Sohrab, the All Alone

Sohrab Sepehri, one of Iran's most prominent poets in the contemporary era, spent at least two or three months a year in his birthplace, Kashan, at Café Sharbati. Seifollah Abbasi Moqaddam was a waiter who worked in the café when Sohrab spent his days in his hangout in the west-central city in the 60s. During his stay, Seifollah catered for Sohrab and enjoyed his company. Sohrab even did him a painting which Seifollah has preserved over the years. What follows is an interview with Seifollah, now a diner owner in Kashan, about those days. His recollections are valuable so far as they are pure and unfiltered, and reflect Sohrab's personality and life as a poet and a painter who lived alone and no one knew him in the city.

Naser Palangi’s Interview with Mehr

I made a promise to combatants of martyr JahanAra to paint their portrait/I decided to stay and picture the war “You are crazy! The city is full of mines, it is nothing but ruins, it is dangerous”; these are what the Governor of Khoramshahr told the young painter but he returned to Khormashahr with importunity to fulfill his promise to the combatants and paint their image on the wall of Khormashahr’s mosque. Mehr News Agency – Culture and Art Group: groves, sultry of south, bomb explosion and firing mortars ….design….picture….barrage… “23 year old young man had two choices, he could either return or to stay and he stayed” says the painter.

Interview with Commander Golali Babaei

Golali Babaei speaks about memory writing of war. "Memories of the Sacred Defense days are useful for the betterment of the society and fight against social issues, and can be used to show people how to live a better life." Every year Iran celebrates September 22-29 as the Sacred Defense Week which begins with the anniversary of Iraqi forces attacking Iran borders on September 22 1980 and ends with the anniversary of braking the seize of Abadan on September 29 1982. The history of the 8-year Iraq-imposed war on Iran is full of analyses, interpretations, memories and stories which could be heard from everyone witnessed the crisis. However, when heard from war experts and military commanders of that era, the history of the war and the way things happened are much more precise and well-founded.

Q&A with oral historian Sara Wood

The stories and history surrounding Southern food are just as colorful and diverse as the food itself. The Southern Foodways Alliance collects stories from across the region and celebrates the contributions of countless classes, races and ethnicities on Southern cuisine. Based in Wilmington, N.C., Sara Wood works as an oral historian with the SFA. The Daily Tar Heel sat down with Wood to find out more about her research and what she has learned from working in the South.

Good Will Hunting: An Oral History

Fifteen years after the release of the movie that made them stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—along with the rest of the cast and crew—reflect in their own words on how a long-shot film by two unknowns became one of Hollywood's biggest success stories.

On the crucial examination of a phenomenon

As one of the most striking features of journalism, reports on war have always been appealing to readers. In the interview that follow, Hedayatollah Behboudi, a senior journalist of war, maintains that it is a necessity for the genre to be scrutinized.

Jack Welch: An Oral History

Since he retired as chief executive of General Electric (GE) in 2001, after two decades in the job, Jack Welch’s legacy has been the subject of heated debate. Under Welch, the company’s market value grew from $14 billion to $410 billion, and revenue multiplied fivefold to $130 billion. Yet his brutal management style was legendary. Each year he famously ranked employees and fired the bottom 10 percent. As retirement neared, he pitted three top executives against each other in a bake-off to determine who would be his successor. “You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system,” Welch told Diane Brady in an interview for this story.

Discussing the Historiography of the Revolution with Hedāyatollah Behbūdi

Not long ago, in one of the special episodes on history in the TV show Hezār-o Yek Shab aired during the days commemorating the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Hedāyatollah Behbūdi and Ja`far Golshan, as experts, discussed the historiography of the Islamic Revolution. Their discussion might more or less be regarded as a report on the status quo of the historiography of the Revolution. From the perspective of oral history, reading the said discussion had its merits; therefore, the website of the Iranian Oral History took it upon itself to transcribe the discussion. It should here be noted that once transcribed, the result was modified by Mr. Behbūdi before it was published on the website.

Steve Jobs interview: One-on-one in 1995

In April of 1995, Steve Jobs, then head of NeXT Computer, was interviewed by the Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation, producers of the Computerworld Honors Awards Program, as part of an Oral History project. The wide-ranging interview was conducted by Daniel Morrow, executive director of the awards program.

The Art of Memories

Man's life flows in memories and his moments are tied with sweet and bitter times of the past; the past mingles with the present and the future and that is where recording memories would help. Oblivion that is a part of human nature would give in to the inscription of memories, and how sublime and elegant are the memories that record sacrifice and virtue!