Oral History of Public Housing
My first job out of college was to be "Resident Initiatives Coordinator" in a public housing development near Boston. The plan was, I would interview as many people of the 616 families who lived there as I could, find out what kind of programming and services they would find most helpful, and then make that programming and those services happen. That's a big undertaking for a 21-year-old, but I was naive and didn't understand the bureaucratic impasses and catch-22s people in the neighborhood were navigating, such as the confusing system by which childcare vouchers were dolled out according…
Iraq History Project
The Iraq History Project is one of the largest independent human rights data collection and analysis projects in the world. The IHP has gathered over 7,000 testimonies from throughout Iraq which have been entered into a secure, searchable database. The project is managed by the International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University College of Law in Chicago and run by an all-Iraqi in-country staff.
Dave Eggers and Oral History
Novelist Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What), publisher of McSweeney's, and founder of 826NYC, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn that supports students in developing their writing skills, is an oral history buff. In this interview in Mother Jones magazine, Eggers talks about Studs Terkel and Voice of Witness, a non-profit book series that uses oral histories to bring to light contemporary social injustices such as the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the lives of undocumented workers in the US.
Archie Green
Folklorist and musicologist Archie Green (b. 1917), who established the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, has died. Raised by a socialist father, Green worked in the San Francisco shipyards during WWII and both experiences inspired his lifelong love of labor history. He influenced countless oral historians and the American Folklife Center houses the Veterans History Project and StoryCorps collections among much much more. He also wrote Tin Men, a book documenting folk art robot-like figures crafted out of found metal.
Batters Up
Forever Blue author Michael D'Antonio was on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC yesterday.
Open Forum: Dodgers
This Saturday, March 21, 1 - 3 PM BHS is hosting an a program: Walter O'Malley and the Brooklyn Dodgers, A New View a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael D'Antonio and Peter O'Malley, moderated by Richard Sandomir, Sports Broadcasting Reporter for the New York Times, followed by a Q&A session, on the occasion of the launch of a new book Forever Blue. This program has sparked lots of press and community interest. BHS is providing this open forum for discussion: we invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section below. This blog forum will be open…
Storyscape
Last Friday, Storyscape launched their third issue with a night of readings and performance here at BHS, it was great. As editor Anne Hays described, Storyscape is a different kind of literary journal since it's not about Fiction or Poetry or Prose, it's about Stories, and stories can be true, untrue, part true and part fiction, told through photographs, drawings, audio pieces such as Ken Cormier's Sounds of Lunch - so good!
Kids Workshops
Last weekend, the Center for Architecture Foundation’s Family Day and BHS hosted a workshop for kids about building the Brooklyn Bridge and lots of fun was had by all. Which got us thinking... Parents, teachers, babysitters, mentors and friends of young people: We'd love to hear your ideas for future Kids Workshops. Are mornings or afternoons better? What age group has the greatest need? What would your kids be into? Let us know! Photos by Catherine Teegarden
Elders Share the Arts
I just went to a wonderful performance presented by Elders Share the Arts: Talkin' Brooklyn - A Story Circle Showcase. Story Circle has been partnering with neighborhood branches of the Brooklyn Public Library and local senior centers for six years, inviting elders to get together to share memories and reflect together on their long and unique lives. For this showcase, eight storytellers read from a script made up of multiple narrators' stories which echoed, overlapped, and brought to life Brooklyn childhoods. They told about sing-a-longs in neighborhood movie theaters and street games: "…
North Brooklyn Story Project
Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (NAG), a community organization that has been serving North Brooklyn since 1994, is starting a project called the North Brooklyn Story Project and their first meeting is tonight at 7pm at 101 Kent Avenue at North 8th Street in Williamsburg. This is such a wonderful idea, it's an oral historian's fantasy that everyone everywhere will start recording everybody else everywhere! If you live in North Brooklyn, get involved, and if you live in another part of Brooklyn think about starting your own local Story Project. And if you would like to learn more about…
Brooklyn Barbados Africa
I can't wait to read Brooklyn-born novelist and MacArthur fellow Paule Marshall's new memoir Triangular Road. In our Listening to Women seminar, we will be discussing the differences between oral histories, autobiographies, and memoirs - I'm curious what people think.
