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 PALGRAVE

Series Editors: Linda Shopes and Bruce M. Stave

The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in
Rome by Alessandro Portelli (2003)
Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila by Sandy
Polishuk (2003)
To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialystok to Shanghai to the Promised Land, an Oral
History by Samuel Iwry, edited by L. J. H. Kelley (2004)
Education as My Agenda: Gertrude Williams, Race, and the Baltimore Public Schools by
Jo Ann Robinson (2005)
Remembering: Oral History Performance edited by Della Pollock (2005)
Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the “Dirty War,” by
Susana Kaiser (2005)
Growing Up in the People’s Republic: Conversations between Two Daughters of China’s
Revolution by Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong (2005)
Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and
Social Change by Kim Lacy Rogers (2006)
Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control,
1961–1973 by David P. Cline (2006)
Voices from This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and
Manzanar Pasts by Jane Wehrey (2006)
Radicals, Rhetoric, and the War: The University of Nevada in the Wake of Kent State by
Brad Lucas (2006)
The Unquiet Nisei: An Oral History of the Life of Sue Kunitomi Embrey by Diana
Meyers Bahr (2007)
Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City
by Jane LaTour (2008)
Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon edited
by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shasha (2008)
Soldiers and Citizens: An Oral History of Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Battlefield
to the Pentagon by Carl Mirra (2008)
Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond edited
by D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand (2009)
I Saw it Coming: Worker Narratives of Plant Closings and Job Loss by Tracy E. K’Meyer
and Joy L. Hart (2009)
Speaking History: Oral Histories of the American Past, 1865–present by Sue Armitage
and Laurie Mercier (2009)
Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle toward School Integration in
Rural North Carolina by Kate Willink (2009)
Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonials of Women in the
Wake of an Industrial Disaster by Suroopa Mukherjee (2010)
Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South
by Anne Valk and Leslie Brown (2010)
Stories from the Gulag by Jehanne Gheith and Katherine Jolluck (2010)
Speaking History
Oral Histories of the American
Past, 1865–present

Sue Armitage and Laurie Mercier

ISBN 978-1-4039-7783-0 ISBN 978-0-230-10491-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-10491-4
SPEAKING HISTORY
Copyright © Sue Armitage and Laurie Mercier, 2009.
Reprint of the original edition 2009

All rights reserved.

First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978–1–4039–7783–0 (paperback)
ISBN 978–1–4039–7782–3 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
Speaking history : oral histories of the American past, 1865–present /
edited by Sue Armitage and Laurie Mercier.
p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in oral history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. United States—History—1865– 2. Oral history. I. Armitage,

Susan H. (Susan Hodge), 1937– II. Mercier, Laurie.
E661.S64 2009
973—dc22 2009023411
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Series Editors’ Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1
ONE
1865–1900 7
Race Relations 8
The End of Slavery: Boston Blackwell 9
Sharecropping and Violence: Hughsey Childes and
Minnie Whitney 13
A California Remembers the War: Doña
Angustias de la Guerra 14
A Wounded Knee Survivor Remembers: Dewey Beard 18
Work on the Western Agricultural Frontier 20
A Homesteader’s Account: Will H. Berger 21
A Cowboy’s Story: Richard Phillips 23
Immigration 25
A Greek Peddler: Anonymous 27
A Chinese Businessman: Woo Gen 29
Industrial War 32
The Homestead Strike: John Holway 34
TWO
1900–1920 39
Reform Movements 40
Women’s Reform: Sylvie Thygeson and Rebecca Reyher 40
Race and Work in the South 46
Child Labor: Naomi Trammel 46
Growing Up with Segregation: Avery Downing 50
vi / Contents

