Tag: OHC Articles

Remembering the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake today with interview excerpts on the quake from our Bay Bridge Oral History Project.

Much has changed–including being much better prepared for the next earthquake–but one thing is the same: the Giants are in the World Series!!

#earthquake #lomaprieta #giants

We are pleased to announce that we will be co-sponsoring an evening public event with the Graduate School of Journalism in support of Voice of Witness’ forthcoming book, Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation.

 

Event: Editor Mateo Hoke in Conversation with Shanna Farrell

Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Time: Reception at 5:30pm, Conversation at 6pm

Location: UC Berkeley, J-School Library in North Gate Hall

Berkeley, California 94720-5860

 

Please contact Shanna Farrell at sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu with any inquiries about the event.

This month on SoundCloud we are featuring clips from our interview with Dorothea Lange. Listen to audio excerpts and read the transcript of our oral history interview Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer.

The full transcript is available online, with an introduction by interviewer Suzanne Riess, and for the first time featuring audio excerpts from the interview, preserved and digitized through our partnership with the California Audiovisual Preservation Project. 

Also, check out the new documentary Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightening.

 

In conjunction with our Indiegogo campaign, we’re having at fundraiser for our West Coast Cocktails: An Oral History project on Tuesday, July 1. Thad Vogler has graciously offered to host us at Bar Agricole.

We’ll be holding a silent auction with items from local businesses like Umami Mart, Omnivore Books on Food, Shrub & Co, and a raffle for bitters-making kits from Oaktown Spice Shop and gift certificates to Trou Normand, Bar Agricole, Bourbon & Branch, and Cask.

We hope you can join us!

 

Bar Agricole

355 11st Street

San Francisco, CA

6-9pm

 

Please contact Shanna Farrell at sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu for more information.

We are pleased to announce that our new project on West Coast cocktail history has a new logo. Jess Peterson and Emily Collins, who won our logo contest, have created our new design.

The logo contest was run in conjunction with our Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for oral history interviews with bartenders, bar owners, spirit distillers, and cocktail historians who have been key figures on the West Coast. For more information on the project, please visit the project website, listen to clips from our pilot interviews on SoundCloud, or watch clips on YouTube.

Congratulations, Jess and Emily!

Leon F. Litwack: Historian of the American People and the African American Experience, Professor at Berkeley, 1964-2007

Conducted by Ann Lage in 2001 and 2002, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.

A celebrated teacher and scholar of the history of the American people and of the African American experience, Leon Litwack has been a Berkeley campus fixture and self-described ?disturber of the peace? for most of the sixty-six years since he arrived as an undergraduate in 1948. His oral history documents and reflects on his personal background, education, teaching, and research and writing. It explores his lifelong quest to uncover and to teach the history of race relations in America and the experiences of people long absent from the historical narrative. He has authored four major books and countless articles, including North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1961); Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979); Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998); and How Free is Free: the Long Death of Jim Crow(Nathan Huggins lectures, 2009).  He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history (1980), the National Book Award for history (1981), and the Francis Parkman prize awarded by the Society of American Historians (1980).

As his oral history reveals, Litwack?s focus on the lives of ordinary men and women and his sensitivity to race and racism grew out of his family roots and boyhood experiences. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century. They met each other in San Francisco, as members of an anarchist-socialist-Jewish-vegetarian-hiking club. Litwack describes them both as avid readers, lovers of nature, and philosophical radicals. Raised in a largely Mexican neighborhood of the seaside community of Santa Barbara in southern California, young Leon soon began to challenge the prevailing attitudes and historical interpretations about race and labor he encountered in high school. In these years he also developed his love of books and reading; he worked in the public library, read widely, and began to collect books in black literature and history, a collection which is now one of the finest private libraries of its kind.

