Oral History Digital Collection

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Annotation

These full-text first-person narratives present the voices of more than 2,000 people from northeast Ohio discussing issues significant to the state and the nation. These oral histories, collected since 1974, focus on a range of topics such as ethnic culture, including African American, Greek, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Romanian, and Russian, and industry, such as steel, pottery, brick, coal, and railroads.

Others discuss labor relations, including women in labor unions, wars (World War II, Vietnam, Gulf War), college life (including the shootings by National Guard troops at Kent State in 1970), the Holocaust, and religion. Subject access is available through more than 200 topics listed alphabetically.

Telfair Museum of Art and Owen-Thomas House [GA]

Description

The Telfair Museum of Art preserves and presents artwork in all forms. The Museum also operates the 1819 Owen-Thomas House, furnished with a collection of decorative arts objects.

The museum offers exhibits, self-guided and guided tours for school groups, a teacher resource library, professional development for educators, and classes and other recreational and educational events; the Owen-Thomas House offers guided tours.

Boot Hill Museum [KS]

Description

The Museum preserves the history of Dodge City and the Old West. Its Front Street buildings are reconstructions, representing Dodge City in 1876 and exhibiting hundreds of original artifacts. The various exhibits throughout the museum depict life in early Dodge City, and include a collection of over 200 original guns, a working print shop, and an extensive collection of drugstore items.

The museum offers exhibits, living history demonstrations, historically-inspired variety show entertainment, stagecoach rides, and chuckwagon-style dinners.

Naughty & Nice: A History of The Holiday Season

Description

According to Backstory:

"Christmas may be the big kahuna of American holy days, but it wasn’t always so. It used to be a time of drunken rowdiness, when the poor would demand food and money from the rich. The Puritans banned Christmas altogether. It wasn’t until the 1820s that the holiday was re-invented as the peaceful, family-oriented, and consumeristic ritual we celebrate today.

In this episode, the History Guys examine the history of the “holiday season” in America. Has Christmas grown more or less religious? How has the holiday evolved and changed here? To what extent was Hanukkah a reaction to Christmas, and how have American Jews shaped and reshaped their own wintertime rituals?"

Just the Facts?: Partisanship and the Press

Description

According to Backstory:

The current era of partisan news and name-calling is enough to make you wonder what happened to good old-fashioned objective reporting. But in this hour, BackStory asks: Where did the idea of media objectivity come from in the first place? Historian Marcus Daniel explains that the bitter rhetoric of editors in the 1790s played a key role in the birth of our democracy. Matthew Goodman tells the story of an elaborate hoax involving “lunar man-bats” in the early days of the penny press. And Michael Kinsley, founder of the online journal Slate, argues that opinion journalism can be more informative than so-called “objective” news.

Ellicott City Station [MD]

Description

Completed by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1831, this National Historic Landmark is the oldest railroad station in America. The site showcases the people who built and operated America's first railroad, tells stories of soldiers and citizens caught in the turmoil of the Civil War, and highlights the clash of technology that transformed America's transportation systems from roads to rails.

The site offers exhibits, tours, and recreational and educational events (including living history events).

Museum of Natural History and Planetarium [RI]

Description

The Museum of Natural History is Rhode Island's only natural history museum and is home to the state's only planetarium. The Museum houses collections containing over one-quarter million objects pertaining to natural and cultural history assembled from sites around the world. The natural history collections include fossils, mollusks, minerals, rocks, and mounted flora and fauna. The cultural collections contain over 24,000 archaeological and ethnographic specimens primarily of Native American and Pacific origin.

The museum offers exhibits, educational programs, planetarium shows, and educational and recreational events.

Roanoke Island Festival Park [NC]

Description

Roanoke Island Festival Park is a 27-acre state historic site and cultural center celebrating history, education, and the arts. Visitors can step aboard the Elizabeth II, a representative 16th-century sailing vessel; visit with Elizabethan explorers and soldiers in the Settlement Site; tour the Roanoke Adventure Museum, which explores 400 years of Outer Banks history; and view the docudrama, "The Legend of Two-Path."

The park offers exhibits, tours, demonstrations, performances, educational programs, research library access, and recreational and educational events (including living history events).

Chepstow [RI]

Description

An Italianate-style villa, Chepstow was built in 1860 by resident Newport architect George Champlin Mason as the summer residence of Edmund Schermerhorn. Containing the original Morris-Gallatin furnishings together with important 19th-century American paintings and documents from other former Morris family residences, Chepstow is highly evocative of the taste and collections of a descendant of one of America's founding families, placed in the context of a contemporary Newport summer home.

The home offers tours.