“So oral history is interviewing.” I get this a lot from people who are trying to understand what I do for a living. Yes, the interview is the primary way in which we gather our historical data, our stories. When people think of interviews in general, however, they might think of the police interrogation, the oral examination in schools, the journalist’s scoop, even an anthropologist’s study of a community, amongst other examples. Near the end of his life, philosopher Michel Foucault was hoping to do a large research project on the interview and the examination as sites of power relations. He could not have been more astute. In each of the examples above, control rests almost completely with the interviewer. The interviewers extract information from the narrator for their own purposes, often without consideration of the interests of the narrator, and sometimes directly against their interests. Sometimes narrators are allowed to see the resulting work; often they are not consulted.
By contrast, oral history as a disciplinary academic practice and as a social movement begins and ends with the problem of power. It’s not that we can get rid of power; power is interwoven through our relationships. Oral history methods acknowledge power relations as a problem to be managed, helping to ensure that the narrators tell the stories they want to tell. We begin with a process of informed consent, so that narrators know what to expect from beginning to end, and that they have the power to withdraw from the work at any moment, even after the project is finished. We then engage in a period of planning and research. Although a spontaneous, cold interview might seem more authentic, what happens in those cases is that the narrator is often at sea in their memories, their real-time decision-making about how to present themselves, and their anxiety about which stories to tell, in how much detail, and with what words. And then we are right back to the problem of the interviewer controlling the scene. By collaboratively planning in advance, the narrator and interviewer build a bond of trust and a plan around the nature of the storytelling.
And when the interview happens, we can both relax, and that’s where it becomes spontaneous. I call it “planned spontaneity,” with a heavy debt to Miles Davis’ approach to “controlled freedom” in jazz performance. Telling a story is like singing; it is singing. It can be an emotional performance of your deepest truths. I’d be tempted to say that the interviewer is the impresario in this metaphor, arranging things so that the narrator’s story shines. But my ideal role would be to serve as both the room and the audience, to let the narrator hear their own voice reflected from the back of the hall, and to see and sense the audience’s engagement with the performance. Ask any singer, and that’s what they need for a good performance; they need feedback from the audience and to hear their own voices.
That’s why, during the interview, I “read back” what I’m hearing periodically to give real-time feedback. But we also transcribe the interview so that the narrator can review what they have said and decide if that is the final form of the story, making changes as needed. Then we ask them to sign off on the finished product, with some guarantee of access to the narrator and their communities. All of these practices together form a set of protections that maximize the narrator’s power in forming, telling, and preserving stories for the future.
The problem of power might be mitigated by this set of practices, but power is always unfinished business. There is the history of the interview itself, whose reputation for extraction, exploitation, and manipulation is not lost on many communities. There is the university, a site of state, political, and economic power, and the authority to include or exclude that hangs over the interview. Anthropologist Michel Rolph-Trouillot wrote about the ways in which the decision about what gets included in archives is the first and perhaps most important violence done to history. Narrators and interviewers come to the interview within multiple, overlapping sets of power relations, exclusions, and hierarchies that threaten to distort and even block trustful communication.
For the interviewer’s part, there are two basic orientations that help with – but do not solve – these problems. The first is empathy. I have interviewed a lot of powerful people, people who might seem from a distance invulnerable, privileged, at ease. I hate to sound obvious, but everyone has experienced exclusion, denigration, and trauma of some kind in their lives, often of many kinds. Sometimes exclusion is a source of pride; but it is most often a source of pain. I have a lot of power and privilege, but I can tap into experiences of the exercise of arbitrary authority, exclusions, bullying, violence and trauma in order to attempt to connect to those who have experienced far greater violence, who have lived lifetimes inside social structures of exclusion and trauma. But if we amplify voices of the excluded, we have to understand that connecting and collecting can too easily end up as claiming and taking.
Empathy is only one part of it. That assumption of some kind of access to another’s experience is another problem of power and privilege. Interviewers also have to begin with the assumption that vast oceans of human experience elude them. Research can help, but a fundamental orientation of humility and respect is required to establish a bond of trust with a narrator. Is there some core of human experience that we all share? Of course. But history shunts us all into patterns of human experience that are both radically different and arranged in a long list of intersectional hierarchies of arbitrary value – race, class, gender identity and orientation, citizenship, disability, body politics, and surely more structures which we as a society have yet to recognize, never mind address. All of that comes into play in the interview encounter, and it may determine whether the interview happens at all. A humility before this pageant of exclusion is the necessary companion to empathy.
