Record Stories. Make History this Thanksgiving.

Record Stories. Make History.

As we gather for the holidays, we make plans for family, friends, and fun. I can’t remember a family gathering that didn’t feature family stories new and old. This year is great opportunity to capture the stories of your family and local community.  You can use The Great Thanksgiving Listen as a guide.

The 2016 StoryCorps initiative, The Great Thanksgiving Listen is an effort to create an oral history of contemporary America.  To participate in The Great Thanksgiving Listen, you simply engage and interview elders the holiday seasons this year.   The Great Thanksgiving Listen has all the tools and tips to help you preserve the stories you hear. You can use tools you already have to participate. The StoryCorps website has advice for planning your interview. 

Ready to start planning your interview? Use this advice.

Select:

·       Person to Interview

·       Place to record interview

·       Device and application to record interview

·       Questions

Test:

·       Device and application to record interview 

Invite:

·       Person to Interview

Remember:

·       Include an introduction of yourself and subject in the interview

·       Share your recording with others who will enjoy the story

Looking for inspiration? Check out the recordings shared at StoryCorps in the 2015 Great Thanksgiving Listen.

Author Spotlight: Elie Wiesel

By Jeff Burns

Recently, the world mourned the passing of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel.  At age 16, Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp.  His Romanian family perished in the Holocaust.  Wiesel survived and dedicated his life to educating the world about the Holocaust and to being a champion for the oppressed around the world.  He wrote 57 books over the course of his 87 years. Here are a few of my favorites, and I hope to re-read some of these soon.

Many of us are familiar with his first work, Night, published in 1960.  It is commonly read in high schools, and, if everyone had to read one book about the Holocaust, it would have to be this one.  Night is Wiesel’s memoir of his “life” in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Only about 120 pages, it is one of the heaviest books you will ever read. Many people do not know, however, that Night is the first work of a trilogy, and the other two books are just as powerful.  Dawn is the story of a young Holocaust survivor and Jewish guerilla fighting for independence in British Palestine.  Day centers on the death of a Holocaust survivor in New York City.  All three books poignantly explore life, death, guilt,  brutality, inhumanity, and humanity.

Wiesel’s two-volume memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full, takes the reader from his childhood memories of his Romanian village through his career as spokesman for humanity.

The Gates of the Forest tells the story of a Jewish teenager who is the lone survivor of his family, wandering through caves, forests, and villages, seeking some sort of order or explanation. The Town Behind the Wall follows a Holocaust survivor as he returns to his home village in Hungary, now behind the Iron Curtain. As he finds himself imprisoned as a spy, he grapples with the bystander question:  what did the people of his village do as the Germans deported their Jewish neighbors to death camps? The Trial of God is a play, set in a Ukranian village in 1649 following a pogrom in which almost all of the Jewish residents had been murdered or driven from their homes.  A traveling group of actors arrives at an inn, and the Jewish innkeeper demands that they put God on trial for abandoning humanity.

Has God abandoned humanity?  How can God allow things like the Holocaust to happen?  How can human beings so cruel and brutal?  How can human beings stand by as brutality happens? How does humanity – and individual humans – survive such experiences?  How can such things be prevented?  These are all the questions that Wiesel addressed in his writing, and we would be hard pressed to find a better “spokesman for humanity.”

Dog Days Reading

By Jeff Burns

As we endure the dog days of summer, you might want to spend them indoors (or by the pool) reading a book or two about man’s best friend.  Here are some titles to consider.

He was born in France during World War I, immigrated to the United States, making his way to Hollywood, where he became the biggest box office draw in the film industry.  He received more votes for the first Best Actor Academy Award, but he was denied the award.  When he died unexpectedly, radio stations broke into programming with the news, and millions mourned.  Rudolph Valentino? No, Rin Tin Tin, Hollywood’s first animal superstar.  Two recent biographies, one by Susan Orlean and one by Walter Donway, tell his fascinating story.

