A colleague recently stopped by my office to express his concerns about a research project on racial politics in the late 1980s and 1990s that one of my students had proposed for his approval. The proposed research, my colleague feared, was not properly historical. How could this student write a strong history paper without more distance from the events she was writing about? he asked. Would there be any historiography that the student could consult to guide her research? Wouldn’t the project become more of a politically driven reflection on recent events than a historical analysis?

While I gathered my...

“I remember at the time it was a big deal but I didn’t quite understand why. It was only after I read about it in the textbook that I understood how huge it was.” This captures one student’s contribution to a discussion about the very recent past, made during the final section meeting of History 104: The United States since 1877, a course I taught at Oberlin College in spring 2010.¹ The student was referring to the contested presidential election of 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush. This topic was among the last we read about, and it...

In 1968 five medical students from universities in the Northeast spent the summer in the Mississippi Delta serving as interns in a public health clinic. Over the course of the summer, the students conducted medical assessments of impoverished African American families and compiled narrative case histories for each family. The case histories illuminate familial structures and relations, social networks, economic and living conditions, public health and social programs, and education in the Delta community. They also provide personal details about individuals’ medical conditions and anomalies, hygiene, sexual habits and pregnancies, religious convictions, and social mores. The case histories, as well...

I shouldn’t have to violate federal law to give a paper at a major history conference. The plan was to present my work on how copyright law had been used to prevent and allow use of civil rights movement images, and to what end, as part of a panel at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. I ended with a mention of the 2001 television commercial for Alcatel Americas (the domestic arm of a French company that builds voice and data networks), in which the special effects team from Industrial Light and Magic—the wizards that brought us...

The study of recent history almost demands that scholars augment their archival research with oral history interviews—if, in fact, interviewing is not already the central methodology being employed. This expectation, however, runs up against the fact that historians are rarely trained in oral history methodology, and universities that offer such training are few and far between. This gap between expectation and training opens scholars and their research to many potential pitfalls, from study design through analysis of the interviews themselves. Given that oral history is by its nature an interactive methodology that requires interface with living witnesses to historical...

The civil rights demonstrations and keen resistance to desegregation in Birmingham, Alabama, loom large in the national imagination. Police dogs and fire hoses turned on black schoolchildren made international headlines in the spring of 1963, putting the city into the center of a civil rights media storm. The power of those days has not ebbed in local minds. Interviewing in Birmingham for my dissertation and the Southern Oral History Program, I often found discussions circling back again and again to the events of 1963 and the city’s national moment. As I tried to push the interviews forward to my own...

As I sat down with feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller in the fall of 2009 to do the first oral history I had ever done, I could not help but be reminded of what different worlds we occupied in the mid-1980s. Coming off her best-selling book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), she had become a prominent antipornography activist, working to close X-rated movie theaters and live sex shows in Times Square.² At the time I was in graduate school, dimly aware of this work, but mostly experiencing feminism through the impact it was having on traditional fields of...

Thomas j. sugrue’s sweet land of liberty, published in 2010, has been praised as a “major contribution to our understanding” of the struggle for racial equality in the United States and a “bold … rewriting of civil rights history.”¹ Interpretively, the book argues powerfully for expanding the focus of the familiar civil rights story beyond the South to northern states, where racial discrimination was less egregious but still deeply pernicious. Empirically, it rests on heroic labors in scores of archival collections, oral histories, hard-to-find newspapers, government reports, and sociological studies. To browse its 117 pages of endnotes is to surmise...

In march 2003 the first recon battalion (nicknamed First Suicide Battalion) of the U.S. Marine Corps entered Iraq as part of the effort to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power. Much like the characters of so many Hollywood combat films, elite soldiers from different socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and hometowns composed the battalion. Despite these differences, they all shared similar training and the extraordinary ability to fight and destroy their enemies. As the battalion approached another resistant Iraqi town, their Humvees dodged burned-out vehicles, enemy gunfire, and dropped wire cables meant to decapitate turret gunners.

For Corporal James Trombley, the...

The installation of an “eternal flame” is a common feature of memorial sites around the world. The symbol captures the ephemerality of the past in the immateriality of fire and highlights the enduring significance of the past for the present and the way that the past can illuminate the present. The eternal flame also captures the incendiary contentiousness of the past and the responsibility of the present to remember and sustain the past. All of these aspects of the symbol resonate in relation to historical memories of World War II. Few question that World War II was a cataclysmic event...

In 1987 a dedicated group of African American women began to organize in Los Angeles neighborhoods, at polling booths, and in front of the county Board of Supervisors. Home health aides themselves, they sought to reach a vast “invisible workforce” of paid caregivers who labored individually in people’s homes, assisting and caring for people with disabilities and elderly persons, often their own parents, spouses, or children. They numbered in the tens of thousands, yet many had little inkling that others out there shared their situation. Although they were funded through a state program, In-Home Support Services (ihss), their status as...

In 1999 a journalist from time magazine traveled to Eatonton, Georgia, to interview members of a controversial new religious community that had recently relocated to the area. The reporter asked Minister Marshall Chance, the head spokesperson of the Nuwaubian’s Holy Tabernacle Ministries, whether, as had been widely reported, the community expected the return of a spaceship in the near future. Chance responded, “Some of us do, and some of us don’t.”¹

This careful, equivocal, and perhaps alarming exchange exemplifies the public challenges that new religious movements often face in negotiating with the outside world: how to simultaneously assuage the concerns...