CSUF’s Center for Oral and Public History offers a portal to California’s colorful past
CSUF’s Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History is home to one of the largest collections of oral histories in the state.
As part of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the center contains more than 6,000 oral histories, recorded by student interviewers and told by individuals who’ve lived through historically impactful events and periods.
But the center does more than create and archive oral histories,” said Natalie Fousekis, the center’s director.
“We teach students, we hold community workshops, we teach the community how to do oral history,” said Fousekis, who has been with the center since 2002 and has served as director since 2008. “Then we also teach students how to take the histories from our archives out into the public.”
Current and recent projects include Women, Politics and Activism; Orange County Politics; Documenting Experiences of Mexican, Filipina and Chicana Women in California Agriculture and the CSU Women’s Presidents Project, which examines the contributions to higher education by women who serve as leaders and administrators.
Students in associate director Ben Cawthra’s visual history course curated the Dorothea Lange exhibit currently on display at the Orange County Great Park.
Lange’s iconic photographs from the 1930s and 1940s captured the mood of the nation through the Great Depression and World War II.
And one of more ambitious projects currently underway is an oral history project on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fousekis is having her students collect oral histories from frontline workers in the medical field and essential workers.
Students are also interviewing Asian American teachers and others to address the surge in anti-Asian hate that occurred during the pandemic. Oral histories are also being collected from African Americans.
“Because in my mind, you can’t really separate one from the other,” Fousekis said. “But some students have interviewed people who were participating in Black Lives Matter, but also interviewed them about COVID.”
For another undertaking, Fousekis ’colleague, Margie Brown Cornell, formed a partnership with California State Parks and is working with her students on a project on Pio Pico State Park in Whittier to revamp the park’s educational program and materials.
The students also put together a temporary exhibit on the project in the center.
“So that’s an example of the hands-on work that we have our students doing,” Fousekis said.
Launched in 1968, the university’s Center for Oral and Public History was formed to record the history of Orange County and the university.
In 2017, the center was named for CSUF historian Lawrence B. de Graaf, who pledged $1 million to the center.
With help from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a 10-year fundraising campaign, the center moved to a new, 10,000-plus-square-foot space on the third floor of the Pollak Library.
In addition to being twice the size of the old center, upgrades include an archive with temperature control settings, a collaborative workroom for students, a community room for exhibits and events, reading room for researchers, a processing room for handling and organizing new materials, a project room for student assistants and interviews, and a recording room.
Archivist Natalie Navar Garcia has the responsibility of organizing every oral history conducted for the center. Part of her job is to create finding aids to help researchers locate interviews that cover a variety of topics and are cataloged in multiple categories.
For example, an oral history of a nurse who cared for COVID-19 patients could also contain information on hospital conditions or the demographic background of the nurse or the patient.
“Whenever somebody donates an interview to us, we always require them to have an abstract or a summary of the interview so that I could put it in that project’s finding aid so a researcher can go through and see exactly what the interviews are about in that collection. Because oral history is multifaceted.”
The most rewarding part of her job is knowing that the oral histories created by the students are often on topics “close to their hearts,” she said.
“It just makes my job fun,” she said.
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