Bronwen Dickey’s new book, Pit Bull: The Batte Over an American Icon, is the story of the breed that went from the heights of popularity in America to the depths of demonization, demonization to the point that the breed is banned in some jurisdictions, subject to euthanization even if no attack has occurred.  Dickey researches the history of the breed, and, on a larger scale, examines the relationships between Americans and their dogs throughout history. If you’re not a fan of bullies, this book will likely change your mind.  If you are a fan, it will affirm what you already know, that an entire breed is not evil.

Melissa Fay Greene is an Atlanta author who has written several really good books about twentieth century history including Praying for Sheetrock, Last Man Out: The Story of the Spring Hill Mine Disaster, and The Temple Bombing.  Her newest book is called The Underdogs: Children, Dogs, and the Power of Unconditional Love, and it’s about the bond between service dogs and their children (and adults). The chief story is that of Karen Shirk, a woman who was stricken with a rare neuromuscular disease in her twenties.  A nurse suggested getting a service dog, but no service dog provider would help.  Shirk got her own dog and trained it.  A thousand dogs later, she specializes in training service dogs for clients previously thought to be unserviceable.  Look no further for inspiring stories of unconditional love that only dogs can provide.

Moving Into Modernity: Three Books About the Early 20th Century

By Jeff Burns

The late 19^th century and early 20^th century were a tumultuous time of great changes in American history. Around the turn of the century, America’s demographics were rapidly changing and transforming the country.  Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flooded into the cities of the Northeast, and, for the first time, the urban population surpassed the rural population.  Industrialization changed how people worked and how people lived.  New inventions and forms of entertainment changed the way things were done enabled Americans to enjoy something new, leisure, and activities like movies, Vaudeville Theater, amusement parks, and spectator sports not only provided enjoyment, but also fostered the assimilation of the new immigrants into the American melting pot. Progressives took note of the many problems, from sanitation to childhood mortality and everything in between, and sought to improve conditions. By the 1920s, a conservative backlash arose as traditionalists tried to slow the rapid pace of change, and the country experienced the first Red Scare, a new surge of nativism, immigration quotas, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and a pronounced clash between modernism and fundamentalism.

The story of this time in New York City is captured and told beautifully at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The Lower East Side has been the home of successive generations of immigrants, and each generation made its mark, and continues to make its mark.  In the late 1800s, the area was full of tenements, where families crowded into 350 square feet apartments, usually with no running water.  Today, the area is one of the most desirable areas of New York City, and those same apartments rent for thousands of dollars per month. The museum gift shop has a huge selection of great books related to the history of the neighborhood. Here are a few titles that I enjoyed reading.

97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families In One New York Tenement, by Jane Ziegelman, is an excellent introduction to the area and history of immigration in New York City.   The author creates a vivid picture by telling the stories of five families who lived in the same building between 1863 and 1935: German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish (both Orthodox and Reform).  Using food to tell the story is fun and unique.  Even more fun is the fact that the book contains forty recipes that the reader can try.

Paula Uruburu wrote American Eve, the story of one of the most infamous scandals and murders in American history, perhaps the first “crime of the century.” Teenager Evelyn Nesbitt gained the notice of photographers and artists in New York City, and she quickly became America’s first “It girl.” Her pictures were published and displayed in galleries, she appeared on stage in Broadway shows, and her movements were reported daily in the press.  Part of her fame was derived from the fact that she became the mistress of Stanford White, one of the most famous, richest, and accomplished men in the city.  She also incurred the attention of another millionaire.  A murder ensues, followed by a lurid trial.  It’s a page-turner.

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz is a fast read, a history of flappers, the young women who scandalized older generations by bobbing their hair, raising their dress hems, and smoking, cursing, drinking, driving, and carrying on in public in ways that “ladies” had never dared to carry on in the past.

Eat Your History! History through Cookbooks, Part 2

By Jeff Burns

My wife and I love cooking (and eating) and often combine that love with our love of history.  Over the years, we’ve accumulated a collection of cookbooks.  Our favorites are the ones that combine great recipes and culture and history.  Foodways are an important part of learning and enjoying history, and, of course, you can find interesting cookbooks in bookstores, but don’t forget to look for cookbooks in museums and historic sites as well.  You can also find them in garage sales, used book sales, and on Ebay.  Here are some of the books in our collection.

