The Science History Institute is seeking a full-time Oral Historian and Curator of Life Sciences to conduct research on the modern histories of the life sciences to include biotechnology and synthetic biology. The Oral Historian and Curator of Life Sciences will conduct and process full-life or project-focused oral history interviews with scientists and engineers. This […]
Application Review Begins January 31 The Oral History Association (OHA) seeks to hire a full-time program associate to assist in the operation of its Executive Office. Since 1966, the OHA has served as the principal membership organization for people committed to the value of oral history. Job tasks assigned to the program associate include […]
The Southern Foodways Alliance oral history program invites experienced oral historians to submit proposals for oral history projects surrounding themes of agriculture, farmers markets, and gardening traditions in the region. We are committed to supporting community-centered work. To apply, please fill out this Google form. It should include a 300 word pitch and list of proposed narrators, a […]
Deadline: January 31, 2025 The Agricultural History Society has posted information on a new award for public engagement in Agricultural History: https://www.aghistorysociety.org/news/agricultural-history-society-award-for-public-engagement. Nominations (which may include self-nomination) are due to aghistorysociety@gmail.com by January 31, 2025. The award is intended to recognize public-facing work that incorporates agricultural and/or rural history as an essential component and contributes to broader […]
| From Frank Bruni’s NYT Opinion Column May 11, 2023 |
ONE OF MY FAVORITE PASTIMES! If this doesn’t make you laugh, you don’t love sentences like I do!
 Pool photo by Stefan Rousseau |
| In the prelude to last weekend’s coronation of King Charles III, Helen Lewis visited and considered royals less fussed over. “One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts,” she observed. “It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.” She has to pass through a gate “guarded by an elderly manservant for whom the term ‘faithful retainer’ might have been invented. Because I am British, his thinly disguised irritation at my presence makes me feel right at home.” (Thanks to Lizzy Menges of Garden City, N.Y., for drawing my attention to Lewis’s excellent article.) |
| Rachel Tashjian in The Washington Post weighed in on the ostentation of Charles’s coronation: “The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility.” (Ann Kolasa Zastrow, Evanston, Ill., and Merrio Morton, Lancaster, S.C., among many others) |
| And from Tom Holland in The Guardian: “Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures.” (Dot McFalls, Charlottesville, Va.) |
| In The New Yorker, J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” reflected on the impossibility of walking entirely in this particular man’s shoes: “I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience.” (Sara Klemmer, Charlotte, N.C., and Susan Kochan, Brooklyn, among others) |
| In The Times, Ligaya Mishan celebrated the infinite textures of food: “What of the coy half-surrender that the Italians venerate in pasta as ‘al dente’ and the Taiwanese in noodles and boba as ‘Q’ (or ‘QQ,’ if the food in question is exceptionally springy); the restive yolk threatening to slither off a six-minute egg; the seraphic weight of a chiffon cake; the heavy melt of fat off a slab of pork belly, slowly liquefying itself? What of goo, foam, dust, air? What of the worlds that lie between slime and velvet, collapse and refusal, succulence and desiccation?” (Judy Cress, El Cerrito, Calif.) |
| Also in The Times, Robert Draper profiled William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director: “His ascent is an unlikely turn for a tall, discreet figure with wary eyes, ashen hair and a trim mustache, a sort you could easily imagine in a John le Carré novel whispering into a dignitary’s ear at an embassy party that the city is falling to the rebels and a boat will be waiting in the harbor at midnight.” (Jefferson M. Gray, Baltimore, and Ed Lyon, Cincinnati) |
| And Michael Levenson reported on the odd dumping of hundreds of pounds of pasta alongside a creek in Old Bridge, N.J. “When photos of the discarded pasta were shared on a Reddit discussion about all things New Jersey, it became fertile ground for puns and dad jokes,” he wrote. “Someone commented: ‘We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary.’” Town workers cleaned up and disposed of the pasta in under an hour. “It was not clear if a large fork had been used.” (Pat Reneman, Kettle Falls, Wash., and Margaret Koziel, Cambridge, Mass., among others) |
| To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence. |
We’ve spent several years researching names, places, and dates related to experiences in World War II. These veterans were born in a United States that spoke English differently than we do now. Think about how Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn sound in some of those old movies. Many of them had never ventured more than 50 miles from the place they were born, and they carried those accents and eccentricities of speech for the rest of their lives.
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The places they visited were far-flung and exotic, and we’re capturing the place names, but also their remembered wonder at seeing those places for the first time. The shock of memories about huge coconut crabs on tropical islands juxtaposed with the sudden, bloody death of the guy right next to you.
And these guys remember the men who were lost—they remember their first and last names and often theor middle initials! They remember where that guy was from. And they remember the sudden, ghastly details of their deaths.
Education seems to have been pretty sporadic, and their reasons for enlisting are as varied as the men who enlisted, but they all shared some degree of naivete. Some have a greater understanding of infantry than others, but none of them were prepared for the realities of war.
They remember their lives before the war so carefully, but to us transcribing, it often seems like a landscape from the Wizard of Oz, more foreign than some of the locales they visited. Men who remember plowing acres of land with horses, and futures that offered only the option of doing what your dad, and his dad, had done.
We forget that most of the U.S. was unaware of the horrors of the Holocaust when we ventured into the war. And I think we forget how united Americans were in enlisting and joining the fight. We’ve heard many veterans comment that everybody was enlisting. My mother used to talk about how important radio was in those days, and veterans and people on the Home Front alike were stirred by Roosevelt’s “a day that will live in infamy speech.”
Listening to these oral histories has been a privilege, and researching their experiences “over there” has been a challenge.
Thanks to the National World War II Museum for the experience of a lifetime, and the chance to capture the descriptions of thousands of experiences of a lifetime.
You can find us here: https://www.ww2online.org/content/donor-support