Staring Out to Sea

In January 2013, Abigail Perkiss, assistant professor of history at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, began work with six undergraduate students to develop an oral history project to document Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath. For several months, these students worked to set the parameters and scope of the project, while at the same time studying the work of oral history and preparing themselves to go into the field to recruit participants and conduct interviews. For a number of these students, themselves impacted by the storm, the project took them into their own communities to capture the stories of their neighbors and friends. The students gained new insights into their own agency in the world; they turned their own feelings of victimization after the storm into a sense of ownership and control during the recovery process; and they felt empowered as both historians and as historical actors to effect change in the world around them. This essay traces the transformative impact of the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project on these undergraduates

Staring Out to Sea and the Transformative Power of Oral History for Undergraduate Interviewers

In January 2013, Abigail Perkiss, assistant professor of history at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, began work with six undergraduate students to develop an oral history project to document Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath. For several months, these students worked to set the parameters and scope of the project, while at the same time studying the work of oral history and preparing themselves to go into the field to recruit participants and conduct interviews. For a number of these students, themselves impacted by the storm, the project took them into their own communities to capture the stories of their neighbors and friends. The students gained new insights into their own agency in the world; they turned their own feelings of victimization after the storm into a sense of ownership and control during the recovery process; and they felt empowered as both historians and as historical actors to effect change in the world around them. This essay traces the transformative impact of the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project on these undergraduates

Introduction: Reimagining integrated space in post-WWII Philadelphia

Using the post-war industrial landscape of metropolitan Philadelphia as a case study, this special section of the Journal of Urban History examines the making and meaning of residentially integrated space in the latter half of the twentieth century. These three projects (Abigail Perkiss\u27 Managed Diversity; James Wolfinger\u27s The American Dream for All Americans; and Cheryl Greenburg\u27s Liberal NIMBY ) look at racial integration not as an idealized form of racial justice, nor as a fleeting notion of residential life doomed for failure. Writing at the intersection of the historiographies on the American urban experience and the northern civil rights struggle, these scholars push beyond the historic notion that integration was the period between the first black family moving into a neighborhood and the last white family moving out, to examine residential integration as an historic process, a political objective, and a cultural experience. © 2012 SAGE Publications

Managed diversity: Contested meanings of integration in post-WWII Philadelphia

In the early 1950s, as neighborhoods around the country experienced widespread racial antagonism and white flight, Philadelphia\u27s West Mount Airy bucked powerful legal and cultural trends to create an institutional mandate toward racial integration. But even as those efforts brought together black and white community leaders under a common goal, there quickly emerged a fundamental disconnect among residents over the meaning of integration; whereas white home owners saw living in an integrated community as a way of legitimizing their identities as liberal, urban Americans, black residents overwhelmingly viewed integration as a means toward achieving a set of very tangible material conditions. At first, this distinction was benign; within two decades, however, the ideological disconnect gave way to a heated battle over the daily experience of integrated living. In the mid-1970s, the growing crisis of crime became the terrain on which battles over local control and racial representation were fought in West Mount Airy. © 2012 SAGE Publications

Reclaiming the past: Oral history and the legacy of integration in West Mount Airy, Philadelphia

In 1992, West Mount Airy Neighbors (WMAN), a Philadelphia community organization, embarked on an oral history project designed to capture the history of local efforts, beginning in the 1950s, to create and foster racial integration in the neighborhood. The project was designed to build a consciousness about the region\u27s past among current residents, in order to bring homeowners together and heighten community cohesion at a time when various social and economic forces threatened neighborhood viability. But even as WMAN saw the project as an opportunity to effect contemporary grassroots change, the group used the emerging narrative to reinforce an official version of the neighborhood\u27s historical efforts toward integration. Through the oral history project, WMAN developed a sanctioned and sanitized memory of the community, one that positioned the longtime organization to assert control over the scope of change going forward. © 2014 The Author