Migrations 52
From Russia to Chicago and Montana: Dora Rosenzweig 53
Beginning the Great Migration: M. Kelly Fritz 57
World War I 59
At the Front: Homer Nikirk 60
On the Homefront: Lola Clyde and Adin McKeown 65
The Influenza Epidemic: Lela Oman 69
THREE
1920–1945 71
Migrations 72
North to the United States for “a Steady Job”: Epigmenio
“Manuel” Rosales 72
From Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California: Mildred Lenora
Morris Ward 76
Involuntary Migration to Mexico: Emilia Castañeda
de Valenciana 79
Leisure and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s 82
Drinking and Leisure during Prohibition: Helen Raymond 82
American Renaissance: Marvel Cooke 84
Turn Your Radio On: John Koch 88
Work and Labor during the Great Depression 90
The New CIO and the 1937 Steel Strike: Thomas White 92
Working for the Civilian Conservation Corps: Marvin Whaley 95
Discrimination and the Depression: Rev Walter M. Cavers 98
World War II: Opportunities and Tragedies 101
Women at Work: LueRayne Culbertson 101
Women at War: Violet Hill Gordon 105
Negotiating Internment: Amy Uno Ishii 109
FOUR
1945–1965 115
The Cold War at Home 116
The Left during the Cold War: Rose Leopold 117
The Cold War and Labor: Frank Fiorello 120
Migrations 123
Opportunities in the Industrial North: Joe Farmer 125
Urban Indians: Gertrude Chapoose Willie 128
Race and Civil Rights 131
Desegregating the Nation’s Capital: Christine
Stewart McCreary 132
Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi: Unita Blackwell 136
 Contents / vii

Postwar Work, Family, and Community 140

Negotiating Career and Family in Arizona: Belen
Soto Moreno 142
Life in the D.C. Suburbs: Valerie Vahouny 146
FIVE
1965–2000 151
Protest and Social Change 152
Rock ‘n’ Roll and Cultural Protest: Gerald
Vincent “Gerry” Casale 153
Radical Protest—SDS and the Weatherman:
Jonathan Lerner 156
The Gender Revolution and its Backlash 160
The Dawning of the Gay Rights Movement: Warren
Allen Smith 161
The Conservative Women’s Movement: Kathryn (Kay)
King Regan 165
Cold War Warriors 169
Vietnam War Soldiers: Dave Taylor 170
The Nuclear Cold War and Its Environmental Consequences: Ian
Dominic Zabarte 174
Cold War Migrations 178
“Born a Hmong Daughter”: Bo Thao 179
Sanctuary for Central American Refugees:
Ninfa Ochoa Krueger 183
Economic Change and New Domestic Challenges 187
Shrinking Jobs in the Industrial Economy: Kenneth Hill 187
Domestic Terrorism and the Oklahoma City Bombing:
Hal McKnight 191
APPENDIX
How to Conduct an Oral History Interview:
A Quick Guide 197

Select Bibliography 199

 Illustrations

1 An African American sharecropper 12

2 Medical examination of immigrants at Ellis Island, New York 26
3 A popular news magazine reports the battle between strikers and
Pinkertons at Homestead, 1892 33
4 Suffragist speaking for woman suffrage in New York 43
5 A young girl working in a cotton mill, Roanoke, VA, 1911 49
6 Man and dog prepared for mustard gas at the front in World War I 64
7 Eighteen-year-old mother from Oklahoma, now a California migrant 75
8 Striking seamen picket Commerce Department, Washington, DC,
Jan. 18, 1937 91
9 Civilian Conservation Corps boys at work, Prince George’s County, MD 95
10 Japanese American evacuees in Pinedale (CA) Assembly Center
dining hall, 1942 109
11 People sitting on front porches in an African-American neighborhood in
Chicago, IL, 1941 124
12 Civil rights march on Washington, DC, Aug. 28, 1963 135
13 One-room school in the Hispanic community of Ojo Sarco,
New Mexico 141
14 Demonstration in favor of equal rights for women, Washington, DC 160
15 Hmong girls playing a traditional game of ball-tossing, December 2005
(Wikipedia Commons) 179
16 Oklahoma City Bombing (Federal Emergency Management Agency) 192
 Series Editors’ Foreword

The history of the United States during the past 150 years is marked by enormous
change, but also by more than a modicum of continuity. The tension between the
two helps make the history of the period a fascinating chronicle of economic and
political transformation, war and peace, racial and ethnic division as well as unity,
and cultural cohesion and cleavage. Historians often slice and dice the period cov-
ered in this volume with labels such as Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, Populism,
Progressivism, the Twenties, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Cold War,
the Age of Reagan, and so on. In Speaking History, Sue Armitage and Laurie Mercier
divide their work into five chronological periods and bring together some of the best
examples of how oral history helps to illuminate the nation’s past.
Their emphasis on the role of ordinary people reveals one of the several ways that
oral history can be useful. It also can be employed to capture the stories of the movers
and shakers, such as the decision-makers who govern or who oversee large corpora-
tions. Those people often leave written records and have their activities chronicled
in newspapers or other media. In their case, the oral history normally attempts to
get beyond what already is known, to ask questions not answered by other available
information, to fill in the gaps. The people of interest to Armitage and Mercier, the
“unfamous,” usually don’t leave written records, and when they do appear in the
public record, it is often as the object of state intervention, not on their own terms.
An oral history interview provides the sole opportunity to obtain their version of life
stories or accounts of a specific event or activity. Since the middle of the 20th century
such accounts have been planned tape recorded, or more recently, digitally recorded
interviews. However, because the chronology of this volume extends back to the
period of Reconstruction, the editors creatively have included material not captured
with the help of audio technology. As this book’s early selections reveal, interviews
were conducted and recorded in writing long before these devices existed. The result-
ing transcripts reflected as much the person who wrote down the interview as the
individual interviewed. For example, see the first excerpt in this volume with Boston
Blackwell, a former slave.
Whatever the means used to obtain them, capturing spoken words brings his-
tory alive. Quotes by ordinary people humanize the historical narrative. Among
the selected oral histories herein, readers of this volume will find many instances
that prove the point. An African American who came to Detroit during the Great
xii / Series Editors’ Foreword

Migration explained how insignificant he felt when he walked through the crowded
Detroit Athletic Club: “I thought everybody in the world was looking at me. There
wasn’t a soul seeing me. Who the hell is going to see a busboy?” The implications for
issues of race and class at the time are palpable. An Oklahoman, or “Okie,” who
migrated to California aptly describes the Dust Bowl and remarks, “You couldn’t
even tell where the sun was.” A Japanese American recounts her feelings at the time
of internment during World War II: “I felt like an ant. I wanted to shrivel up into
nothing.” Less dramatically, a resident of Fairfax, Virginia incisively portrays every-
day, mundane life in an American suburb during the 1950s and 1960s. Those who
speak history have much to say even when discussing the ordinary.
Beyond giving us new knowledge of those otherwise absent from history and
humanizing them, oral history can complicate the generalities with which surveys
of United States history necessarily proceed. That is, oral history shows us in a more
fine-grained way the continuities and changes of a given period, the fits and starts
by which the trajectory of “history” moves, and also the human consequences of the
“big events” of the past.
This volume adds a new dimension to the Palgrave Studies in Oral History series,
which already includes sixteen books. These ordinarily cover a single topic such as
those most recently published about African Americans and Hurricane Katrina or
about reactions to the war in Iraq; others concentrate on the experience of a sin-
gle individual such as Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who led the movement for redress of
Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Usually, the interviews on which
the books are based primarily come from one oral history collection. Speaking History,
on the other hand, covers the entire panorama of U. S. history since Reconstruction
and mines the collections of a variety of the nation’s archives, large and small. It also
includes a guide on how to conduct an oral history for those interested in doing so. It
will assist those who seek to understand change and continuity in American society
over the past century and a half.

Bruce M. Stave
University of Connecticut
Linda Shopes
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
 Acknowledgments

Our first thanks go to the people who asked us to undertake this project in the first
place, Linda Shopes and Bruce Stave, longtime members and officers of the national
Oral History Association and editors of the Palgrave Oral History series. Special
thanks are also owed to Chris Chappell at Palgrave for his support, patience, and
keeping this book on track; to Tess Rond of Washington State University (WSU) for
her computer skills and intelligent questions; and to the WSU History Department
for its assistance.
This project would have been impossible without the help of oral historians and
archivists all over the country. The long list that follows is one way to say thanks.
Oral histories came to us from many individuals and institutions. Listed alphabeti-
cally, they are:

