Editor’s Introduction

In this first issue of 2015, we at the Oral History Review are delighted to publish another set of stellar articles that invite us to ask different questions of our sources and consider insights from different perspectives. This issue is also compelling as the articles use oral history not only to interrogate the past but also to contemplate contemporary events in the United States and around the world. War and its aftermath is certainly a reality of life in the twenty-first century, and two articles address larger questions of survival, interrogating what that means for veterans and civilians alike. We begin the issue with Alistair Thomson’s “Anzac Memories Revisited,” an article in which Thomson returns to interviews he conducted 30 years ago with an Australian World War One veteran. This insightful article, which draws on these interviews in light of new questions and interpretations since the publication of Thomson’s book Anzac Memories, foregrounds questions of individual and collective memory of war and postwar life, especially trauma and its aftermath.

In “(Re)Placing the Past,” Tim Cole explores how geographical space and place in Holocaust survivors’ oral histories. In doing so, he moves beyond obvious ways that narrators recount events through where they physically were in any particular point in time; instead, he suggests that memory allows narrators to employ “strategies of memory” that allow them to navigate the retelling of painful and difficult events in their lives, especially around separation from family and physical or mental violence.

Strategic memory is not limited, of course, to wartime survivors. Jennifer Helgren interrogates oral history narratives of a multiracial group of women who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. How women construct nostalgic recollections of a “very innocent time” when girls participated in single-sex organizations and grew up in more insular communities illuminates gendered notions of safety and respectability, concepts the women in Helgren’s study worked hard to maintain in their lives. What they reveal about their lives as sheltered girls offers nuanced analysis about safety and crime in postwar America, a topic we see repeated in the news with respect to sexual and physical violence against women in the United States and around the world.

Ruth Carbonette Yow turns our attention to football culture as the site for battles over racial integration in a Georgia town in the 1960s. A winning football team in 1967 provides the foundation for a dominant narrative of racial harmony, but Yow pushes beyond this narrative to explore black student activism and discord as well as reconciliation. Student protest, Yow argues, exposes a politics of racial justice that needs to be elevated in order to understand not only integration and desegregation in the past but also racial harmony and discord in contemporary school communities.

The final article in this issue is Alexander Freund’s interrogation of oral history in a neoliberal age. Freund turns his attention to the wildly popular National Public Radio’s StoryCorps excerpts, exploring how autobiographical storytelling in this format does reinforce a sense of democratization of oral history, but does so at the price of “competitive individualism,” which, Freund argues, depoliticizes public discourse. He calls for oral historians to investigate storytelling as a historically situated phenomenon and its relationship to oral history methodology, ethics, and political aims – a project that has ramifications not only for StoryCorps and NPR, but also for oral history practitioners in and beyond the academy.

It certainly takes a village of authors, reviewers, and editors to make any journal successful. This issue, the first under my editorship, also features twenty-one book reviews and six media/nonprint reviews, carefully commissioned and edited by David Caruso and Jennifer Cramer, respectively. Their tasks are often thankless, but I am honored to work with them to create a multifaceted journal. I am especially thankful for Elinor Mazé, our copy and production editor, who handles every query with tact and grace. When I had a family emergency in December, just as this issue was starting to go to press, Troy Reeves stepped beyond his role as managing editor and handled all of the production for this issue. For his...