Documenting his long connection to Berkeley, his oral history gives a picture of the campus and the Department of History during six decades. Litwack came to Berkeley as a history major in his sophomore year. He was active in campus politics, presided over Henry Wallace?s 1949 campus visit, and had a role as a student in the loyalty oath controversy that embroiled the campus in those years. After graduation, he spent the summer as a seaman on a ship to the Far East before returning to Berkeley to begin graduate studies in history in 1951 under Kenneth Stampp. With a break for a stint in army, he received his PhD in 1958 and accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin. In 1964, during the tumultuous year of the Free Speech Movement, he returned to Berkeley as a visiting professor, and that year was hired as associate professor for fall 1965. He retired in 2007 as the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison professor of history after forty-three years as an acclaimed teacher and engaged citizen of the campus. Still an active lecturer and scholar, he is now working on the experience of African Americans during and after World War II.

Leon Litwack is known as a scholar who enjoys and excels at teaching; he is equally at home in large lecture classes as in graduate seminars and estimates that he has taught more than 30,000 undergraduates.  He taught the introductory class in American history throughout his career, with carefully constructed, eloquent lectures which often introduced film, music, and other media as interpretive documents.  He initiated, with Winthrop Jordan, the first course on African American history at Berkeley and always included the history of often overlooked Americans in his US history classes. He received two Distinguished Teaching Awards granted by the campus and the Golden Apple Award for distinguished teaching awarded by the Associated Students. An influential mentor of generations of graduate students, he inserted brief comments on each of his PhD students as he reviewed the transcript of his oral history.

Our nine interview sessions were audiotaped from August 2001 through January 2002, the first four in his Dwinelle Hall office on the Berkeley campus, the last five in the library of his North Berkeley home. The transcript was lightly edited and sent to him in April 2002. A stroke in July 2002, along with his teaching commitments and work on the Nathan Huggins lectures and other writings, delayed his review of the transcript for several years. Given his careful attention to style in his books and in the composition of his lectures, it was not surprising that he reviewed the transcript with the same concerns for clarity and precision. He edited the initial several sessions carefully, clarifying his language, correcting facts, adding pertinent details, and removing repetitive language. As we discussed with him our wish to keep the transcript as a faithful record of the taped interviews, he reviewed the later sessions with a lighter hand. His changes throughout were primarily for clarity and style rather than substantive meaning. Additions to the transcript are bracketed.

This oral history is one of twenty-two in-depth interviews on the Department of History at Berkeley; the list of completed oral histories in the series is included in this volume. Most of the interviews can be found online with our oral history series on the Department of History at Berkeley. Copies of all interviews and the audio or video recordings are available for research use in The Bancroft Library. The Regional Oral History Office is a division of The Bancroft Library and is under the direction of Neil Henry. Special thanks are owed to Esther Ehrlich for her initial editing of the transcript, to Linda Norton for shepherding the interview through the production process, and to former University Archivist James R.K. Kantor for his careful proofreading of the final transcript.

Ann Lage
Interviewer, Project Director
Berkeley, California
April 2014

ROHO is developing a new project on the legacy of the West Coast craft cocktail, which will feature long-form oral history interviews with bar owners, bartenders, craft spirit distillers, and cocktail historians.

The project will record life histories and focus on themes of community, gender, labor, ethnicity, storytelling and myth-making, dissemination of information, geography, culinary influences, and popular culture. ROHO is launching a logo contest for the project and is accepting submissions from May 1 to May 30, 2014; the winning design will be announced on Monday, June 2. The logo contest is in preparation for a crowdfunding campaign that ROHO will run to offset the costs of the project which will launch on June 3.

ROHO is looking for designs that capture the essence of the role of storytelling in cocktail culture. Submissions should include vector-based mockups in full color, black and white, reverse, banner size, and thumbnail sizes for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SoundCloud.

The winning logo will be used on our website, social media outlets and all project-related printed material. In addition to being credited as the logo designer, the contest winner will be invited as a VIP guest to all project-related events and receive a $250 gift certificate to either Amazon, craft spirit store Cask, or San Francisco restaurant Bar Agricole. While UC staff are welcome to participate in the contest, they are not eligible to receive rewards.