We love Indian food, and we have a couple of Indian cookbooks.  Madhur Jaffrey is the undisputed queen of Indian cuisine in the United Kingdom and the United States.  You might say that she did for Indian cooking what Julia Child did for French cuisine or Paula Deen for southern food.  Besides cooking on television and publishing cookbooks, she’s also a noted actress and author.  She has a great gift for demystifying Indian favorites and for imparting cultural history along the way.

The Classic 1000 Indian Recipes is an expensive book, filled with more recipes than you can make, and there aren’t glossy photos. The recipes are thorough, but doable.  The Art of Brazilian Cookery has been around for a long time, first published in 1960.  Brazil’s culture reflects a combination of many different cultures; it is a true melting pot, and the recipes reflect that. 

Analogy time again:  Before anybody had ever heard of Paula Deen, there was a queen of southern cuisine on television, in magazines, and publishing cookbooks. That queen was Nathalie Dupree. Even though she was born in New Jersey, she grew up in the South, and she became the first woman since Julia Child to host more than one hundred cooking episodes on public television. Nathalie Dupree’s Matters of Taste represented sort of a departure for her as it is not solely southern cuisine.  Instead she blends stories and recipes from all over America.

The Jewish Holiday Kitchen is a treasury of knowledge about the traditions and rituals of Jewish holidays, and an important part of those holidays is food. Jewish or not, it makes for interesting reading and tasty food.

Alton Brown is a current star on the food scene.  His show “Good Eats” entertained and educated for years, he’s been a staple on The Food Network since its start, and he’s currently on another tour of sold out venues across the country with his combination of food, science, music, and comedy.  A few years ago, he undertook a motorcycle road trip along the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota, and made the trip into a TV series.  He introduced the viewers to the best roadside food along the way, the food and traditions that make each region and community unique.  The accompanying book, Feasting on Asphalt, is part travelogue and part cookbook and every bit as entertaining as the television show.  We’ve not only used some of the recipes, but we also used the book as a guidebook for our own roadtrip, stopping at some of the locations he wrote about.

Eat Your History! History through Cookbooks, Part 1

By Jeff Burns

My wife and I love cooking (and eating) and often combine that love with our love of history.  Over the years, we’ve accumulated a collection of cookbooks.  Our favorites are the ones that combine great recipes and culture and history.  Foodways are an important part of learning and enjoying history, and, of course, you can find interesting cookbooks in bookstores, but don’t forget to look for cookbooks in museums and historic sites as well.  You can also find them in garage sales, used book sales, and on Ebay.  Here are some of the books in our collection.

Chef Paul Prudhomme introduced many Americans to Creole and Cajun cuisine in the 1980s and 1990s.  He worked in the most famous restaurants in New Orleans and with many famous chefs.  He owned his own restaurants, made lots of television appearances and had his own cooking shows, and he published several cookbooks. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen  is his first book, published in 1984, and our copy is well used.  He introduces readers to Cajun and Creole ingredients and techniques before providing dozens and dozens of easy to follow recipes in thirteen different categories, from jambalayas, to pork and rabbit to sweets and brunch.  One of our favorites, a go-to for special occasions, is shrimp Diane, a simple but decadent dish of shrimp, butter, and spices.

The Williamsburg Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a collection of traditional recipes that were served in the taverns and inns of colonial America, adapted and contemporized for modern cooks. You can find cream of peanut soup, shad roe omelets, and game pie, along with interesting stories about colonial tavern cooking and dining.

We bought The Best of Shaker Cooking at the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire.  The Shakers were a religious sect, an offshoot of Quakerism, that established communities in America during the first half of the 19^th century.  Simplicity and communal living were major tenets of the faith they practiced in their agrarian communities.  Their recipes used the fruits and vegetables that they grew themselves, and there is a great chapter on jams, jellies and preserves.

Gift shops at historic sites often have small and inexpensive paperback collections of recipes of the time.  Be sure to check them out.

