Editor’s Introduction

In the current issue of the Oral History Review (OHR), the editorial team features work that extends our editorial mission in two key areas—the internationalization of the journal and our multimedia initiative. It also marks a bittersweet transition for us, as we bid farewell to book review editor John Wolford and welcome David Caruso to the position.

The international subjects featured in this issue range from Claire Payton’s article on the spiritual dimensions of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, to Miguel Cardina’s piece on the arrest and torture of lef-wing militants during the revolutionary period of the 1960s and 1970s in Portugal, and Anika Walke’s contribution on the Nazi genocide as it was experienced and remembered by the first generation of Soviet Jews. The article section of this issue is rounded out by a fourth piece that bridges domestic and international perspectives: Steven Rosales’s article on masculinity among Chicanos who served in the Vietnam War. All four authors also describe the projects that generated the oral history interviews under discussion and thus offer insights into the intersubjective nature of the interpretations they present.

This issue also features the second annual pedagogy section of the OHR, edited by Glenn Whitman, with two articles. Ken Woodard describes and assesses his work with high school students as they produced oral history–based audio and video documentaries in US History courses. He finds both potential and pitfalls: the digital revolution challenges students to process their research and present their work in ways that appeal to accessible and connected audiences, yet these students, while being “digital natives,” must still be trained in basic production values and, even more importantly, in the labor-intensive research and preparation techniques of good oral history. Woodard’s piece includes hyperlinks to three samples of these student-produced projects. Elizabeth Stone offers a description and analysis of using oral histories in a literature course. Her students create and treat their oral histories as literary texts, and Stone’s course design valorizes their projects by including some of them in the syllabus for the course. Additionally, Stone’s article contains several appendices with assignments and student work from the course.

The articles by Ken Woodard and Claire Payton also extend the OHR’s effort to bring digital content to the journal. The video documentaries in Woodard’s piece mark the arrival of video content within the OHR’s broader multimedia initiative, while Payton’s article allows us to feature excerpts from multilingual oral histories as they are currently being indexed and transcribed with the University of Kentucky Libraries’ OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer). Moreover, online access to these interviews, provided by hyperlinks at the end of Payton’s article, marks an integration of primary sources into the scholarship we publish, made possible by the increasing ease of accessing oral histories in the digital age. These two articles purposefully extend the conversation that we undertook in issue 40.1, the special issue devoted to oral history in the digital age, about the impact of the digital turn in our field. In this regard, media and non-print review editor, Jennifer Abraham Cramer, brings us a collectively authored review of the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) website. A coda to this issue, written by Troy Reeves, managing editor, and Caitlin Tyler-Richards, editorial assistant, rounds out our discussion on this topic. Its theme and title—“Reading Beyond the Pages of the OHR”—encourage readers to engage more actively not only with the OHR’s digital content but also with the journal’s social media initiative. Podcasts, blogs entries, and online postings in various forms allow for more nimble, timely, and ongoing engagement with the ideas presented on the pages of the OHR. And, once again, we encourage readers to gravitate online to fully “read” the OHR. The editorial team reminds readers that issue 39.2 provided “Instructions for Multimedia Reading of the OHR.”

Last, but far from least, this editor’s introduction ends with a farewell and a welcome. This is John Wolford’s last issue as book review editor, and he is going out in...