In 2017, historians not only create their own audio- and video-recorded oral history collections, and use oral histories generated by others in previous decades; they also discover other recorded and transcribed interview formats in archives, such as 1960s participant observer data. Using two very different projects—Alison Isenberg’s just-completed book about postwar renewal in San Francisco, and a new study of 1960s protest and unrest in Trenton, New Jersey–this workshop will focus on the complexities of relying upon this mix of “oral history” records to construct written and documentary film narratives about urban places during a turbulent (yet unevenly-archived) recent decade.
Alison Isenberg is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University. Isenberg writes and teaches about nineteenth and twentieth century American society, with particular attention to the transformation of cities, and to the intersections of culture, the economy, and place. More information available here.