ROHO was established in 1954 and is the second oldest oral history program in the United States. There are ten subject areas for which there are over 4,000 interviews archived in the collection with people like Ansel Adams, Warren Hinkel, Ernest Gallo, Robert Mondavi, and Dorthea Lange; the vast majority of our interview transcripts are available online.

Submissions and questions should be emailed to Shanna Farrell at sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu

FAQs

Q: What is oral history?

A: Oral history is the collection and analysis of historical information through first-person narratives about specific topics, themes, or events. These narratives are documented through recorded long-form interviews, which often take the life history approach, wherein the narrator works from the beginning of their lives to the present.

Q: How is it different from journalism?

A: Oral history aim to contextualize history and is a highly collaborative process between the narrator and the interview. Oral history interviewers ask open questions that illicit longer responses and interviewers often take cues from the content of the narrator’s answer, whereas journalists usually ask topical and pointed questions for shorter interview sessions. Furthermore, oral history interviews are expected to be archived and added to the historical record for future use, while journalistic interviews are often not heard by anyone but the interviewer.

Q: How did I listen to your interviews?

A: ROHO’s interviews are archived in The Bancroft Library (TBL) at UC Berkeley. Audio and video files of most of our interviews can be requested through TBL though transcripts of the vast majority of our collection are available as PDFs on our website and accessible at any time.

Q: Why can’t I listen to or watch the interviews online?

A: Unfortunately, the audio and video files of our interviews are very large and would take up most of TBL’s broadband. However, you can request these audio and video files of the interviews at TBL or read the transcripts on our website. We also have clips from a selected series of interviews (which change monthly) available on our SoundCloud account.

Q: How can I connect to ROHO?

A: You can follow what is going on with ROHO through our website, newsletter, blog, or our various social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, SoundCloud, Instagram, and YouTube.

Q: How do I donate to ROHO?

A: You can donate here. We truly appreciate your support.

Q: How many people will this project include?

A: We hope to include at least thirty individuals, but would like to interview as many people as possible.

Q: Who will be interviewed for this project?

A: We have conducted a four-hour interview with cocktail historian David Wondrich, completed pilot interviews with Jennifer Colliau of Small Hand Foods, Claire Sprouse of the United States Bartender’s Guild, and Rhachel Shaw of Hog Island Oyster Co, and a short interview with bartender Dale DeGroff. We have spoken with several high-profile bar owners, bartenders, and craft spirit distillers who have expressed interested in being interviewed for the project.

Q: Will I be able to listen to or watch the interviews?

A: You will be able to watch and listen to clips from the interviews on our YouTube and SoundCloud pages when the interviews are complete. You will also be able to request the audio and video files of the interviews at The Bancroft Library and read the interview transcripts on our website.

Q: How long will this project last?

A: We anticipate this being a multi-year project and do not have a project deadline.

Q: What kind of logo are you looking for?

A: We are looking for designs that capture the essence of project and somehow related to oral history/storytelling and craft cocktails. The rest is up to you.

Q: What should I submit?

A: You should submit your design in the following formats:

-Vector-based (for Adobe Illustrator)

-Full Color

-Black and White

-Reverse

-Banner Sized

-Sized for social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SoundCloud

Q: How do I submit a logo?

A: Logos should be submitted to Shanna Farrell at sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu.

Q: How will I know that my logo was received?

A: You will receive an email confirmation from Shanna Farrell within 24 hours of your submission.

Q: When will the contest winner be announced?

A: The winner be announced by Monday, June 2 2014.

Q: How do I donate to the project?

A: You can donate to the project through ROHO’s website. We truly appreciate your support.

The cocktail has a long and storied history since it was defined in 1806 as a “stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” The popularity of cocktails has ebbed and flowed since the Prohibition Era and much information about cocktail culture–particularly who was doing what and when–went undocumented. As a result, myths have evolved about drink inventions, drinking habits, popular trends, and training methods, which have been perpetuated in recent years.

