TY - JOUR
AU - Hogan, Wesley
AB - The HistoryMakers is an archive of three thousand oral history interviews, professionally conducted and recorded on digital video. Since the year 2000, the nonprofit organization of the same name, based in Chicago, has aimed to address “the lack of documentation and preservation of the African American historical record.” It seeks to “preserve and elevate the cultural equity of the African American community, as well as to increase the cultural understanding of present and future generations.” Noting that prior to 2000, the Works Progress Administration slave narratives were the only large-scale methodic attempt in the twentieth century to capture African American history from a first-person perspective, the lawyer and entrepreneur Julieanna Richardson started HistoryMakers, “to provide a unique scholarly and educational resource for exploring African American history and culture.” Her aim was to build an archive of five thousand interviews, “life oral histories covering the person's entire span of memories as well as his or her own family's oral history,” rather than focus on one particular part of a person's career or participation in the civil rights movement. Those chosen are African American by descent, who have made “a significant contribution in some area of American life or culture, or who has been associated with a particular movement or organization that is important to the African American community.” HistoryMakers prioritizes people based on age and accomplishments. The site also has a nomination form and information on regional and topical advisory boards that help select people to be interviewed. This collection is an astounding achievement. The vision, determination, fund raising, and organization building it takes to create an archive such as this outside a university setting is profound and exciting. The Library of Congress recognized the importance of the archive's collection in 2014, becoming the permanent repository for HistoryMakers. To access the collection, users can either join HistoryMakers online or through an affiliated institutional subscription, or they can go to the Moving Image Research Center at the Library of Congress's James Madison Memorial Building in Washington, D.C. The site is well organized, created for ease of use with many different audiences. It has a clean interface with the ability to search by topic, keyword, and person interviewed. I liked the “My Clips” feature—a simple bookmarking tool easy to use for students and scholars alike. The Faq page is similarly well organized and most importantly, not overwhelming. Its “How to Cite” and “Privacy Statement” pages are also both straightforward, short, and exceptionally well done. The site has features “Under Development,” such as a “Mixtape” as a way for users to share stories like on a 1980s cassette mixtape. The current four mixtapes focus on Black police officers, Black women speaking about race and gender, Black scholars in the field of classics, and the role of reading in African Americans' lives. These mixtapes show one of the most powerful features of the site. For example, cutting across all three thousand interviews, the mixtape on “reading” gathers clips from Marva Collins, Shelby Steele, and Eric Holder, as well as twenty others who share how reading has illuminated their world. Whether talking about teaching a parent to read, or how powerful reading has been as a superpower, or the excitement of reading Black newspapers each week, each clip is powerful—but taken together they provide a quilt that allows the site itself to curate topics, as well as individual users, in truly exciting ways. Similarly, the mixtape on Black women talking about race and gender ranges across the collection to include Maxine Waters recalling how Willie Brown came to her defense, Carol Moseley Braun talking about the way gender shaped her approach to politics, and Rev. Maisha Handy discussing womanist theology. The breadth and depth of these mixtapes invites further exploration, curiosity, and reflection. The people who use the site, according to the Faq page, come from fifty-one countries. Most are college educated and over the age of thirty; only 28% are twenty-nine and under. 58% are Black, 31% white, 3% Asian, 2% American Indian, 2% Latino/a. Fifty-seven percent of those who use the site are women. The balance of people interviewed tilts toward those involved in education (549 interviews), civic and political life (457), and media (378), with large numbers of artists (260), lawyers (235), and scientists (212) represented, and relatively few military members (84), sports figures (68), and medical professionals (130). Geographically, it perhaps unsurprisingly tilts toward Illinois (295 interviews), with the next largest cohorts coming from New York (241), Georgia (140), and Alabama (136). The most disappointing and inexplicable ratio, for a site that claims to find “America's missing stories,” is the inequity between women (998) and men (1693). The archive documents the lives of only six women for every ten men it interviews. The challenges for this archive are making connections to those it seeks to reach. Richardson and her team clearly understand that youth, “especially underserved youth, benefit greatly from exposure to the role models and the stories of success that have been recorded.” But the site is not well connected to K–12 teachers or public libraries, and is connected to only sixty colleges and universities as subscribers. The HistoryMakers team has worked in multiple ways to address this issue over the last twenty years by creating videos for public libraries, public programming for Pbs, and grants for faculty, graduate students, and students to use the collections. In 2004 they also created a pathbreaking partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (Cmu) to digitize the archive. Cmu fostered a great many innovations on the digital site and spearheaded an effort to update the deployment of the digital archive to a broader set of platforms. Over several years, they also presented these innovations at the Oral History Association's annual conference; all of these presentations are available through the HistoryMakers site, a powerful and intentional example of transparency and sharing of digital systems, software, and interfaces for video libraries. Since 2019 the University of Virginia has led a follow-up effort. Still, a significant gap remains between the richness of the site, on the one hand, and its “findability” for young people and their teachers and parents, on the other. This is an incredibly important archive that needs to be shared with a much wider audience. It could also benefit from guest curators creating many more “mixtapes” across the collection to be used with specific audiences, to draw them in. To reach its goal of five thousand interviews, perhaps it will also aim for gender equity. From Harriet Tubman, “Go to freedom or die today,” to Maxine Waters, “Reclaiming my time,” such an achievement would reflect the triumphs of the women who have kept this nation within bounds by setting the limits when no one else would or could. © The Author 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The HistoryMakers
JF - Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaab061
DA - 2021-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-historymakers-68RCrLGspK
SP - 231
EP - 233
VL - 108
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -