2023 Annual Meeting Scholarship Applications are now open! The OHA scholarship program provides students, professionals, and community practitioners with travel funds so they may attend the annual meeting. OHA offers more than $10,000 in scholarship funds each year. Go to https://oralhistory.org/annual-meeting-scholarships/ for more information.
May 2023 Executive Summary The first purpose of this document is to inform and assist college and university administrators, department chairs, promotion and tenure committees, and/or other employers by: 1) developing an appreciation for the intellectual effort, research, expertise, and time required for conducting successful oral history projects; 2) demonstrating the value and unique work […]
The Oral History Association invites you to apply to exhibit a research poster related to your oral history project at our 2023 annual meeting in Baltimore! This theme of this year’s meeting is “Oral History As/And Education: Teaching and Learning in the Classroom and Beyond.” As part of the program, we will host a […]
| 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. |
As OHA gears up for our conference in Baltimore we are pleased to announce that the Annual Call for Awards is OPEN! This year we are accepting applications for the following four categories: Article Award Book Award Mason Multi-Media Award Martha Ross Teaching Award Click this link to read more about each award and fill […]
As our program committee members review your great submissions for our upcoming 2023 annual meeting in Baltimore, October 18-21, we’d like to extend an invitation to propose additional workshops, meetings, and special events for our time together at the conference. Please use this link to submit your ideas by April 30th.