Author Spotlight: Rick Bragg

By Jeff Burns

Recently, the world of southern literature lost an icon when novelist Pat Conroy died.  Fortunately, there are others to pick up that banner, and I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite southern writers, Rick Bragg.  Bragg is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author who grew up in northeastern Alabama and has lived all over the South.  He is not a historian, but many of his books and articles are memoirs, stories of his family, his experiences, and his travels in the South. He is keenly perceptive and his stories are the stories of the South in the last half of the 20^th century.  He is a master storyteller, and his writing is entertaining and eloquent.  It resonates for me because I recognize many elements of his stories as similar to my family background, even though I grew up in small-town southeast Georgia. He is insightful and very humorous.  His stories are about the best of people, even when situations are not the best.

I’m currently listening to his latest, My Southern Journey: True Stories From the Heart of the South, a collection of essays written over a decade.  A plus is that Bragg reads the audiobook version himself, and that adds a whole new level of enjoyment.  The introduction hooked me from the start; it’s one of the finest pieces of writing about the South that I’ve ever read. 

 

I was first introduced to Bragg’s work by All Over But the Shoutin, published in 1998.  It is an inspiring story about growing up dirt-poor with an alcoholic father and a mother who worked hard in cotton fields and mills of Alabama to raise her sons and keep her family together. He followed up in 2002 with the story of his grandfather, Ava’s Man, the story of a moonshiner and hustler of the Great Depression.

The Prince of Frogtown was written for Bragg’s stepson, and it’s a memoir of his adolescence and especially his relationship with his father. It fits nicely as the third book of a trilogy, with Ava and Shoutin. The Most They Ever Had is a broader story but still set in his hometown of Jacksonville, Alabama. It’s the story of the community that was centered around the cotton mill that dominated the town for over a century. As the mill closes down, Bragg tells its story through in-depth profiles of the employees and families who worked there over the years.  It’s a fascinating story that is pretty much the same story as mill towns and factory towns across the country.  For a change of pace, I highly recommend Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, Bragg’s as-told-to biography of one of the greatest of rock and roll legends.  Bragg made a real connection with Lewis and allows him to truly tell his own incredible story.

Southerner or not, if you love great storytelling and great writing, I think you’ll love Rick Bragg’s works.

History in Print or on Video, Take Your Pick

By  Jeff Burns

Americans have been fans of British dramas for a long time, especially period shows, often BBC productions broadcast by PBS..  You’re probably familiar with classics like Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and Downton Abbey, but here are a few that you might want to watch on Netflix and/or read the books on which they are based.

 
Call the Midwife, based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, is about a group nurse midwives and nuns who run a medical facility in London’s impoverished East End in the 1950s.  It was the BBC’s most successful drama since 2001, and every episode has layers of drama.  There’s the life-and-death drama you’d expect in a medical show, but also each character has her own personal drama, whether it’s a love affair, a family conflict, feelings of inadequacy, or alcoholism.  On top of that, there are the social, racial, economic, and political tensions that Britain grappled with in the post- World War II period.  Each episode is humorous, sad, inspiring, and educational all at once.

Homefires is based on a book called Jambusters by Julie Summers.  It tells the story of a rural Women’s Institute in the UK during World War II. The Women’s Institute program was created during World War I to mobilize rural British women for the war effort, and they engaged in all sorts of activities from selling war bonds and collecting supplies for the war effort to making and selling jams and growing victory gardens.  The Women’s Institute was a unifying and empowering movement for rural English women, and the book and show tell their story through the lives of the families in this particular small village.  Season 1 consists of 6 episodes, and a second season is currently in production.

 

 A Young Doctor’s Notebook is based on a collection of short stories by Mikhail Bulgakhov called A Country Doctor’s Notebook.  The stories are set in a rural Russian village during the revolution, and in the series, the doctor is played as a young man  by Daniel Radcliffe and by Jon Hamm as his older self, and the two have great scenes together.  It’s kind of a fish-out-of-water story with Radcliffe’s character fresh out of a Moscow university, relegated to a backwards village full of eccentrics.  That makes for more comedy than drama, compared to the first two recommendations.  In fact, the show reminds me a lot of the recent Wes Anderson movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel. If you like Wes Anderson movies, if you like quirky, if you like eccentric, you’ll love A Young Doctor’s Notebook.