Lee, Russell, 1903-, photographer. Homesteader and his children eating barbeque at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair, 1940 Oct. Library of Congress, no known copyright restrictions, from Flickr.Originally published on onthecommons.org Nov. 3, 2008
Studs Terkel died at age 96 on Friday October 31, 2008 at the end of a long career in television, radio and writing. His stock in trade was oral history—the original knowledge commons.
The articles I read on his passing mentioned that he was a great supporter of Barack Obama. What outcome did he miss on this election day?
I think that Studs Terkel loved this country and it's commoner citizens very much. But he was not so hopeful as he once was and said "the United States of Alzheimers. People have forgotten their own history."
History lives in the telling as much as it does in the textbook. I can only hope that a new generation, with readily available, inexpensive digital recording and distribution technologies, will continue to collect stories that make up our cultural heritage. The Studs Terkel website housed at the Chicago Historical Society, includes educational tools about collecting your own oral histories.
Library of Congress, no known copyright, from Flickr.
I remember my first encounter with Terkel—an audio recording of Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. This recording helped establish my love of audio books. A voice without images (we are so used to visual imagery in this decade) is a powerful stimulant to the imagination. Close your eyes and truly listen—what can the tone, the diction, the prideful, defiant or trouble-laden human voice convey? Terkel’s quest for stories was not a scientific, ethnological survey approach. There was no attempt to dissect, quantify and theorize. He listened, asked questions and conversations unfolded. In Hard Times extraordinary everyday people spoke in their own voices, telling stories of hardship and joy more wrenching than fiction. The interviews yielded unscripted, diamond bright gems that sounded like lines from plays. But this dialogue could never be created by fiction writers. It was too iconic to be anything but real.
Terkel also interviewed famous people of his day. Whether his subjects lived lives in obscurity or fame his books and broadcast interviews include stories by the hundreds that are the stuff of all human experience. Common people in shared circumstances that contain the epic themes of the ages: the struggle for dignity, food and shelter, meaning and a place in the sun.
Terkel was a champion of the working class and gave me insight into my family history. My father and his brother left home during the depression looking for work. They traveled from Minnesota to California “on the rails.” They seldom talked about this—it was painful and perhaps they thought best forgotten. But Hard Times provided me a glimpse of what they went through. The voices in the book had such similarity to my father and my uncle's I could see them in the same situations—in the same struggle for work and sustenance.
This NPR page includes several interviews with Terkel over the years including his reading of selections from Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath that seem poignantly pertinent today.
And a February 2008 interview on BBC gives a different perspective of another country’s veneration for Terkel and his look back at America over a lifetime.
The articles I read on his passing mentioned that he was a great supporter of Barack Obama. What outcome did he miss on this election day?
I think that Studs Terkel loved this country and it's commoner citizens very much. But he was not so hopeful as he once was and said "the United States of Alzheimers. People have forgotten their own history."
History lives in the telling as much as it does in the textbook. I can only hope that a new generation, with readily available, inexpensive digital recording and distribution technologies, will continue to collect stories that make up our cultural heritage. The Studs Terkel website housed at the Chicago Historical Society, includes educational tools about collecting your own oral histories.
Library of Congress, no known copyright, from Flickr.
I remember my first encounter with Terkel—an audio recording of Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. This recording helped establish my love of audio books. A voice without images (we are so used to visual imagery in this decade) is a powerful stimulant to the imagination. Close your eyes and truly listen—what can the tone, the diction, the prideful, defiant or trouble-laden human voice convey? Terkel’s quest for stories was not a scientific, ethnological survey approach. There was no attempt to dissect, quantify and theorize. He listened, asked questions and conversations unfolded. In Hard Times extraordinary everyday people spoke in their own voices, telling stories of hardship and joy more wrenching than fiction. The interviews yielded unscripted, diamond bright gems that sounded like lines from plays. But this dialogue could never be created by fiction writers. It was too iconic to be anything but real.
Terkel also interviewed famous people of his day. Whether his subjects lived lives in obscurity or fame his books and broadcast interviews include stories by the hundreds that are the stuff of all human experience. Common people in shared circumstances that contain the epic themes of the ages: the struggle for dignity, food and shelter, meaning and a place in the sun.
Terkel was a champion of the working class and gave me insight into my family history. My father and his brother left home during the depression looking for work. They traveled from Minnesota to California “on the rails.” They seldom talked about this—it was painful and perhaps they thought best forgotten. But Hard Times provided me a glimpse of what they went through. The voices in the book had such similarity to my father and my uncle's I could see them in the same situations—in the same struggle for work and sustenance.
This NPR page includes several interviews with Terkel over the years including his reading of selections from Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath that seem poignantly pertinent today.
And a February 2008 interview on BBC gives a different perspective of another country’s veneration for Terkel and his look back at America over a lifetime.