What I’m presenting here isn’t new. The oral history community has been wrestling with these questions for a long time, especially with its frequently expressed commitment to using oral history to explore those hierarchies of value, to shine a light on and validate the experiences of the excluded and the othered. Although I’m an oral historian, I’m also a historian of science. One of the things I’m interested in is how disciplines define themselves. One of the patterns about knowers in a discipline is that they are sometimes poor interpreters of their own origins and practices. Researchers often have the hardest time seeing the very spot from which they observe. It may be precisely because of their commitment to reflexivity that oral historians may not be able to see, or perhaps hear, these challenges. We check our audio equipment, but sometimes we don’t check how we are listening, or whether we’re able to hear something at all. Our most important listening equipment is between our ears, or maybe inside our chests, and limited by our lived experience and frames of reference. What we need to continually re-examine and affirm is our commitment to empathy, humility, and trust in our work.
Samuel Barondes in 1992 as Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF and Director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute.
Samuel Barondes is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) who, over the course of his exceptional career, helped bridge those two fields as a researcher, author, and builder of interdisciplinary programs. Sam and I video-recorded over eighteen-hours of his life narrative at his home in Sausalito in 2019, which resulted in a rich 390-page transcript including an appendix with photographs of his family, dear friends, and fellow researchers. Parts of Sam’s oral history explore meta-themes in his life, from his memories about researching the molecular biology of memory-formation in our brains, to the human connections and collaborations Sam nurtured while investigating the ways neural synapses make new connections. Throughout, Sam’s oral history reflects his abiding fascination with what makes people tick—at the molecular level in cells and synapses, and metaphorically in people’s hearts and souls.
Samuel Barondes in his laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City in 1969.
In many ways, Sam Barondes’s life reflects a kind of American utopia. Sam was born during the Great Depression in New York City. As the only child to Jewish immigrants who received little formal schooling, Sam was the first in his family to attend college. In the 1950s, he earned an Ivy League education and became a medical doctor before launching his career as a research scientist at some of the world’s most acclaimed institutions. Sam trained in clinical medicine and psychiatry at several Harvard teaching hospitals before becoming a postdoctoral trainee in the early 1960s at the National Institutes of Health. There, Sam was introduced to the new science of molecular biology by University of California alumnus Gordon Tomkins, and Sam participated in Marshall Nirenberg’s Nobel Prize-winning studies that deciphered the genetic code. In his subsequent career, Sam used this biomolecular perspective to make novel discoveries of his own, to enrich our understanding of how human brains work, and to build new institutions to uplift the work of others.
A whimsical portrait of Samuel Barondes commissioned in 1997 by UCSF and painted by his friend Millicent Tomkins, widow of his mentor, Gordon Tomkins.
Along his life journey, Sam found love, experienced tragedy, and found love again, all while fostering deep, life-long friendships with other exceptional researchers, including Sydney Brenner, Francis Crick, Eric Kandel, and other luminaries whom Sam discusses in his oral history. In 1970, Sam moved west with his own family to live along the California coast, first in La Jolla where he raised two daughters, and now in Sausalito, where his stunning home overlooks the San Francisco Bay from an ocean-front property once owned by William Randolph Hearst. Sam spent most of his career at the University of California, first at its San Diego campus (UCSD 1970-86) as a founding Professor of Psychiatry and in the interdepartmental Neuroscience Program. He then moved to its San Francisco campus (UCSF 1986-) where he was Chair of Psychiatry and Director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute before founding the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry as the Jeanne and Sanford Robertson Endowed Chair. Sam also held many editorial and advisory positions including co-founding and serving for ten years as President of the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. His honors include election to the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
David Byrne singing “Here,” the opening song of his Broadway performance “American Utopia.” Photo by Mike Brooks.
