? Who decides whether someone has the right to earn money from including an interview in a commercially distributed book, video, or website? Furthermore, does Creative Commons, a licensing tool developed by the open access movement to protect copyright while increasing public distribution, offer a better solution to these questions than existing oral history protocols?

Back to Business: A Next Step in the Field of Oral History

Business organizations and elites are often neglected in oral history as a result of the dominant assumption that elites have ample opportunity to be heard. We argue, however, that researching corporations and elites is very interesting for oral historians. This contention is supported by the four contributions that legitimize the use of oral history as formulated by Richard Crownshaw and Selma Leydesdorff.

An Oral History Of New York Food: Dining Out Wasn

As Marcel Proust so famously documented, it's often the simplest of foods that can carry us back to remembrances of things past. And so perhaps it's not so surprising that, when freelance food writer Anne Noyes Saini began asking New York's elderly residents about their memories of the foods of the city during the early- to mid-20th century, it was humble meals like baked beans and the fruits sold by old-timey wagons that most often came to mind.

What about the character of the girls?: Girls and Women’s Basketball in Illinois, 1968-1977

What about the character of the girls?: Girls and Women’s Basketball in Illinois, 1968-1977 Illinois hosted its first Girls’ State Basketball Tournament in 1977, five years after the U.S. Congress passed the landmark Title IX legislation. Title IX led to an explosion in the growth of women’s sports in the United States, dramatically changing American culture in the process.

Oral historians and online spaces

In November 2012, a thread appeared on the H-Net Oral history listserv with the enticing subject line “experimental uses of oral history.” Amid assorted student projects and artistic explorations, two projects in particular caught my eye: the VOCES Oral History Project and the Freedom Mosaic. As we work towards our upcoming special issue on Oral History in the Digital Age, I’ve been mulling over how oral historians negotiate online spaces, and how the Internet and related advancing technologies can inspire but also challenge the manner in which they share their scholarship.

Happy Nowruz!

When our people use the word “’Eyd (celebration)” alone, they mean “Nowruz”. Undoubtedly Nowruz is the oldest most persistent and beautiful Iranian ceremony which is celebrated now from Tibet to Crimea. Nowruz is the unifying link of a great nation whose multi-thousand years of history has a big share in the world’s heritage of civilization, literature, art and culture. We congratulate this great celebration to all Iranians particularly our readers and wish a happy new Persian year for all of them.

OCEANIA: AUSTRALIA, CAMDEN VOICES

Jo Oliver, local studies librarian at Camden council library reports on the Camden Voices Oral History Project which has recorded oral histories of people within the Camden community to be archived and accessible as part of the Camden Council Library collection.

Africa: The Fading Use Of Indigenous Languages

It is a disturbing fact that African countries have embraced foreign languages at the expense of indigenous languages. As such, traditions and beliefs that have been passed on from generation to generation are gradually going extinct. Proverbs and stories that served as moral lessons and generational teachings have been traded for the 'fables of aesop', Mills and bones, etc, and foreign films now serve as the instructor of today's children. Indigenous languages have been labeled 'vernacular' or 'gibberish', and as such, most African children and youths in primary and secondary schools are even punished for speaking their mother tongues.

The Persistence of Silence after Dictatorships

This article describes the Argentina–Catalonia Project, a collaborative secondary school oral history project based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Tarragona, Spain. The purpose of the project is to engage high school students in an exploration of the persistence of silence that exists in contemporary Argentina and Spain concerning the impact of dictatorship on everyday life.

From the Intimate Circle to Globalized Oral History

In what now seems a bygone golden age many of us argued that the role of oral history was to revolutionize the study of history by bringing heretofore neglected populations into that study and by recognizing their abilities to formulate their own histories. Despite what are now seen as glaring contradictions, enchanted by the insight that the interviews we gathered, and the people we talked to, told us more than simply information about the past, we began to argue that they were richer than repositories of information or archival documents, they were texts themselves.