ROHO is developing a new project on the legacy of the West Coast craft cocktail.Our project will document the legacy of the West Coast craft cocktail through a series of interviews with key bar owners, bartenders, craft distillers, and cocktail historians. Interviews will focus on themes of community, gender, ethnicity, labor, myth-making, storytelling, the dissemination of information, geography, the role of California cuisine, craft and artisanal culture, popular culture, bartender/customer relationships, and the perception of bartending as a respected profession. Our esteemed project advisors include bartender extraordinaire Dale DeGroff, cocktail historian and journalist David Wondrich, and PUNCH co-founders Talia Baiocchi and Leslie Pariseau. (We also want to thank our friends at Prizefighter for their help.)

We’ll be launching a crowdfunding campaign on Tuesday, June 3, 2014 through Indiegogo, which will run until Thursday, July 10. The funds that we raise will go to paying for these interviews. We hope to interview at least thirty people and once the campaign is complete we’ll begin by interviewing Jorg Rupf of St. George Spirits, Murray Stenson of Elysian Bar, Thad Vogler of Bar Agricole and Trou Normand, Julio Bermejo of Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant, and Mike Buhen of Tiki Ti.

We’ll be holding a launch party to celebrate the start of the campaign on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014 at East Bay Spice Company from 5:30 – 7:30pm. There will be West Coast cocktail specials, we’ll be playing clips from our pilot interviews, and Shanna Farrell will be saying a few words about the project. We hope that you can join us!

Here’s the information:

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014

at East Bay Spice Company

2134 Oxford Street,

Berkeley, CA

from 5:30 – 7:30pm.

One main purpose of oral history research is to give voice to the voiceless, to those who have left no written record for historians to use in the future. Oral history has been part of the broader effort in social history to write “from below” to balance the voices of the powerful in history, which are heard through their official documents, ledgers, edicts, and so on.

In ROHO’s Western Mining in the Twentieth Century oral history project, there are over one hundred interviews with people who are, for the most part, neither the rich and powerful nor the excluded and forgotten. The project consists of interviews with mine foremen, managers, technicians, metallurgists, professors, and engineers. What is clear from reading these histories is the degree to which neither the official, dominant narratives nor the traditional marginal voices of oral history can give us the whole picture. The middle level of managers, engineers and scientists still have much left to say.

Lee Swent’s interview with Braden Mining Co. executive Bob Haldeman is a dramatic story of a powerful man buffeted by still-more-powerful historical forces. A 29-year company man with the Braden Copper Company (Kennecott Copper Co.) in Chile, Haldeman thought he had dodged a bullet in 1967. For the previous ten years, he and his colleagues watched as the Chilean government took greater control of the mining industry. Haldeman brokered a deal for a massive expansion of the mine in exchange for a guarantee of no increases in taxes for 12 years. Three years later, the new mine opened. Three months after that, socialist candidate Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile. Haldeman describes the direct political supervision of him and the mine’s managers, along with some of the sabotage and work slowdowns that took place after the election. Compared to the strife on the streets and the tragedy of the subsequent years in Chile during the 1970s, Haldeman’s concerns may seem trifling. But his oral history gives us some of the texture of the moment, including the panic among the well-to-do in Chile and the exultation of the young Allende supporters:

Chaos happened. People started to scramble. The Chileans who had money figured that it was the end of their life here. You could go out and buy a brand-new car — they would give you the keys for a thousand dollar bill.

In February or March [1970] they dug up out of the files an ancient law; I think it was enacted in 1887. For some reason, at that time it said that in vital or basic industries in the country, if for any reason the government feels they are being mismanaged and go against the interest of the country, they can appoint interventores, or watchdogs, overseers, for those key positions to make sure that the people in those positions aren’t destroying the operation of the country, the economy, et cetera. They dug that law up.