During the shelter-in-place orders of 2020, Sam Barondes came to my mind while watching David Byrne’s Broadway performance of American Utopia, as filmed by Spike Lee and streamed into my home. The opening song of American Utopia begins with Bryne holding a plastic model of a brain and singing the song “Here.” While pointing to different sections of the brain, Bryne sings, “Here is a region of abundant detail. Here is a region that is seldom used. … As it passes through your neurons, Like a whisper in the dark, Raise your eyes to one who loves you. It is safe right where you are.” The song continues before concluding with a question: “Here is an area of great confusion. Here is a section that’s extremely precise. And here is an area that needs attention. Here’s the connection with the opposite side … Here is something we call elucidation. Is it the truth? Or merely a description?” At the end of “Here,” Bryne holds the brain aloft like Hamlet contemplating poor Yorick’s skull. Here, in his oral history, Sam Barondes shares his truth—from his own experiences elucidating the molecular-workings of brains, to his work building institutions where his colleagues continue advancing biomolecular psychiatry.
Samuel Barondes (age 2) standing with his father Solomon Barondes and his mother Yetta Barondes in Brooklyn, New York in 1935.
Furthermore, the metaphor of connections and how they evolve was central to both Sam Barondes’s oral history and to David Bryne’s American Utopia performance. Fruitful and long-lasting human connections animate Sam’s story, especially throughout his remarkable scientific career. Similarly, Bryne’s opening monologue in American Utopia begins: “I read that babies brains have hundreds of millions more neural connections than we do as adults and that, as we grow up, we lose these connections.” Bryne continued, “Well, what happens is, we keep the connections that are useful to us. And yes, there’s a process of pruning and elimination, and we get rid of a lot of the others, until the ones that are left define who we are as a person, who we are as people, they define how we perceive the world, and the world appears to make some kind of sense to us.” Here, in his published transcript, Sam shares how connections—both human and neural—helped him make sense of his world.
Samuel Barondes in his laboratory at UCSD in 1975. The stacks of Petri dishes grew slime mold colonies for research on cellular adhesion.
Throughout Sam’s interdisciplinary career in science, he authored over 200 original research articles in leading journals including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Cell, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurochemistry, and Journal of Cell Biology. Among his many publications that Sam and I discussed were his two back-to-back 1962 publications in Science with Marshall Nirenberg, which were associated with Nirenberg’s Nobel Prize-winning research with poly-U to decipher the genetic code. Sam and I also reviewed his many years of research on cell adhesion and sugar-binding proteins, including his discovery of galectins, a class of proteins that bind to specific complex beta-galactosides. Throughout his interviews, Sam spoke about what motivated much of his career, some of which he shared in his June 1990 article in the Journal of Neuroscience, “The Biological Approach to Psychiatry: History and Prospects.” In the clip below, Sam recalls his early notion in 1962 that, “Maybe psychiatry is molecular biology?”
Sam and I also discussed his numerous books written for popular audiences. We spoke about his enjoyable and deeply informative book Molecules and Mental Illness, published by Scientific American Library in 1993 (revised in 1999). We discussed his books Mood Genes: Hunting for Origins of Mania and Depression (1998); Better Than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs (2003); and Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality (2011). In 2014, Sam published a book of light verse that I now read to my young daughter titled Before I Sleep: Poems for Children Who Think. His poem “Brain Dials” appears in the appendix to his oral history. Sam also wrote a substantial poem called “Recapitulation (In Verse)” that he published at the end of Molecules and Mental Illness, and which brilliantly summarizes the entire book. In the clip below, Sam reads aloud a portion of his inventive poem during his final oral history interview.
Samuel Barondes at his home in Sausalito, California, in April 2019, during the course of his oral history.
Here, again, Sam’s oral history reminds me of David Bryne’s American Utopia. Bryne’s final monologue returns to the performance’s theme of connections, both neural and personal. Bryne declares, “Despite all that’s happened, and despite all that’s still happening, I think there’s still possibility.” He concludes, “We’re a work in progress. We’re not fixed. Our brains can change. Maybe those millions of connections in our brains that got pruned and eliminated when we were babies somehow get kind of reestablished. Only now, instead of being in our heads, they’re between us and other people.” Throughout his oral history, Sam Barondes expressed a similar optimism. “I lived in this time of limitless opportunity,” Sam explained. “It’s all connected,” he told me. Later, Sam said, “You become part of a little in-group where you have connections. You learn from everybody.”
“That afternoon, when we came home, the troops were here, and this was martial law. Martial law was imposed on us, the soldiers just controlled everything.”
The Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project is the result of a collaboration between the UC Berkeley Oral History Center and the National Park Service: a series of interviews chronicling the World War II American home front experience. The library’s digital collections hold over 200 interviews pertaining to the project, and the recorded stories cover a wide range of themes, including migration, women’s employment, race relations and civil rights, religion, and wartime life.
Since the focus of this project is those individuals who were not on active military duty during the war, many of the interviewees are women and people from minority backgrounds for whom the war opened up career opportunities, like Elizabeth Lew and Betty Reid Soskin. Many other interviewees grew up during the 1930s and 1940s and recall the war years through the lens of childhood. What drew me to this project though, and what I would like to highlight in particular, is the subset of interviews from the Rosie the Riveter project that center around people who grew up in Hawaii and either witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor or lived through the aftermath, during which the state was placed under martial law.
These interviews are breathtakingly vivid in their accounts of the islands before the war, and the descriptions of life in Hawaii during the war and in the decades following are both insightful and poignantly emotional.
The majority of the interviewees discussed here are Nisei, the second-generation children of people who immigrated to Oahu, Kauai, or Maui to find work and start a family. Several, including Yoshie Seida Yamamoto and Champ Ono, grew up on plantations and recall the diverse environment of neighborhoods populated by Portuguese, Filipino, haole (white), Chinese, Korean, and Japanese families. “To this day, I proudly tell people I’m a plantation girl,” says Gladys Okada, who spent her childhood on the McBryde Sugar Company plantation in Eleele on the island of Kauai.
“Exciting,” Jimmy Lee says of his childhood. “Very happy,” recalls Okada, referring to her home on the McBryde plantation. The narrators of these oral histories bring to life vibrant accounts of their homes in Hawaii prior to the imposition of martial law on the islands.
At the same time, though, tensions between these different groups often ran high. Interracial relationships were frowned upon, if not strictly forbidden; narrators like Yoshie Seida Yamamoto and Fujiko Nonaka recall racial slurs hurled at them by American soldiers in the wake of Pearl Harbor; and several interviews note the segregation of Okinawan immigrants from other mainland Japanese families. Tomi Taba, for example, expresses in her interview frustration at being relegated to the position of second-class citizen on account of her Okinawan heritage, something that her family had always taken pride in. In his interview, Jimmy Lee describes the tumultuous and often violent environment that arose from locals, military, and undercover police living in close proximity in Oahu’s Chinatown. Here Lee discusses being questioned by police about undercover gambling rings as a child:
He says, “Don’t point.” I said, “Yes, up there, up there, up there, up there, all the gambling.” They had one of the biggest raids in Chinatown, for all the gambling joints because of—hopefully, all those guys are dead now, they can’t hear me.
Top row left to right: Akiko Kurokawa, Jimmy Lee, Shizue Takaki, Fujiko Nonaka, Sadi Doi. Bottom row left to right: Taba Tomi, Yoshie Seida Yamamoto, Ono Champ, Robert Lee, Gladys Okawa.
Many children worked part-time on the plantations, harvesting crops like sugarcane and pineapple. In her joint interview with Akiko Kurokawa, Fujiko Nonaka describes how she and the other children on the McBryde plantation would pick kiawe beans and sell them for five cents a bag to earn lunch money. Tomi Taba worked on the pineapple field owned by her adoptive father, weeding and washing clothes for the Filipino workers her parents hired to tend to the land. Robert Lee recalls older workers making “pineapple swipes” while working in the California Packing Corporation’s pineapple fields:
But as soon as they got off the truck, each one would rush over to the pineapple field and pick the largest, ripest, prettiest pineapple they could find, break it off, cut the top off, and reach inside with their sharp knives, and make a soup out of the inside. Then they would put that same thing back on its own same plant; then they would go off and do the harvesting. At the end of the day, that pineapple had sat in the hot sun all day long, you see. So at six p.m., they come, and each of those men would take his pineapple, jump back on the truck, and drink his alcohol all the way back to the camp. Because it had been fermenting all day long.
At the same time, most children attended school. A few, like Gladys Okada and Robert Lee, remained long enough to graduate high school and attend college. In Japanese families, it was common practice for children to attend an hour or two of Japanese school after the standard school day was over. Here Gladys Okada details her daily routine with a friend:
We would have a little snack, like soda crackers and dried shrimp; walk from Eleele to Port Allen; and we’d go to Japanese school, come home, walk all the [way] back, talk story, laughing. We had so much fun.
