"Who's Archiving This History of Resistance?"
Hey friends,
Episode 10, "Live Working or Die Fighting," is the second part of our three-part documentary, and it's built on sixteen archival sources from eight archives. You know by now that we don't just narrate history on this show. We go find it. Today’s newsletter is filled with resources and ways you can find, use and participate in oral history.
First, I want to tell how some of these recordings came to be.
The recording of formerly enslaved people are from The "Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories" collection at the US Library of Congress contains recordings of twenty-three people born into slavery between 1823 and the early 1860s. Aunt Phoebe Boyd talking about cotton and quilts in a single breath was recorded by linguists Archibald A. Hill and Guy Sumner Lowman showed up in Dunnsville, Virginia in 1935 with a disc recorder. Mrs. Laura Smalley's testimony was recorded by a young Texas folklorist named John Henry Faulk who drove to Hempstead in 1941 on a Rosenwald Fellowship and pressed record. These interviews were given by elderly Black Americans to white interviewers during Jim Crow, under conditions where self-censorship was a survival strategy.
Shawn and I felt a deep responsibility while working with the recordings of people who were enslaved.
We use the language "people who were enslaved" and "born into enslavement" rather than "slaves," following the guidance of P. Gabrielle Foreman's community-sourced style guide and the National Park Service, because no one was born a slave. They were born into a system that allowed white people to enslave them. We use full names and honorifics as listed in the collection.
FDR's Labour Secretary Frances Perkins describing the Triangle fire, her voice shaking fifty-three years later, exists because Professor Maurice Neufeld at Cornell's ILR School kept inviting her back to lecture and someone finally thought to preserve the tapes.
Alice Paul's account of first hearing Christabel Pankhurst speak in 1907 was the work of oral historian Amelia R. Fry sat with Paul in her Connecticut home the Monday before Thanksgiving 1972, when Paul was in her late eighties and frustrated by inaccurate magazine articles about her life.
And the only surviving audio of Pankhurst was recorded by the Gramophone Company, when they put a microphone in front of Pankhurst hours after she walked out of Holloway Prison in December 1908.
Every one of those decisions is why you can hear these voices in this episode...but the person being recorded is the one responsible for it existing. They agreed to be interviewed, to have their story preserved.
Without that consent, history would be very quiet.
You can do what those fieldworkers and oral historians did.
Your phone is enough.
Record somebody. The quilter in your guild who's been making since the 1960s. The retired garment worker in your neighbourhood. The elder in your community who remembers the factory. Sit with them. Ask what they made with their hands.
If you’re in the US: the StoryCorps app is free. It walks you through the whole thing: questions, recording, upload. Your recording goes to the StoryCorps archive and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. You control the privacy settings. They also have StoryCorps Connect for remote interviews. That's a direct pipeline from your phone to the LOC.
Your library might lend you a recording kit. The Boston Public Library lends "Oral History Backpacks" with recorders and guides in ten languages. Libraries at Virginia Tech, Duke, CUNY, and Washington University in St. Louis do the same. Ask yours.
If you're using your phone: record in airplane mode, set it on a stable surface, do a 30-second test first, and sit somewhere with soft furnishings. The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide by Marjorie Hunt is the best free how-to. The Oral History Association's best practices are the field standard.
Always get consent first. A simple release form before you start. Templates from Columbia University, Claremont Colleges, and the Smithsonian are all free. For vulnerable communities, elders, trauma survivors, undocumented people, the OHA's Guidelines for Social Justice Oral History Work says it plainly: move at the speed of trust.
Then archive it somewhere it'll last. Besides StoryCorps, you can upload to the Internet Archive with a free account. The Library of Congress Veterans History Project accepts community submissions with their free field kit. Many state and provincial archives take oral histories too.
And if the voice you want to preserve belongs to a community that's been historically shut out of mainstream archives, there are places built specifically for that work:
Black communities: Schomburg Center (NYPL), Amistad Research Center (Tulane), Moorland-Spingarn (Howard), Auburn Avenue Research Library (Atlanta). In Canada, Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) in Montreal holds the Voices of Little Burgundy collection and the Alfie Roberts Institute fonds documenting Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Quebec, plus the Montreal Life Stories project with Haitian and Rwandan survivor testimonies.
Indigenous communities: Mukurtu CMS is a free, open-source platform built by and for Indigenous communities at Washington State University, with cultural protocols that let communities control who sees what. And I work at Animikii, who makes Niiwin, a data platform dedicated to Indigenous data sovereignty. In Canada, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria also holds significant Indigenous Two-Spirit materials.
LGBTQ+ communities: ONE Archives (USC), Lesbian Herstory Archives (Brooklyn), Digital Transgender Archive, Invisible Histories Project (preserving LGBTQ+ life in the U.S. South), LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. In Canada, The ArQuives in Toronto is one of the largest LGBTQ2S+ archives in the world, founded in 1973, with over 150 oral histories including the Foolscap Gay Oral History Project and the Lesbians Making History collection.
Latinx communities: Voces Oral History Center (UT Austin, 1,800+ interviews), UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
Asian American communities: Densho (Japanese American incarceration, 2,000 hours of video), South Asian American Digital Archive, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation
Labour history: Kheel Center (Cornell, where our Frances Perkins recording lives), Walter P. Reuther Library (Wayne State), Tamiment Library (NYU)
Textile and craft: Quilt Alliance "Save Our Stories" oral history project, International Quilt Museum (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Canada: Library and Archives Canada holds oral history collections including Indigenous and immigrant testimonies. COHDS at Concordia in Montreal is a global leader in oral history research and runs a Summer Institute every May if you want training. Two-Spirited People of Manitoba in Winnipeg maintains a Two-Spirit archive. The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (ALOT) at Simon Fraser University is an open-access online archive. And every province has a provincial archives that accepts community oral histories.
United Kingdom: The Oral History Society (founded 1973) runs training courses with the British Library and has regional networkers across the country who can help you start a project. The British Library Sound Archive holds one of the largest oral history collections in Europe, and the Community Archives and Heritage Group maintains a directory of hundreds of community archives. The People's History Museum in Manchester holds labour and suffragette collections.
Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand: The National Library of Australia runs an active oral history and folklore program. In Aotearoa, the Alexander Turnbull Library at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa holds oral histories in both English and te reo Māori.
Kimmie Dearest asks in this episode:
"Who's archiving this history of resistance?"
That's not a rhetorical question, it's more of a challenge. It could be you, with your phone, this weekend.
Until next time, keep making, keep resisting, and remember: our hands know how to build the world we want.
Xo. Ian
Art Against Empire is co-created and edited by Shawn Dearn and is a production of Secret Agents.