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Essay Instructions: Oral History Directions (5-8 pages, double-spaced)



The purpose of these oral histories is for you to demonstrate an understanding of the ways in which education and identity have intersected in the three-generation history of your family. Experiences such as changing national, cultural and community events and trends have an impact on identity formation. You are the family historian, not just the storyteller of this family - find the connections between what happened to the family over time, the role of education and the influences of outside events and trace those changes.



You are required to conduct at least two interviews, one each with people from different generations. Some questions to be thinking about as you interview your subjects are: How has your family been shaped from the outside by political, social or economic changes? How was the family shaped from the inside by dreams, aspirations, religious or ethnic traditions or practices? And, what was the role of education across these two dimensions in shaping identity?



Try to identify the KEY events that altered or affected the lives of your family for each generation. They may be outside events such as social upheaval, or inside events like adjustment to a new society, or a combination of the two. Ask open-ended questions. Record your interview and transcribe it or take detailed notes and immediately after the interview write as much detailed information of the conversation as possible using notes and memory. Immediately reproducing the interview in writing is essential if you only take notes and do not record the interview. Eventually, you will use these data to write an essay using the collected data.



Try to find a theme that runs across the generations including yourself, to “tie” your story together. You may already be making some decisions about what were the important external events so let those decisions drive your questions. Use the ideas discussed in the course online and in class to shape your questions, if you like. For example- you can focus on the racial/ethnic identity formation of your family, or their rise from poverty to middle class, or the educational attainment of family members and how that has shaped changes to the family. You can interview as many people as you like for each interview, but be sure and interview at least two people from different generations from you and from each other. Finally, try to get details about dates, wages, prices, how free time was used, how people communicated, what they did for fun, acquisition of TV and technology, favorite movies, books, family heroes, friends and neighbors, etcetera as details add richness to your story. Feel free to be creative.





Possible topics of conversation:

The private sphere--

Migration/Immigration/ Ethnic Identity

Family Making/Marriage /Gender relations

Sexual division of Labor/Childrearing

Social and Kin Networks

Housing, Work and Social Class

Education









The public sphere--

Civic interests

Religious and cultural beliefs and practices

Military

Consumption and popular culture

National tragedies

National wars and domestic conflicts

Natural disasters



Oral History Reflection for each interview:

1- Write up what you observed writing about your family (this is a broad question- it can be observing your family member or yourself during the interview, or any interpretation you give it).

2- What did you learn about yourself?

3- What did you learn about your community?

Essay Instructions: I need a 10 page paper that explores the historiography topic of Oral History. It should use examples of oral history from different time periods to emphasize its importance. It should also discuss criticisms of the medium.

Instructor’s notes:
The paper shall be typed, double-spaced, and in a 12-point Arial or Times New Roman font and include a minimum of ten reference citations – taken from ten different source documents – and a list of works cited. Again, it is highly recommended that the reference citations and the list of works cited conform to the Parenthetical Reference form of academic citation as detailed in Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Term Papers. Although reference citations from primary or secondary sources other than the required course readings are permitted and encouraged, they too must be correctly formatted. As before, no more than one general internet source can be used for citation purposes, exceptions being the scholarly websites and documents available through other academic and governmental databases. And, again, for our purposes, Wikipedia is not considered a valid academic source.

While the research paper consists of several parts, there is no hard-and-fast rule about the length of each individual section, as this will be reflective of your particular topic and your individual approach to the issue in question. This said, generally the paper should consist of the following elements:
• Introduction: This section of the essay introduces the reader to the topic and to your particular historical interest in, or interpretation of, the topic.
• Thesis: This section includes your interpretation of your topic and in many cases concludes with a statement of your research question.
• The Literature: This is your review of the literature relevant to your thesis.
• Analysis of the Issue: This is the heart of the paper. It will include a discussion of the topic based on relevant literature and concepts discussed in the course. In order to prove the argument, you should document your statements with research in primary and secondary sources.
• Conclusion: What does it all mean? What does your analysis show? Commonly, conclusions restate the thesis statement and restate the argument made to support it.
• Works Cited: A list of the documentary sources cited in your paper.

Essay Instructions: For this assignment you will be examining and writing about a series of documents that discuss the sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan during the Great Depression. The above website tells the story of the strikes (which you will use as background), but also has audio clips of oral history interviews done forty years after the strikes occurred. The goal of this assignment is to have you consider both what these sources tell us about the Great Depression, especially the experiences of the workers for one of America’s most important companies, but also the nature of the sources themselves. Using the oral histories from the website, your paper needs to answer the following question:

Flint Sit-Down Strike Audio Gallery
http://www.historicalvoices.org/flint/
Document transcripts are located at: http://www.historicalvoices.org/flint/transcript_browser.html

What do these oral histories tell us, and not tell us, about the Great Depression?

To complete this assignment, your paper should revolve around two sets of questions. The first is what these sources tell us about the experience of these workers:
- Why did people join the union and participate in the strikes?
- What was the experience of women during the sit-down strikes?
- Why was the union controversial?
- According to these documents, why was the strike successful?
- What was life like for the workers after the strikes?

The second set of questions is about the nature of oral history sources:
- What are the benefits of using these sources?
- What are the drawbacks?
- What type of story do they tend to privilege?
- What do they leave out?

please use the sources from website that i provided to you and a bibliography.
There are faxes for this order.

Essay Instructions: I need a analytical paper of Alessandor Portelli''s book, "The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History."
The paper should include the type of historical method that the author utilizes, the author''s main argument, and how that argument is examined. It should include at least 1 or 2 quotes from the text, and it should have a bibliography for the book.
The paper should include how the author''s argument and topic fit into the broader historiographical context. It should also state what sources (ie: archives, legislation, petitions) that the author used.