American Century Project, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, Potomac, Maryland

American Indian Research Project, University of South Dakota
American West Center, University of Utah
Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley
Baylor University Institute for Oral History
Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University
Center for Oral and Public History, California State University Fullerton
Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University
Gloria Cuadraz, Arizona State University
Detroit Urban League
Dust Bowl Migration Digital Archives, Walter W. Stiern Library, California State
University Bakersfield
Experience Music Project | Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Seattle
Charles Hardy, “Goin’ North: Tales of the Great Migration” radio documentary
Hoover Library, Stanford University
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
Idaho State Historical Society
Latah County (Idaho) Historical Society
Sydney Lewis, Rochester, Massachusetts
Library of Congress, “Born in Slavery” collection
xiv / Acknowledgments

Library of Congress, American Memory project

Maine Folklife Center, University of Maine
Minnesota Historical Society
Montana Historical Society
Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, University of Nevada Las Vegas
Northwest Women’s Oral History Project
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries
Oklahoma Historical Society
Oral History Research Office, Columbia University
Sandy Polishuk, Portland, Oregon
Project Jukebox, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Regional Oral History Office, University of California Berkeley
Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina
Dan Terkel, Chicago
United States Senate Historical Office
University at Albany, State University of New York
University of Southern Mississippi Oral History Program
Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University
Washington Women’s History Consortium, Washington State Historical Society
Women in Journalism Oral History Project, Washington Press Club Foundation
Youngstown (Ohio) State University Archives and Special Collections
Judy Yung, San Francisco
 Introduction

This volume of oral histories features the voices of Americans who lived through
some of the most critical events shaping the nation’s history since the Civil War.
Their memories bring history alive, lending an unequalled immediacy to the past.
In the process, they give us a glimpse of a new kind of history. Conventionally,
we tend to think of History with a capital H: a narrative of great events—wars,
elections, and enterprise—decided by the prominent people in charge—generals,
presidents, and CEOs. And in most history textbooks, generalizations drown out
the particular, the voices of ordinary individuals are lost, and what we remember
are the words and actions of the famous (and infamous). This volume seeks to
illuminate the particular experiences of ordinary Americans and how they par-
ticipated in and observed history in the making. Here, they speak to us about
themes familiar and unfamiliar: about migration, family life, discrimination,
labor, leisure, social movements, depression, and wars. In so doing, they reveal
the many ways in which individual experience and historical events intersect.
On the one hand, they show us how individuals live through, and affect, great
historical events. And at the same time, they aid our historical understanding by
providing texture and depth to historians’ generalizations.
For thousands of years peoples of the world have relied on the spoken word
to understand history. In the late nineteenth century, however, as history became
an organized academic discipline, scholars became suspicious of oral sources
and considered only written records as reliable. The inevitable result was “top
down” history, because records were created only by those who were able to
write or who were so notable that others wanted to write about them. Only in
the mid-twentieth century did historians begin to rediscover the value of oral
reminiscences. In the depth of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Federal
Writers Project employed writers to document American lifeways and culture by
2 / SPEAKING HISTORY

interviewing elderly people of special interest—ex-slaves, western pioneers, work-

