Doing right by Studs Terkel

Reviewer Richard J. Evans is called out by Chicagoan Marc Geelhoed in the new issue of the New York Review of Books for overlooking a set of quote marks. The matter isnt as petty as it sounds.

Transferring conditions, sentiments and spirits from talking to writing

Interview with the active and influential or present elements in historical events is the most important method through which is used in oral history for registering and keeping the history.

Accomplishment of "Memory-Writing" movement and future of Holy Defense books

We are now in the 32nd week of the Holy Defense. A little more than 24 years has passed from the end of the Iraqi imposed war against Islamic Republic of Iran.

Narrative and Reality

The article explores the narrative construction of reality in life stories. First, the context of the research is introduced and second, the concept of reality is discussed. Third, narrative construction of one life story is analysed, turning to the relationship between performance and content. As researchers, we have no access to the reality of past events, but only to memories, stories and documents.

Steps to Conduct an Imposed War Oral History Project

It is difficult to talk in details about steps in writing memoirs and conducting oral history projects on the imposed war in a short article like this. What I say then, will focus on general tips concerning the issue. But before delving into the issue of doing oral history, it will be useful to mention a neglected fact. Writing memoirs and doing oral history is a specialized field that similar to other disciplines, requires education and training. So any individual with any knowledge and level of literacy is not capable of doing oral history.

Oral History in Latin America

This presentation discusses the relationship between history, oral history, and oral history in Latin America. It discusses whether Oral History is a specific field of historical studies, or a tool for the researcher. At the same time it considers if Oral History in Latin America has a specificity or not, and whether it constitutes a field in and of itself.

The “Industry” of Writing Memoirs in Iran

You may be surprised by the title of this short article, and like that correspondent who interviewed me two weeks ago, imagine that by using the term “the industry of writing memoirs”, I mean we have to industrialize and mechanize the memories! If you suppose so, you are utterly wrong! In this article I want to mention a pathological subject in the area of memoirs and writing the memoirs of the Islamic Revolution and the imposed war, which without paying attention, it will bear irretrievable harms for the literature of writing memoirs In Iran and the oral memoirs and even oral history in this country, and this is what could be called the “the industry of writing memoirs in Iran”.

15th of Khordad 1342

The arrest of Imam Khomeini on June 5, 1963 (15th of Khordad 1342 S.H.) by the government of Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, started a powerful whirlwind that 15 years later swallowed Iran’s imperial system.

Research Note: Role of Oral History in Preparing Biographies

Back in the fall of 1980, Edward Keenan, then Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, asked whether I would organize an oral history project on Iran. A Soviet specialist, Keenan saw certain similarities between the Russian and the Iranian revolutions and considered the immigration to the West of hundreds of former Iranian officials to be an exceptional opportunity to collect and preserve valuable historical data.

Oral History and the Construction of Multiple and Conflicting Histories

The transformation of oral history that I want to talk about today was, of course, part of a broader, more general transformation of historical studies: what has come to be called the “linguistic turn” or the “historical turn” or the “cultural turn”.