As this holiday season begins, please consider donating to our program. Read here to learn about twelve reasons to support the SPOHP team in the upcoming year. The donation link is at the top right of our page! Each day, we will add another of our 12 reasons. Stay tuned!
December 1: SPOHP’s 50th Anniversary Celebration!
Day one of our giving campaign also marks the beginning our 50th anniversary celebration of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. In 1967, our program began as an oral history program with a typewriter, four drawer filing cabinet, and one student assistant, housed in an office of Library West. Through a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, the program began collecting interviews with American Indians throughout the Southeast. From its humble beginnings, it has grown into a community-based research hub with projects spanning all across the United States. Today, we have over 7000 interviews in our collection, and we proudly hold over 150,000 pages of transcribed material, both in the UF Digital Collections and our own archives.
December 2: Community Based Research
One of SPOHP’s commitments is community-based research. One of our most recent local endeavors was our collaboration with Paradise Church in Alachua, Florida. In danger of being dissolved by their denomination because of their small size, Paradise Church reached out to us to collect their story. They had an important role to play in the community because of their youth program that helped teenaged students after school. By listening to members of the church and students in their after-school youth program, the AAHP team helped to create a documentary detailing their involvement in the community to bring awareness to its importance.
December 3: Commitment to Social Justice
One of the pillars of SPOHP is our commitment to social justice. In partnership with the UF Women’s Studies Department, a few members of the SPOHP staff will be travelling to Washington D.C. to document the Women’s March On Washington on January 21, 2017. Field researchers will also collect the impressions and experiences of individuals attending the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump on the day prior to the march. The world will have its eyes on Washington during this pivotal transition in our nation’s history, and SPOHP will be on the ground to capture the diverse emotions and perspectives of those experiencing this historical moment alongside us.
December 4: Collections and Archives
SPOHP has over 150 collections in our archives, but our 6 largest projects, the African American History Project, Mississippi Freedom Project, Veteran’s History Project, Latina/o Diaspora in the Americas Project, Native American History Project, and the newly established Florida Queer History Project contain a bulk of our 7,000 interviews. Each work within communities in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Virginia, and beyond to collect lived experience interviews with people of all different backgrounds!
December 5: Community Workshops in Oral History
SPOHP is not only involved in teaching oral history to students at the University of Florida. Our volunteers and staff also host oral history workshops both locally and nationally, to train members of communities, churches, and other institutions how to conduct oral histories with family members, community elders, and neighbors. For our most recent workshop, staff members traveled all the way to Duckwater, Nevada in collaboration with members of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe in their efforts to collect knowledge among their rich oral culture from tribal elders in their community. Our team helped community members learn more about digital history methods that could be useful for their research.
December 6: SPOHP Podcasts
Our newly launched podcast series share the oral histories we have conducted with our supporters and the broader
public! SPOHP podcasts cover a wide range of topics, from interviews done in the past with our “Voices from the Archives” series, to special edition podcasts on fieldwork research like John Paul Lorie’s recent podcast on Mississippian Edward Duvall, who researchers met on the Mississippi Freedom Project fieldwork trip this year. Your support allows us to create these educational and engaging works for public listeners.
December 7: Internship
One of the shining lights of our program is the SPOHP internship. Each semester, it is offered to undergraduate and graduate students interested in learning about the methods of oral history. Students learn the methods of how to conduct oral histories and analyze them in their own personal scholarship. This semester,they conducted interviews with former athletes from the University of Florida. After processing their interviews, interns created a capstone podcast project with their interview.
December 8: Fieldwork Research Trips
We pride ourselves on being able to provide both undergraduate and graduate students with the ability to learn how to do oral history research in the field at no cost to them. This is an incredible opportunity for students to learn the methods of oral history and gain experience working with institutions and individuals of many different backgrounds. For example, this fall, we were able to send ten students and staff to the Mississippi Delta in order to conduct oral histories with individuals involved in the freedom struggle and grassroots organizing in the communities of Montgomery, Alabama, the Mississippi Delta.
December 9: Ongoing Research Projects
Your support helps us to conduct extensive fieldwork projects like the St. Augustine African American History Project. This project is centered in the Lincolnville Community of St. Augustine, Florida, which is a historic African American neighborhood. Through an extended eight week stay in St. Augustine, SPOHP researchers were able to build a relationship with people in the community. While there, we partnered with the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center to house oral histories we conducted in their museum. Our researchers collected 25 interviews, and created countless friendships. We are continuing this work of collecting the histories of the African American communities of St. Augustine.
December 10: Student Impact of SPOHP
SPOHP means a lot to its students. Here, Patrick Daglaris, a Library Sciences MA student at Florida State University and SPOHP’s Poarch Creek Digitization Coordinator explains how oral history has impacted his life.
December 11: Public Scholarship
Jennifer Thelusma, a former University Scholar and SPOHP staff member, learned how to do oral history through our internship program and our many fieldwork research trips. Jennifer is currently pursuing a law degree at Duke University School of Law. Here, she explains how fieldwork helped her to look at the world through a more critical lens. Your support helps us send students like Jennifer on trips throughout the Southeast United States.
December 12: Public Programming
Public programming is a large part of our mission as a community-based oral history program. Every public program planned by SPOHP is an opportunity for the audience to interact with esteemed scholars. In February, we will host a documentary screening of “Love and Solidarity,” from Director Errol Morris and Professor Mike Honey. This documentary shares the story of Reverend James Lawson, a major player in the civil rights movement, and later, he continued his activism by helping organize Latino and Latina farmworkers in California.