Editor’s Introduction

With this issue of the Oral History Review, the journal’s editors and authors celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Oral History Association. We greatly appreciate not only the OHA’s steadfast and generous support of the Review but also all the organization has done to foster the practice of oral history and nurture its practitioners through five decades. We look forward to many more inspiring and productive years of association with the OHA.

I owe heartfelt thanks to Teresa Barnett for her diligent leadership and careful editing as she brought together the special OHA anniversary section of this issue. Teresa’s introduction describes the creative and inspiring process through which the special section took shape and invites readers to consider thoughtfully the authors’ provocative ideas—fresh ways of understanding the genesis, evolution, and direction of our discipline—which comprise the section.

In addition to the anniversary reflections, this issue includes a refreshingly original piece by Lori Garner, in which she delves into the vivid metaphors and dramatic myths of medieval tales to find the wellsprings of personal and cultural meaning making in the modern remembrances which comprise oral history. In “Stories Which I Know to be True: Oral Tradition, Oral History, and Voices from the Past,” Garner traces similarities of expressive mode between French and Anglo-Saxon tellings of the story of Beowulf and oral histories from a mid-twentieth-century sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee.

The second article in this issue’s main section is Alistair Thomson’s piece describing the tools and processes he and his colleagues are using to enhance accessibility to the recordings which comprise the Australian Generations Oral History Project. In “Digital Aural History: An Australian Case Study,” Thomson joins the authors of this issue’s pedagogy section, Abigail Perkiss and Dan Royles, as well as Mary Larson, author of “‘The Medium Is the Message’: Oral History, Media, and Mediation” in the anniversary section, in corroborating the crucial role of archival practice—and particularly, in our times, digital archiving—in shaping oral history practice.

In the Review’s annual section on oral history pedagogy, Perkiss and Royles have contributed complementary essays about a highly successful project conducted by students at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. In “Staring Out to Sea and the Transformative Power of Oral History for Undergraduate Interviewers,” Perkiss details how her students worked with exemplary dedication to interview people who survived Hurricane Sandy and to create a carefully contextualized and readily accessible online archive of their interviews. Royles describes how students used the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer to organize, index, and present their project. The student project undertaken by Perkiss and Royles perfectly illustrates the power of sensitively and intelligently conceived oral history practice to engage students not only with the study of history but with a wide variety of analytical and creative tools to understand themselves and their world.

Once again, our review editors, Dave Caruso for books, Jennifer Cramer for media, have gathered a thought-provoking collection of reviews—of books, Web sites, and a museum exhibit—all of which demonstrate the fascinating variety of ways in which oral history, in one form or another, enriches our understanding of the past and present and helps shape our notions of what the future might or should be. Taken together, the works reviewed in this issue illuminate in many ways the reflective themes of the issue’s three sections. For example, among the reviewed books, several demonstrate the power of the personal voice and counternarrative to foster more nuanced, or even completely revised, notions of the meaning of past or presently unfolding events. Tamar Carroll’s Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism, reviewed by Gopika Krishna, reminds readers of the role of grassroots activists in shaping the nationwide response to the AIDS epidemic, and Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan, by David Cunningham, reviewed by David Cline, presents personal accounts which deepen our understanding of how North Carolina came to be at once the “poster child of the New South,” as Cline puts it, as well the regional...