Oral History Assignment
Due October 1, 2013

Oral interviews are historical sources just like the texts that we have been reading during this semester.  This material, however, must be handled with care as interviews provide us with both different opportunities and advantages for understanding the past as well as a range of unique challenges and drawbacks.  In an essay no longer than 2 pages (double-spaced; 12 point font), I want you to do two things.

First, how do the three interviews throw a different light on our understanding of these three important moments in the American past: the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and World War II in the Pacific.  In what ways do they challenge some general stereotypes you may have had about these events?  Secondly, reflect more critically and analytically on the use of oral history as provided by these three examples.  What do these oral histories offer us that traditional sources do not? What are their advantages?  Are these interviews more or less subjective than primary sources?  Why or whyt not?

At the seame time reflect on their weaknesses.  What are their limitations?  What caution should we exercise when using them?  How are biases revealed? In what ways might they actually distort the past? Provide at least one concrete example from the interviews.  In your essay you must provide an example or reference from all three interviews.


Three Interviews
Margaret Block (9/12/2008)
Margaret Block was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s in Mississippi.  Along with several other white and black young people, she attempted to organize rural black men and women to vote and protest disenfranchisment.

Terms
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Stokely Carmichael
Molotov Cocktail
Emmett Till

Gregory Faulk (2/10/2011)
Gregory Faluk served two tours of duty in Vietnam.  This clip is from his second tour of duty doing long-range reconnaisannce in rural Vietnam.

Victor Cote (10/17/2004)
Victor Cote was stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and launched a simultaneous attack on American forces in Bataan in 1942.  The clip begins at the end of the initial attack on Bataan and ends with his time as an American priosner of war in a Japanese camp in 1942. He was freed after American forces bombed Nagasaki in 1945.

Terms
Bataan Death March