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Blogs, Reviews, and Reports
Writing by Oral History Centre Staff and Members.
Religion, Workers, and Oral History: A Review
Review: My father often took me to the factory with him when I was a small boy. Dad was the foreman of the finishing room in a medium sized textile factory in Galt, Ontario. The company made towels of all sizes and styles to be sold across North America. The...
Sound Advice at the OHA
Event: Engaging audiences with oral history was the theme of this year’s Oral History Association meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sessions on podcasting, audio-walks, and interactive exhibits were well represented as ways to present research. The OHA podcasting...
Oral History and Impostors: What to do?
Blog: The first time I read about an impostor who had fooled an oral historian was Bruce Jackson’s “The Perfect Informant,” originally published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1990. In this account, Jackson describes how he was slowly taken in by the...
Disappearing Sounds
Blog: It is easy to forget that oral history practices developed differently in different countries. The U.S. model – or, more precisely, the model developed by Allan Nevins, Louis Starr, and Elizabeth Mason at Columbia University in the 1950s and 1960s – was...
Final Offer Selection in Manitoba
Blog: While it is common for some to view the labour movement as a monolith, in practice this is rarely the case. One of the more pronounced examples of the splits that can happen within the labour movement occurred when the 1980's NDP government put forward Final...
Canadians Do Oral History?
Blog: Oral historians in the English-speaking world have been rewarded with a number of excellent compendiums over the past few decades, including an anthology, a reader, and two handbooks. Yet, to the international readership of these introductory essay collections,...
Oral History and the Common Good
Blog: In my last blog post, I wrote about the Oral History Centre’s motto of “democratizing history.” Today, I continue this idea by asking how the notion of the Common Good can help us understand oral history’s democratizing potential. The phrase “Common Good” has a...
Democratizing History: The Role of Oral History
Blog: “Democratizing history” is the motto of the University of Winnipeg Oral History Centre. What do we mean? History and democracy are two big ideas that have shaped the modern world. We often see them as static institutions or abstract concepts, but we can also...
Famed Italian historian Alessandro Portelli discusses Nazi massacre of 335 civilians in Rome
Blog: Originally published in THE JEWISH POST & NEWS, 21, Wednesday, November 11, 2015. On March 24, 1944, Nazi occupation forces in Rome killed 335 unarmed civilians, some of whom were Jews, in retaliation for a partisan attack in which 32 Nazis were...
Price on Labour: Uncovering Manitoba’s Labour Movement
Blog: On March 29th 1943, workers at Canada Packers in Winnipeg launched a sit down strike over the suspension of one of their co-workers. This spontaneous direct action by Canada Packers Workers was one example pf action taken by packing house workers across Canada...
Reports from the Annual Meeting of the Oral History Association; Implementing OHMS: Multi-Institutional Perspectives
Blog: This article details the OHMS system currently being developed out of the University of Kentucky's Louie B Nunn Centre for Oral History, directed by Doug Boyd. Over the next few months and into the new year, the Oral History Centre is seeking to integrate OHMS...
Oral History Association Annual Conference: Oral History at the Grassroots Level
Blog: Members of the OHC attended the OHA Annual Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. OHC researcher Scott Price presented his project ‘Stand Our Ground’: Life Story Interviews of UFCW Local 832 at the Grassroots Oral History Panel chaired by Michael Gordon (University of...