Brooklyn Born
We're enjoying this blog today:
Brooklyn Born: Views of a Born and Bred Brooklynite
And the New York Times' Brooklyn blogging foray based in Fort Greene/Clinton Hill:
The Local
And photos of Brooklyn covered in snow:
Brooklyn's New Culinary Movement
This time the New York Times got it right about Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Kitchen is a dreamy store, the owners Taylor and Harry are wonderful, and it's a great place to take classes like How to Make Kombucha. Plus, it's good to read about the growing successes of mom & pop operations and not just their closings, like Jimmy Prince's Major Prime Meat Market on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island which opened in 1934 and is closing at the end of the month. In honor of Jimmy Prince, shop local this weekend and come see our exhibit Counter/Culture: The Disappearing Face of Brooklyn's Storefronts!…
Women Veterans
Here's more information about this event next week: Women Veterans: Citizen-Soldiers in Changing Times Thursday, March 5, 6:30 – 8:30 PM *This BHS event is being held around the corner from BHS at the Rotunda Gallery, 33 Clinton Street* Women veterans who served in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan discuss their military experiences and the expanding role of women in U.S. Armed Forces. Presented in conjunction with the Brooklyn Historical Society exhibit In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn’s Vietnam Veterans Featuring: Joan Furey, author with Lynda Van Devanter of Visions of War, Dreams of…
FUREE Film Premiere
Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), a Brooklyn-based, multi-racial organization announce the premiere screening of the documentary Some Place Like Home: The Fight Against Gentrification in Downtown Brooklyn this coming December - tickets are on sale now. Check out the trailer, what do you think?
Grunge Is Dead
Following in the footsteps of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, authors of Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk, comes Greg Prato's Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music. I'm excited to see how this book talks about Riot Grrrl. And I'm always interested in this small but powerful distinction: THE Oral History vs. AN Oral History, hmm... is there a difference?
Brooklyn Women
Yesterday, I was getting some ducks in order for the Brooklyn Navy Yard Oral History Project we're working on and browsing through some audio recordings to double check dates of birth and I happened to listen to two striking moments. In one, a woman who grew up in Red Hook in the 1920s and 1930s breaks into tears when she talks about having to end her schooling and go to work. She was a proud honors student but she didn''t finish high school. In the second, a woman who worked as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII talks about how she would have loved to continue her career as a…
America I AM
America I AM: The African American Imprint is currently on view at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. I heard about it on NY1 yesterday where they quoted the exhibition's press release: An interactive component of the exhibition will allow visitors to leave their own video “imprints,” and this collection will grow throughout the life of the exhibit to become the largest recorded oral history project in U.S. history. And that got me thinking about the meaning of oral history. Recording the impressions of museum visitors certainly creates an excellent video document that future…
Federal Writers' Project
Oh wow, this is a treasure: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 - 1940.* There are 417 stories in the New York City collection. In one titled Brooklyn Streets the worker (that's how the WPA writers were cited) William Wood describes The Hundski Pickers he heard many tell about: The Hundski Pickers were a strange occupational group whose scattered membership plied their business in Brooklyn during the early years of the present century. Their calling was definitely unconnected with the harvest fields; nor was it related with the garnering of some strange genus of flora. In…
New Oral Histories
Islam, Women and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan by Nyla Ali Khan I have chosen to deploy oral evidence in my book, which has allowed me to approach events, notions, and literatures about which there was meager evidence from other sources. The use of oral history has empowered my interviewees/correspondents, people of Jammu and Kashmir, in significant ways, bringing acknowledgment of hitherto disregarded opinions and experiences. Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art by Debra Blake Since the 1980s Chicana writers including…