In terms of recreational activities, interviewees describe a seemingly endless array of games and pastimes. Gladys Okada remembers swimming in the McBryde Sugar Company reservoir and catching medaka (Japanese rice fish) in mayonnaise jars to take home. Champ Ono fondly reminisces about pole fishing, a frequent weekend activity for kids in Puʻunene:
When we were in high school, somebody asked us, “Weren’t you afraid of going in and out?” I said, “Afraid of what?” They said, “Oh, sharks.” We never even thought about those things.
Sadie Doi discusses in her interview the importance of the family’s Philco radio for bringing her community together—neighbors used to gather at her house at night to listen to boxing matches and radio programs like The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger. Others describe their love for the movies, recounting memories of cheap tickets and the variety of films. “I used to go to Japanese movies every Saturday night. I used to like Japanese movies,” Tomi Taba says of movie theaters before the war.
Christian churches or Buddhist temples were also often an important part of family life, and several narrators, including Shizue Takaki and Yoshie Seida Yamamoto, discuss their experiences with religion throughout their lives. Here, Yamamoto talks about converting to Christianity: “Yeah, I was born a Buddhist, so I was a Buddhist until—gee, until war broke out.”
Almost every interviewee remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Tomi Taba, living on Kauai with her in-laws at the time, discusses how she was pregnant with her second son when word first got around:
So I went to see the doctor that day. As we were coming back, I stopped at the service station, which my uncle owned. Then when we stopped over there, my brother-in-law, who was below my husband, came over to the car and said, “You know something? Something awful happened on Oahu.”
Jimmy Lee was around eleven years old at the start of the war, and witnessed the entirety of the attack while doing chores on the family farm.
Well, my chores on December 7 was to feed the pigs. Right over here, maybe about 200 yards from here, that’s where the pigpen was. Feeding the pigs that morning, and wow, all of a sudden, here comes the plane coming overhead really low.
The USS Oklahoma being salvaged after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Photo credit: US Navy.
Robert Lee, then twenty years old, was also living on Oahu at the time and was woken up by the explosions from the harbor. Lee recalls the morning of December 7, 1941:
The Oklahoma, for example, had already turned over. Because before I’d even taken my grandfather and grandmother up to the cave, I had watched the Oklahoma turn right over. That was the first part of it; when I was still looking out my bedroom window, that still was happening. Then even when I was still up there looking, at that same early time, the Arizona exploded in this huge ball of fire.
Lee and his family members were later involved in the rescue efforts, helping the many boats of soldiers being carried to shore. Lee on assisting oil-covered soldiers:
So immediately, we knew what to do. We hooked up several hoses to the water supply there, and we started washing these fellows down. My mother came down with several cakes of what they called Fels-Naptha Soap. The naphtha soap cuts grease.
After the United States declared war against Japan on December 8, 1941, life on the islands quickly changed. Waterfront access was swiftly restricted, blackout drills went into immediate effect, and Japanese schools and Buddhist temples were shut down as priests and teachers were transported to internment camps on the mainland. Jimmy Lee describes life on Oahu under martial law, saying, “That afternoon, when we came home, the troops were here, and this was martial law. Martial law was imposed on us, the soldiers just controlled everything.”
Several interviewees discuss their families’ fear surrounding Japanese items they owned and how many of their parents quickly took action to hide or destroy their possessions. “By evening time, my mother took most of our Japanese things, and she burned it,” Gladys Okada says of December 7, 1941. Yoshie Seida Yamamoto remembers her parents entrusting a family heirloom, a sword, to a neighbor, only to have him refuse to return it after the war. Sadie Doi recalls digging underneath the house to bury her family’s Japanese books and records. “In fact, I think we even buried the phonograph,” she notes.
The Japanese films that Tomi Taba and several others look back on fondly stopped being shown at Hawaiian theaters, swiftly replaced by movies on the war and American patriotism. “We used to say, now, why did they make all the Japanese pilots look so ugly?” says Gladys Okada in reference to American war films.
In his interview, Champ Ono conveys the sense of panic and disorganization that pervaded the first few days of the war. A member of his school’s ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), Ono was quickly drafted, along with many of his classmates, into the Hawaii Territorial Guard. Laughing, Ono recalls the lack of training he received in the Territorial Guard: “Well, they didn’t even tell us how to load the gun.” On his first night as part of the Territorial Guard, he was assigned to patrol the waterfront for invasion:
The first night, I was there on the waterfront. They were supposed to pick us up the next morning. They never came, till almost evening time.