ers in certain occupations, immigrants, and their children—and then writing up
the interviews. What made these interviews unique was precisely the fact that
they were not with well-known people, nor about celebrated events. In spite of an
obvious bias toward a nostalgic vision of rural America, the interviews provided
the first real opportunity for ordinary Americans (especially the 2,000 former
slaves) to speak for themselves about their own lives.
Following World War II, the advent of new technology—the tape recorder—
and the desire to obtain a more complete record of those who had led notable
lives or were eyewitnesses to significant events led to the formal creation of the
first academic oral history programs and archives. Allan Nevins founded the
Columbia Oral History Research Office in 1948. The University of California at
Berkeley, UCLA, and several presidential libraries initiated oral history programs
in the 1950s and 1960s. These programs sought to record the memories of the
nation’s “movers and shakers” about what we might call “the story behind the
story.” Why did a politician propose a controversial bill? What were his personal,
private reasons? What happened behind the scenes? Whom did he contact, make
deals with, work against? Who were his rivals, who his collaborators? What was
he really like in his unguarded, offstage moments? These kinds of interviews with
public figures have added considerably to our understanding of political and
institutional history.
It was the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that spawned new
interest in the lives of people formerly ignored by the historical record—
women, workers, racial/ethnic minorities, people of different sexual orientations,
children—and oral history became a popular method for discovering and captur-
ing those “hidden” histories. An entire generation of historians became motivated
to write what is commonly known as social history, by which we mean the his-
tory of interactions of different groups in society rather than the more customary
narrative of politics and economics. Beginning in the 1970s, large numbers of
schools, local historical societies, and university and state programs launched oral
history projects to capture the reminiscences of both the known and not-so-well
known people. You will find interviews from a number of these projects in the
pages that follow. Indeed, there are thousands of oral history interviews stored in
archives all over the country; increasingly, these can be found in digital formats
on the Internet. A major purpose of this volume is to encourage our readers to
appreciate the richness of the source material that these archived oral histories
can provide.
What exactly is oral history? It is much more than a conversation between
two people about past events. Oral history refers to a planned and recorded inter-
view in which the interviewer helps the narrator recall certain experiences in
full detail. For the narrator, the process of reflecting often elicits spontaneous
thoughts and emotions, bringing a sense of immediacy that even the best-written
 INTRODUCTION / 3

recollections lack. Interviewers also have an important part to play in the ques-
tions they ask, and in how they encourage full recollection. Narrators often react
differently to different interviewers, depending on race, age, gender, and familiar-
ity. You will see many varieties of interviewer-narrator interaction in the follow-
ing pages, but even in the selections where the questions have been removed, it is
important to remember that oral history is a collaboration between two people,
not a monologue, and created at a particular point in time.

Using Oral History

What makes oral history such a valuable source for our understanding of history?
And what did we mean when we say that these interviews are the building blocks
of a new kind of history?
We look to oral histories to answer a number of questions. The first that we
all feel is the urge to recapture significant events: what was it like to be there?
What did you see when the World Trade Towers collapsed on 9/11? What did
you do on 9/11? What was it like to serve as a soldier in World War II or to
migrate from China to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century?
But we also seek to find out how people lived their lives from day to day. How
did you survive on your wages as a domestic worker? What was a typical work day
like in the steel mill? What can you recall of the games you played in childhood,
or the foods prepared by your parents or grandparents? As narrators remember
what happened and what they did, they can make past events come alive again
for all of us. Through their eyes we can see the past—or a little slice of it. The
memories of individuals contain a wealth of information, information that is
usually not available in any other form. By giving voice to people heretofore
excluded or ignored in the usual historical sources, oral history can provide a
fuller, more honest picture of the past.
But are these memories reliable? Memory is a tricky thing. As we age, some
memories become sharper while others dim. Often the popular or collective
memory of events such as a natural catastrophe or a labor strike drowns out or
alters our own individual recollections. And we know that one single memory
can’t tell it all. The problem with “eyewitness” oral history, for example, is that
no single reminiscence can contain the whole truth. Famously, when Cornelius
Ryan decided to write the “truth” of the D Day invasion of Normandy by inter-
viewing survivors, he found so many conflicting stories that he abandoned his
goal of writing the absolutely final, definitive “history.” In a larger sense, it seems
fair to say that oral histories are a way for people to make sense of their pasts, even
if all the details are not precisely accurate.
The full possibilities of oral history begin to become clear when we think
of all the people who will never write their memoirs, never save their letters
4 / SPEAKING HISTORY

