Editor’s Introduction

“All human beings are practicing historians,” wrote the late women’s historian Gerda Lerner. “We live our lives; we tell our stories. It is as natural as breathing.”¹ But as I write this editor’s introduction, I am aware that telling our stories can often be a luxury. I woke this morning, June 18, 2015, to finish this piece, only to learn that nine black congregants at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were murdered while attending Wednesday night worship service. This news comes on the heels of far too many cases of police brutality, from Chicago to Baltimore to Ferguson. Haitians are currently being exiled from the Dominican Republic. Nepal experienced a terrible earthquake in April, leaving over eight thousand people dead, three times as many people injured, and even more without homes or access to basic services. Reproductive rights and same-sex marriage are cultural battlegrounds in the United States and around the world. Transracial has become a word that people are discussing—quite contentiously—with reference to Rachel Dolezal’s self-identification as African American, shifting the definition of the word away from adoptive families comprised of parents and children of different races. People are unable to breathe long enough to tell their stories.

That’s why oral history matters. This issue begins with Susan Blackbeard’s exploration of issues related to dispossession and land claim in the Kat River Settlement in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Her study, grounded in interviews with a descendant of a mixed-race settler after the Kat River Rebellion of 1851–52, turns our attention to the benefits of a physical “interview-journey” as a lens into understanding resistance from the perspective of those who have been forcibly removed from and denied legal claims to ancestral land. The story of state-based violence continues in Jessica Taylor’s article on civil rights, commemoration, and historical memory in Mississippi. She makes a convincing case for the value of oral historians as preservationists, contributing to the public understanding of the value of black-owned homes, businesses, and buildings that once were targets of white violence. The civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta, as well as ongoing economic and political segregation, provide the setting for her work, but it speaks alongside Blackbeard’s to consider the voices of the dispossessed as they actively resist being elided from the historical record.

Mark and Christine Robbins also explore the importance of space and landscape to understand the lived experiences and historical memory of the New Deal-era Robstown Migrant Labor Camp in South Texas. In this article, the Robbinses apply a “geobiographical” approach that focuses on individuals’ experiences with this area as it was turned from a labor camp into a hurricane refuge, then a housing project, and then a county park. This approach allows them to examine spatial relations in people’s public memories. Collective memory is also the focus of Bethan Coupland’s article, which traces the nuances of ex-miners’ narratives at Big Pit Coal Mining Museum in South Wales. What group interviews tell us about collective memory is a powerful topic within the field of oral history, and Coupland delves into the complexity of remembering what happens in a particular space in both individual and collective ways.

In the short-form article that follows next, noted oral historian Linda Shopes argues—even insists—that we cannot end our work as oral historians with the recorded interview. Instead, we must move it out of the archive and into the public sphere. Here she is talking about publication, but she makes a bigger point about listening to narrators and engaging openly with ethical considerations around our own voices as authors and translators.

Her article connects powerfully with the pedagogy section, which in this issue features two articles. The first, by Aishwarya Gautam, Janet Morford, and Sarah Joy Yockey, discusses student-produced radio documentaries at University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. In this intensive oral history project, students are taught not only about the “nuts and bolts” of oral history but also its real-world application and authentic engagement with...