Brooklyn College Library LibGuides Home: Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities 2023-24: Oral History Events During Hess Week: April 2-3, 2024

Oral History Events During Hess Week: April 2-3, 2024

Our History, Our Voices: Oral History to Change the World
Tuesday April 2, 2024
11:00 AM to 12:30 PM
Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library

Co-sponsored by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida

This panel takes inspiration from Paul Ortiz’s work as President of the Oral History Association and Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Participants will explore the multiple public uses of oral history.

Zaheer Ali, Executive Director of the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice at the Lawrenceville School
Paul Ortiz, Professor of History and Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida; Robert L. Hess Scholar 2023-24
Naomi Schiller, Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College
Amy Starecheski, Director of the Oral History Master’s Program at Columbia University

Moderator: Phil Napoli, Professor of History and Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Brooklyn College

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Bearing Witness and Taking Action in an Age of Rising Fascism: Oral History in the Field and in the Classroom
Wednesday April 3, 2024
9:30 AM to 10:45 AM
Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library

Co-sponsored by the Brooklyn College Center for Teaching and Learning and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida

Professor Ortiz will deliver a talk drawing on his personal experiences as an oral historian.

Paul Ortiz, Professor of History and Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida; Robert L. Hess Scholar 2023-24

Oral History Books and Resources by and about Hess Week Speakers

Oral History, Democracy, and the Power of Memory by Paul Ortiz
in African American Studies: 50 Years at the University of Florida, ed., Jacob Gordon and Paul Ortiz (2021)

Pathways in Oral History: Paul Ortiz
in US Latina & Latino Oral History Journal, 2022-10, Volume 6, p.95-103

Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle by Paul Ortiz
in Alabama Review, 2002, Volume 55 (3), p. 211

Oral History of the Black Struggle: The Pursuit of Truth in the Delta by Paul Ortiz
in Against the Current, 2020-01, Volume 34 (6), p.23-26

Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida

Challenging Racism Series
The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida (2022-23)

Muslims in Brooklyn Project by Zaheer Ali

American Muslims: A History Revealed Storytelling Initiative by Zaheer Ali

Disruptive Engagement by Naomi Schiller and Vanessa Thill

V eteran's Oral History Project by Philip Napoli

Center for Brooklyn History's Oral History Portal

Remembering Jim Crow by William H. Chafe (Editor, Preface by); Raymond Gavins (Editor); Robert Korstad (Editor)
Call Number: E185.61 .R4 2001
Publication Date: 2014
This "viscerally powerful compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era" won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher's Weekly, starred review). Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Project at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation. Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism--building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.
Bringing It All Back Home by Philip F. Napoli
Publication Date: 2013
A collection of heartrending oral histories that topples assumptions about the people who served in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a defining event for a generation of Americans. But for years, misguided and sometimes demeaning cliches about its veterans have proliferated widely. Philip F. Napoli's Bringing It All Back Home strips away the myths and reveals the complex individuals who served in Southeast Asia. Napoli was one of the chief researchers for Tom Brokaw'sThe Greatest Generation, and in the spirit of that enterprise, his oral histories recast our understanding of a war and its legacy. Napoli introduces a remarkable group of young New Yorkers who went abroad with high hopes only to find a bewildering conflict. We meet a nurse who staged a hunger strike to promote peace while working at a field hospital; a paratrooper whose experiences on the battlefield left him with emotional scars that led to violence and homelessness; a black soldier who achieved an unexpected camaraderie with his fellow servicemen in racially tense times; and a university administrator who helped to create New York City's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some of Napoli's soldiers became active opponents of the war; others did not. But all returned with a powerful urge to understand the death and destruction they had seen. Overcoming adversity, a great many would go on to lead ambitious lives of public service. Tracing their journeys from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to the banks of the Mekong, and back to the most glamorous corporations and meanest homeless shelters of New York City, Napoli reveals the variety and surprising vibrancy of the ex-soldiers' experiences. "For almost everyone the time in Vietnam was the most exciting and the most alive time of your life," one veteran recalls. He adds: "I still have this little trick . . . When I lie down and go to sleep, if there's something bothering me, I say, 'You're warm, you're dry, and there is no one shooting at you.'"
Ours to Lose by Amy Starecheski
Publication Date: 2016
Though New York's Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict--an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and '80s Manhattan. Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.
Say It Forward by Cliff Mayotte (Editor); Claire Keifer (Editor)
Publication Date: 2018
Oral history is a universal form of storytelling. For many years, Voice of Witness has shared powerful stories of people impacted by injustice with a broad audience of readers. Say It Forward extends this work, offering a DIY guide for social justice storytelling that outlines the critical methodology at the core of Voice of Witness's evocative oral history collections. Field reports candidly detail how to harness the power of personal narrative to expose larger issues of inequality. Cliff Mayotte is the education program director with Voice of Witness. He previously edited The Power of the Story: The Voice of Witness Teachers Guide to Oral History. Claire Kiefer is the author of Bear Witness. She was a Voice of Witness curriculum specialist and currently works at the Georgia Capital Defender.

Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice by Amy Starecheski
in The Oral History Review, Volume 41, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 2014), pp. 187-216

South Bronx Soundwalks as Embodied Archiving Practice by Amy Starecheski
in Oral History, Volume 48, No. 2 (Autumn 2020), pp. 102-112

99 Percent Invisible Podcast with Amy Starecheski

Additional Resources

From "Best" to Situated and Relational: Notes Toward a Decolonizing Praxis
by Crystal Mun-hye Baik
in The Oral History Review (2022)

Allan Nevins is Not My Grandfather: The Roots of Radical Oral History Practice in the United States by Daniel R. Kerr
in The Oral History Review, Volume 43, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 2016), pp. 367-391

Oral History Association Principles and Best Practices

Brooklyn College Listening Project

The Oral History Review

Library &
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Library & Academic IT

Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities 2023-24: Oral History Events During Hess Week: April 2-3, 2024

Oral History Events During Hess Week: April 2-3, 2024

Oral History Books and Resources by and about Hess Week Speakers

Additional Resources