or emails and donate them to an archive, never keep a diary or share it with
anyone. We have never known how most people lived their daily lives, or what
they thought. Today, however, we have the tools to interview almost anyone. We
have the means to document a genuine peoples’ history. Of course we cannot in
fact interview everyone, but we can now realistically aim to write a popular his-
tory, based on the idea: we all make history. Each one of us, in our life choices,
makes our own history, even if under circumstances inherited from the past. All
of us, with our combined choices and reactions, make our national history. Those
actions, of course, are shaped by structures often beyond our control, for example
the decisions made by officials to go to war, or by corporations to lay off workers
and move operations to another country. At any given moment, all that may be
obvious is a huge jumble of conflicting actions and opinions, but out of that very
diversity emerges a direction that in hindsight we call “history.”
Oral history has been a key tool in this exciting process of discovery. All
the new voices have vastly complicated any simple version of American history.
These reminiscences enrich, illuminate, and often contradict older versions of
the meaning of events, and they lead us to ask new questions. Each oral history
is individual, and it tells an individual story. As our experiences have differed,
so have our beliefs, values, and perceptions. Some people find this diversity of
viewpoints upsetting, fearing that we are losing the unity and shared beliefs that
hold us together as a nation. But for many others, the diversity is the story. New
viewpoints challenge us to think of the past in wider and more comprehensive
ways, and in their complexity, make history more compelling. In that spirit, we
offer a variety of perspectives in the following pages. We invite you to hear the
past speak in many voices.

Navigating Speaking History

In the following pages we present excerpts from fifty oral history interviews that
exemplify major themes in American history since 1865. We chose them from
among the thousands of interviews in oral history archives all over the country.
Recognizing the fallibility of memory, we make no claim that the oral histories we
have chosen “tell the whole truth.” We chose interviews that, in our view, seemed
accurate to the facts of history as we know them, but our primary purpose was to
select interviews that provided more than usual depth of insight into the life of
an individual and his or her times. There are many other interview examples that
could not be included because of space limitations. We urge you to explore the
rich variety of the country’s oral history archives, many of which have excellent
indexes and substantial collections available through the Internet.
The five sections that follow are divided chronologically: 1865–1900;
1900–1920; 1920–1945; 1945–1965; 1965–2000. Beginning with a very brief
 INTRODUCTION / 5

introduction to the major events of the period, each section offers about ten oral
histories, drawn from archives all over the country, to illuminate major themes.
Five of the constant themes across all sections are war, migration, race, culture,
and work, while within each section other themes will be prominent as well.
To a large extent, we let each oral history “speak for itself,” while also pointing
out specific characteristics of each interview. Each example comes from a longer
interview; many of the transcribed interviews are available in their entirety in
electronic form on the Internet or from the institution noted. We have lightly
edited most interviews by removing repeated phrases, eliminating some ques-
tions, and indicating by ellipses where we made cuts. Brackets indicate editorial
clarifications, either by the interviewer, transcriber, or by us.
In each thematic section, we ask questions to guide you in thinking about
how these oral histories expand, modify or challenge our current historical under-
standing. In this way, we encourage you to join us in thinking about history as
the ongoing story of people shaping their own lives. As they speak history, they
point the way to a new sense of the past.
Finally, the Appendix gives you the tools to undertake an oral history your-
self. There you will find a brief “how to” guide for conducting and preserving an
interview, as well as a bibliography and list of websites with further helpful infor-
mation. The opportunity to interview a person about historical events through
which they lived is a way in which you personally can bring history alive. You will
probably hear things you did not expect to hear—the surprise value of oral his-
tory is one of its greatest pleasures! Many people have a lot to tell us about their
pasts. By helping them speak their histories they enrich our own.
 O N E

1865–1900

The consequences of the Civil War shaped every aspect of American life in
the second half of the nineteenth century. The South had to be rebuilt and the
fate of four million African-American former slaves decided. Race relations were
the paramount, and the most controversial, southern concern. Race was also an
issue in the vast new western territories that the United States had taken in 1848
at the end of the Mexican-American War. Many Americans believed that west-
ward expansion required control over the American Indian and Mexican inhabit-
ants of the region and its resources.
Another consequence of the Civil War was a fundamental change in size and
organization of society. Large industries originally created by wartime needs now
contributed to a vastly accelerated rate of industrialization that attracted massive
immigration from Europe and Asia. The growth of industrial capitalism provoked
unprecedented conflict about wages, working conditions, and power in American
society. At the very moment when individual homesteaders were establishing farms
and ranches in the West, a new, larger scale of organization—what one historian
has called “the incorporation of America”—was transforming the society of small
towns and small businesses that had been the norm before the Civil War.
The nine interviews in this section introduce you to the voices of nineteenth
century Americans as they coped with these major adjustments in their lives.
The first five interviews concern different aspects of race relations in the period
1865–1900, in the South and in the West, followed by two interviews about
work on the western agricultural frontier, by a farmer and a cowboy. Two immigra-
tion accounts, one from the East Coast, one from the West, follow. Finally, this
section concludes with an account of a battle that epitomized the bitter nature
of the industrial war of the period. Each thematic section provides questions that
focus on what these oral histories add to our sense of history.
8 / SPEAKING HISTORY