Ono was later dismissed from the Hawaii Territorial Guard on account of his Japanese heritage and went on to join the Varsity Victory Volunteers along with many other Japanese American students at the University of Hawaii.
Military presence on the Hawaiian islands was heightened. Individual families were ordered to build bomb shelters, the windows of houses and buildings were blacked out to prevent light from being visible, and air raid drills were frequently practiced in schools. Beaches were patrolled and monitored by troops in case of invasion, and access to the waterfront was restricted for civilians. Sadie Doi discusses military security measures along the beach on Waimea, stating that to access the water, she had to “crawl through the barbed wire fence, because they had strung barbed wire all over the place.”
Jimmy Lee’s childhood encounter with an armed soldier is a chilling reminder of the reality of martial law in Hawaii:
One morning before curfew time, I brought the cow out from the bushes, so I could take it to the pen so I could milk her. I was met by a soldier. A soldier with a long rifle and a long bayonet sticking at my throat. “What are you doing violating the curfew?”
And yet, despite the omnipresent worry that war was just around the corner, many interviewees look back on this period fondly. Yoshie Seida Yamamoto remembers a local dance held for the members of her community and how, despite the inability for people to obtain good dancing shoes during the war, everyone still showed up and had fun together:
It was a dance. It was during the day. It was on Sunday and it was from twelve to three, I think. The public is invited. So I saw the soldiers coming, all the camp people—everybody was there dancing, having a great time.
Gladys Okada’s memory of being scolded by a teacher for misbehaving during a drill — “Just because you bought three twenty-five stamps doesn’t give you the right to not behave during an air raid” — highlights the reality that the people in these oral histories faced during the 1940s. This story is humorous but nevertheless still tinged by the very real threat of war on the Hawaiian islands. It really drives home the fact that many of the narrators of these oral histories were only children or young adults at the time of this globally tumultuous period and spent many of their formative years growing up in the shadow of a world war.
I barely learned about World War II in school, and what I did learn was focused mainly on the European theater of the war. I’m not like my little sister, a history nut who could probably name every major player involved in the war and what their personal motivations were. I credit my knowledge of the war to one thing: my father loves war documentaries. Even more than that, he loves telling me what he learned from war documentaries. At this point, I’ve seen enough war documentaries to last a lifetime, and, while invaluable as a resource for education and preserving the past, I’ve come to realize that for me these documentaries sometimes seem impersonal. The rich cadence of a narrator’s voice plays over grainy, zoomed-out footage of planes and ships and explosions and smoke, while masterful editing weaves in music — the soundtrack of war. It’s easy to lose the human element of the story within the spectacle.
I visited Pearl Harbor as a child, and what I remember most is the glaringly white color of the USS Arizona Memorial against the bright blue sky and the massive crush of people that seemed endless to a three-year-old. That visit unfortunately didn’t have as great an effect on me as it could have. The glaring white hurt my eyes, the bright blue of the sky meant sweltering heat, and the massive crowd of people so much bigger than me just made me nervous. Yet for some reason, the memory of that day has long remained in my mind.
Working my way through this oral history project has in its own way helped my mind sharpen that indistinct memory of the white and the blue and the rainbow of Hawaiian-shirted tourists into something that fits solidly within my understanding of history. These interviews are the opposite of an impersonal documentary. They plainly capture the experiences and emotions of people who lived through a time in history so much earlier than my own. More than that, these interviews are comprehensive; they document entire lives, thus granting people like you and me intimate insight into how people lived through, and continued to live beyond, such devastating events.
Shannon White
Find these interviews and all our oral histories from the search feature on the Oral History Center home page. You can search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. You can also find projects, including the Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project through the menu on our home page from Oral Histories, then choose Projects.
Shannon White is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying classical languages. They are an undergraduate research apprentice in the Nemea Center under Professor Kim Shelton and a member of the editing staff for the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics. Shannon works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
Related Resources at The Bancroft Library
In addition to these oral histories, The Bancroft Library has a wide range of source materials on Pearl Harbor including: Army reports, photos, fiction, personal accounts, films, and more. From the UC Library Search, click on Advanced Search, select “UC Berkeley special collections and archives” and enter your search terms.