We had to report to them, and they were privy to all information and had to sit in at all meetings. They could sit in my office and watch what I did all the time; I had to make office space for them. I got an interventor by the name of Mr. Arancibia, an economist, twenty-eight, and a socialist. Mr. Grant got an engineering student from the university, a communist. Thelawyer got another student, who brought his girlfriend as secretary. They locked up at three o’clock in the afternoon and made love on the sofa. [laughs] It was just chaos. You can’t imagine. (70-71)

Haldeman began to make arrangements to get his family and belongings out as the political atmosphere deteriorated. As a painter, he had accumulated thirty years of his own work. When he tried to export them, they were declared “national treasures” and denied permits. When he did finally get permits, the paintings were tossed away at customs.

Although this personal adversity must be taken in context, circumstances rapidly grew more sinister for Haldeman in his encounter with the new National Copper Corporation (CODELCO), which was positioning itself to take over the mining industry on behalf of Allende’s Chilean government:

Now it was June, and I was called to the Copper Corporation by the minister of mines and the head of the Copper Corporation. I was to be over at the Copper Corporation office at 10 o’clock in the morning. I met them, and they took me into the board room. In the board room there are eight or ten young guys with boinas [berets] on — Che Guevara style — all sitting around. I didn’t know who they were; they were political hacks. They were all smiling and talking among themselves.

We sat down, and the minister said, “Mr. Haldeman, I’m sorry I had to call you in, and I’m also sorry that I have to tell you that there have been these acts of sabotage, Chileans have been leaving the company and you have been paying them severance pay in dollars,” which legally I was entitled to.

They had a whole list of things. He said, “Those are very serious matters.” He looked at me, and I said, “Yes, they are, sir.” [He then said,] “Well, I have to tell you that we are going to file suit against you for infraction of the civil and penal codes for all of these violations.”

They were all smiling. My lawyer started to speak, and I kicked him in the shins. I told him quietly, “Shut up. Don’t say anything.” I looked at the minister, and he was smiling. I said, “Yes, Mr. Minister, that’s very serious. I just don’t know what to say.” He didn’t say anything. Nothing happened. It was a showdown, and I didn’t defend myself. The head of the Copper Corporation repeated some of the charges, and I said, “Yes, I understand that they are very serious.” He said, “Yes, it’s very serious.”

You’ve heard of Pavlov’s dog and conditioned reflex” In any meeting where you are the one invited, if you stand up to leave, everyone stands up. I said, “Is that all, Mr. Minister”” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Mr. Vice President, is that all”” “Yes,” [he said]. I stood up, and everybody stood up. I said, “With your permission, I’ll be leaving.” They all collapsed.

I walked by the minister, and he said, “Bob, just a minute,” and grabbed my hand. “I’d like to talk to you.” I said, “Wait a minute [for my lawyer],” and he said, “No, just you alone.” Two of them took me in and sat down. “Do you want coffee”” I said, “No, thanks.” “These are very serious charges,” [they said]. I said, “Yes, very serious.” I agreed with everything, and he was becoming more frustrated. I said, “I’ll just have to go back and see what I can do about this. Can I ask you a favor”” “Anything you want,” [they said]. “This is so serious that I would like it if you would give me forty-eight hours to leave the country,” [I asked]. He said, “No, that’s not the idea. That’s not the purpose of all this.” [laughs] They wanted to put me on a kangaroo court!

I had a group of Chileans who still stuck with me. They were loyal, and they wouldn’t take any orders from these overseers, managed the company the way we wanted to and it was frustrating them. The Anaconda [Copper Co.] people just melted away and practically turned it over to the overseers before the legislation came through. (74-76)

Haldeman knew he had to leave the country immediately. What follows is straight out of a political thriller, what Haldeman called “James Bond stuff,” involving telephone scramblers, counter-surveillance, and clandestine meetings. He and his spouse were out of the country the next day.

As one can see, the mining interviews in ROHO’s collection do not just consist of technical descriptions of mining processes and labor negotiations. In this small sample from one of the oral histories in Western Mining in the Twentieth Century, there is this rich narrative of a direct human experience of the geopolitics, clashing ideologies, and politics of corporate hierarchies of the time. More of Bob Haldeman’s life history can be found here.

Paul Burnett, ROHO Historian

The official theme of this year’s annual Oral History Association Conference, held in Oklahoma City, was “Hidden Stories, Contested Truths: The Craft of Oral History.” However, the unofficial theme was on moving oral history into the digital age. Earlier this year the Oral History Review published a special issue entitled “Oral History in the Digital Age” and the ideas, challenges, and questions which were raised in its pages were at the forefront of the conference. Many presentations focused on using digital technology to conduct, promote, process, and make projects accessible online; some of these sessions included “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” “New Approaches to Bringing Community Histories into Public Space in an Urban Region,” “Campus Oral History Programs,”and “New Answers to Old Questions in the Digital Age,” and the Saturday plenary session on “Oral History and the Documentation of American Foodways” demonstrated how integral digital technology is in the application of their work.

The first session that I attended, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” focused on the OHMS [Oral History Metadata Synthesizer] system, an open source platform for coding and indexing oral history interviews. Doug Boyd from the Louis B. Nunn Center for Oral History walked the audience through the conceptual and practical foundation of OHMS. Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH) and the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) were both selected to pilot the OHMS system before it is made public; Steven Sielaff from BUIOH and Sady Sullivan from BHS discussed how their oral history programs run, the way in which they used OHMS to process interviews, and the strengths and weaknesses they experienced in using the system. Dean Rehberger from Michigan State University, who works on OHMS with Boyd, talked about the future of system.

The audience asked relevant questions that illuminated issues other oral history programs face and the practicality of using OHMS. Overall, this session provided people with issues to be carefully considered when deciding whether to use OHMS when it is public.

“New Approaches to Bringing Community Histories into Public Space in an Urban Region” featured a collaborative project between Erie County Public Library, Randforce Associates, and locally-based community groups in Buffalo, New York. The project, which was originally funded by an NEH digital start-up grant but grew into a large multi-year effort (which is on-going) funded by an IMLS grant, is showcasing their archival collection by connecting issues from the Depression Era to contemporary life in Buffalo. This project combines digital technology, such as Omeka and Interclipper, with low-tech tools, such as the posters and photographs, and uses available resources like the physical space of the library and the knowledge and network of their community partners to bolster their work. A component of this project is a series of public programs that intend to engender dialogue among professional experts and community members while featuring archival material. Their project involves forward-thinkers who are thoroughly addressing the needs of both the library and the community. Their decision to combine the use of new technology and existing resources is a creative solution that enhances the project. This was a great example of a complex project that could serve as a model for other collaborative projects.

Panelists from Louisiana State University, Oklahoma State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Baylor University, and UCLA presented at the “Campus Oral History Programs” session. They each gave examples of their specific projects, the way in which their programs run, and an overview of issues they face. They are dealing with similar issues: fundraising, outreach, public engagement, digital access, and campus politics. Some of these programs have solved their problems by re-assessing their needs, creating work plans that are often re-visited or revised, using students in the production and editing process, and utilizing cheap digital resources. Most of all, they are struggling with how best to bring their collections and future work into the digital age. The audience asked many questions that revealed most oral history programs are dealing with the very same issues.

Though these are just a few highlights from the 2013 OHA Conference, there were many other dynamic presentations and examples of robust and tangible oral history projects. My biggest takeaway was that the field seems to be yearning for a solution to their issues surrounding digitization and is looking for some guidance. People want to engage in dialogue about challenges associated with the digital technology, especially those affiliated with campus or established oral history programs. This is the perfect time for us all to work together as a community and share our solutions (and failures) in order progress the field and push our work into the digital age. I look forward to next year’s conference in Wisconsin, where there will hopefully more discussions on such topics.

Shanna Farrell, ROHO Historian