Taking Their Place Among the Giants
Performing Oral Histories of Pennsylvania’s Black Freedom Struggle
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11077228 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Judith Ridner (Corner House, corresponding author), Judith A Ridner, Susan W Clemens-Bruder (Muhlenberg College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 48-76 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Oral History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0798 • E-ISSN: 1533-8592 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ohr/ohu003 |
| OpenAlex | W1993678643 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
Oral history performance is an important tool for making history, but performing oral histories also raises important questions about what kind of history is being made, issues of particular relevance to the performed histories of underrepresented minority groups, such as African Americans. This article focuses on a case study of Another River Flows , an African American oral history performance staged in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley in 2008. It examines the complex creative processes through which this performance came to fruition. More importantly, it analyzes how oral history performance was the creative vehicle through which three small, long-ignored, sometimes internally divided, and mostly quiet African American communities of the urban North came to assert a bold, collective history of struggle and resistance for themselves, one in keeping with heroic tales of the national black freedom struggle.
African american · American history · Ancient history · Archaeology · Black history · Black Power · Ethnology · Oral history · Political science · Politics · Relevance (law) · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
Local people
A shared authority
The warmth of other suns
Plainfield Burning
But Burn—No”
Telling the Told
Precious Blood
Oral History and the Study of Communities
Memory and American History
The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past
Public Memory and the Search for Power in American Historical Archaeology
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |