History Makers oral history archive

What do Civil Rights leader Julian Bond, Texas cowboy Alonzo Pettie, the late blacksmith Philip Simmons, musician B.B. King, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Charleston funeral home director Herbert Fielding have in common? All have been videotaped telling their life stories to The History Makers project, the nation's largest archive of African-American oral histories. Founded in 1999 by Chicago historian Julieanna Richardson, the History Makers archive already contains interviews with more than 2,600 people. Her work was sidelined for a few years by Great Recession but has been recently revived. This summer, it received an important stamp of approval, when the Library of Congress agreed to serve as its permanent home - a step that both validates the History Makers' value and ensures that its archive will be preserved.

A filmmaker peers into the dark past of China's Great Famine

'Spark' documents a group of students who tried to expose the truth of Mao's 'Great Leap Forward,' which led to tens of millions of deaths from starvation in 1959-62. For filmmaker Hu Jie, telling the truth about China's Great Famine is a sacred duty, however much it flies in the face of government censorship and public indifference. Mr. Hu’s latest film "Spark," which has so far shown publicly only in Hong Kong, chronicles four students in the Chinese heartland of Lanzhou who start a short-lived underground magazine in 1960 at the height of the famine. The magazine, also called Spark, dares to blame the mass starvation on the Communist Party, which promptly arrests the students. “These kinds of people are the spiritual support for the nation to survive in a noble and elegant way,” Hu told The Christian Science Monitor in a recent telephone interview from his home in Nanjing. “They show there is light and life in the darkness of their time and ours.”

When science meets aboriginal oral history

In Inuit oral history, the Tuniit loom both large and small. They inhabited the Arctic before the Inuit came, and they were a different stock of people — taller and stronger, with the muscularity of polar bears, the stories say. A Tuniit man could lift a 1,000 pound seal on his back, or drag a whole walrus. Others say the Tuniit slept with their legs in the air to drain the blood from their feet and make them lighter, so they could outrun a caribou. But despite their superior strength and size, the Tuniit were shy. They were “easily put to flight and it was seldom heard that they killed others,” according to one storyteller in the book “Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut.” The Inuit took over the best hunting camps and displaced the conflict-averse Tuniit. Soon enough, these strange people disappeared from the land. This week, the prestigious journal Science published an unprecedented paleogenomic study that resolves long-held questions about the people of the prehistoric Arctic.

WWII vet who found Hitler's top hat dies at 88

ALBANY, New York (AP) — Richard Marowitz was just a day removed from witnessing the horrors of Dachau when he found a top hat on a shelf in a closet in Adolf Hitler's Munich apartment. Still furious over the gruesome sights he had seen at the nearby Nazi concentration camp, the 19-year-old self-described "skinny Jewish kid" from New York threw the black silk hat on the floor, jumped off the chair he had used to reach the item and stomped Hitler's formal headwear until it was flat. "I swear to this day I could see his face in it," Marowitz told The Associated Press in a 2001 interview, recalling how he "smashed the hell out of it." Marowitz, who brought the souvenir back to New York after World War II ended, died this week at age 88 at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albany. His son, Larry Marowitz, told The Associated Press on Friday that his father died Wednesday after battling cancer and dementia. His death was first reported by The Times Union of Albany.

Oral History Weekly Magazine Aims and Regulations
Oral History Weekly Magazine wishes to create a suitable place for thoughts and idea development; Its main field would be “Oral History” and subjects as telling & writing memoirs, writing diaries, travelogues, chronologies, and all other subfields of history which are presented in the form of news, articles, reports, notes, interviews and memoirs can be included. There is no limitation on the length of would-be-sent materials.
Mentioning the name, academic background and email is necessary. Articles with complete references and bibliography are more credited and an abstract would quite helpful.
Weekly is not about to publish any material consisting insults and libels about other people or anything that brings anxiety to public opinion. Weekly can edit and translate the received materials.
The published articles and materials are only the writer’s ideas and Oral History Weekly Magazine has no responsibility about their content.