None of the interviews in this section were preserved with mechanical record-
ing devices. Unlike later sound recordings, in the nineteenth century the accu-
racy of an interview depended on the interviewer and how well he or she listened
and transcribed. Accuracy also depended on the interviewer’s intent: sometimes
it seemed important to reproduce exact words and speech patterns; in other cases
interviewers paraphrased the spoken narrative. When reading the interviews in
this section, the reader should always keep in mind that the very words the nar-
rator “speaks” come to us literally through the interviewer as that person decides
how to write down the narrator’s words. The selections that follow introduce
the reader to various choices made by interviewers about how they present the
reminiscence.

Race Relations

In the South, federally imposed Reconstruction following the Civil War

intended to give four million ex-slaves political and civil rights. In 1865 General
William T. Sherman granted economic independence, represented by land and
the means to cultivate it—the famous “forty acres and a mule”—to black fami-
lies on the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. But Andrew Johnson
revoked the provision when he became president after the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln. As a result, few ex-slaves were able to withstand the violence
and coercion of the Ku Klux Klan and economic pressures from landowners,
who quickly established the labor system known as sharecropping. Although
no longer enslaved, African Americans were forced to sign contracts with white
landowners for land and tools, and in return paid the owner a share of each year’s
crop. Many soon found themselves in debt to their landlords. White southerners
claimed that former slaves were too ignorant and indolent to survive without
this strict control. In the decades after Reconstruction ended in 1877, whites
established a system of segregation (Jim Crow), and denied voting rights to
African Americans as well.
In the lands that the United States had conquered from Mexico, two groups
came under American control: the Mexicans in California, Arizona, New Mexico,
and Texas; and American Indians. The Mexicans lost their lands and influence,
and few were able to become U.S. citizens, although the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo technically guaranteed citizenship. American Indians, overwhelmed
by Euro-American settlers and the United States military, were confined to res-
ervations. In effect, both groups were racially marked as inferior. When most
Americans thought about Mexicans and American Indians at all, they echoed
journalist John O’Sullivan, who claimed that it was “our manifest destiny to
overspread the continent allotted [to us] by Providence,” ignoring the rights of
the people who were already there.
 1865–1900 / 9

Questions to Consider: The first three interviews, one by an ex-slave and

another by two members of the next generation of African Americans, illus-
trate how the initial hopes of freedom were lost. The last two interviews, from
an elite Spanish Mexican woman and from a survivor of the Wounded Knee
massacre of 1890, illustrate different kinds of conquest and resistance. Note
how language matters in these interviews. Beulah Hagg probably believed that
she was “authentic” when she wrote Boston Blackwell’s interview in dialect.
Thomas Savage, the interviewer of Doña Angustias, was proud of his ability to
transcribe Spanish at high speed word for word. James McGregor interviewed
Dewey Beard through an interpreter.
1. In what ways do the first three narrators contradict the southern stereo-
type of former slaves as ignorant and childlike?
2. How do these five narrators demonstrate resistance?
3. In what ways does language itself affect the interview? Can we regard
these interviews as authentically “in their own words?” And even when
we hear the recorded voices of Hughsey Childes and Minnie Whitney, do
we know enough about them from these brief excerpts to be able to fully
understand their testimony?

