SOHP Southern Oral History Program

This month we are talking about Confederate Monuments. In this episode you will hear from John Sellars, a former UNC student activist, Mistyre Bonds, a current student activist, and Dr. William Sturkey, a history professor, as they discuss a confederate statue, Silent Sam, on the UNC campus.

In the second part of our series on environmental racism and oral history, Danielle and Pavithra discuss specific moments in the oral histories they collected that illuminate lived experiences of environmental racism in the South. Danielle, and Pavithra also explain how they showcased their projects to the public and what they learned from the experience of collecting interviews.

This month, Press Record is excited to bring you Part I of our first mini-series on oral history and environmental racism featuring the work of two scholars: Danielle Purifoy and Pavithra Vasudevan. In this episode, you'll meet Danielle and Pavithra and listen to them discuss their projects and the meaning of environmental racism. You'll also hear from some of the people they interviewed explain their firsthand experiences fighting for environmental justice in the South.

This month, Press Record dives into an ongoing project about oral history and immigration in North Carolina. In the following episode, Carol sits down with Maria Ramírez and Laura Villa who both worked on the New Roots/Nuevas Raíces Project. New Roots/ Nuevas Raíces is a bilingual digital archive that contains oral histories from Latin American migrants in North Carolina as well as North Carolinians who have worked closely with migrants in the state. In the following half hour, you'll hear oral history clips, conversations about what went into making a bilingual digital archive, and how New Roots has moved beyond the walls of academia.

This month, Press Record revisits questions about silence and rural segregation by taking a look at the Backways project one year later. The structure of this episode is a little different; the following half hour represents the highlights of two conversations with Rachel Cotterman, a field scholar here at the SOHP who is currently working on the Backways project. Rachel talks about silences in the archives, the legacy of Jim Crow in North Carolina, and what it means for her to do a research project close to home. We hope this episode gives you an inside look at some of the research going on here at the SOHP and the questions some of our field scholars are navigating in the process of doing oral history.

Episode 11: Oral History and the ERA by Southern Oral History Program