The End of Slavery: Boston Blackwell

Source Note: The first interview is from the nation’s most famous oral history
collection, the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers Project in the
1930s. Over 2000 former slaves were interviewed and their memories preserved
in the Library of Congress. For years the collection was controversial. Many
historians questioned the accuracy of the accounts. After all, by the 1930s,
ex-slaves were elderly and their memories faded. Historians also questioned
how well the interviews represented former slaves. Although 2,000 was a large
sample, it was only 2 percent of the total slave population. Also, would elderly
black people speak frankly with the interviewers, most of whom were white?
For these and other reasons, scholars generally ignored the interviews until the
1970s, when as a consequence of the civil rights movement, historians came
to realize that the interviews contained valuable insight into the day-to-day
reality of slavery as it was experienced by those who endured it. Today Born in
Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938 is a major
online resource of the Library of Congress at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/
snhtml/.
Boston Blackwell was 98 years old when he was interviewed in 1938 in Little
Rock, Arkansas, but his energetic recollections show that he was neither senile nor
intimidated by his interviewer, Beulah Hagg, who was white. He tells a vivid story of
hard work, hope, and disappointment: “That old story ‘bout 40 acres and a mule, it
make me laugh.” Blackwell describes several experiences typical of ex-slaves, including
10 / SPEAKING HISTORY

escape to Union lines, being welcomed as a “contraband” and put to work, and that
he had pension and voting rights. The interviewer chose to convey the voice and style
of this narrator by the use of dialect in her transcript of the interview, a choice that
was common in the 1930s but can seem demeaning today.
Make yourself comfoble, miss. I can’t see you much ‘cause my eyes, they
is dim. My voice, it kinder dim too. I knows my age, good. Old Miss, she
told me when I got sold “Boss, you is 13—borned Christmas. Be sure to
tell your new misses and she put you down in her book.” My borned name
was Pruitt ‘cause I got borned on Robert Pruitt’s plantation in Georgia,—
Franklin County, Georgia. But Blackwell, it my freed name. You see, miss,
after my mammy got sold down to Augusta—I wisht I could tell you the man
what bought her, I ain’t never seed him since—I was sold to go to Arkansas;
Jefferson county, Arkansas. Then was when old Miss telled me I am 13. It was
before the Civil War I come here. The onliest auction of slaves I ever seed as
in Memphis, coming on to Arkansas. I heerd a girl bid off for $800. She was
about fifteen, I reckon. I heard a woman—a breeding woman, bid off for
$1500. They always brought good money. I’m telling you, it was when we was
coming from Atlanta.
Do you want to hear how I runned away and jined the Yankees? You know
Abraham Lincoln ‘claired freedom in ‘63, first day of January [the Emancipation
Proclamation]. In October ‘63, I runned away and went to Pine Bluff to get to
the Yankees. I was on the Blackwell plantation south of Pine Bluff in ‘63. They
was building a new house; I wanted to feel some putty in my hand. One early
morning I clim a ladder to get a little chunk and the overseer man, he seed me.
Here he come, yelling me to get down; he g’wine whip me ‘cause I’se a thief, he
say. He call a slave boy and tell him cut ten willer whips; he gwine wear every
one out on me. When he ‘a gone to eat breakfas’, I runs to my cabin and tells my
sister, ‘‘I’se leaving this here place for good.” She cry and say, “Overseer man, he
kill you.” I says, “He kill me anyhow.” The young boy what cut the whips—he
named Jerry—he come along wif me, and we wade the stream for long piece.
Heard the hounds a-howling, getting ready for to chase after us. Then we hide
in dark woods. It was cold, frosty weather. Two days and two nights we traveled.
That boy, he so cold and hongry, he want to fall out by the way, but I drug him
on. When we gets to the Yankee camp all our troubles was over. We gets all the
contraband we could eat. Was they more runaways there? Oh, Lordy, yessum.
Hundreds, I reckon. Yessum, the Yankees feeds all them refugees on contraband.
They made me a driver of a team in the quartermasters department. I was always
keerful to do everything they telled me. They telled me I was free when I gets to
the Yankee camp, but I couldn’t go outside much. Yessum, iffen you could get to
the Yankee’s camp you was free right now.
That old story ‘bout 40 acres and a mule, it make me laugh. Yessum, they
sure did tell us that, but I never knowed any pusson which got it. The officers
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