About This Unit

When the documents are missing, biased, or written by the powerful, people tell. This unit takes storytelling — oral history above all — as a method for making the record that institutions failed to make, and as a politics: the claim that ordinary people are authorities on their own lives. Alessandro Portelli, the field's foundational theorist, supplies the unit's counterintuitive starting point: oral sources are valuable not despite their subjectivity but because of it — what narrators misremember, reorder, and embellish is evidence, of meaning, desire, and the work memory does. Maurice Halbwachs adds the sociological frame the unit builds on: memory is collective, held in groups and their frameworks, which is why communities can remember what no archive filed — and why destroying a community's institutions attacks its past as well as its present.

The unit's center of gravity is close to home. In April 1969, Black and Puerto Rican students occupied the campus of City College — ninety-one percent white, in the heart of Harlem — renamed it the University of Harlem, and issued Five Demands; the strike helped force Open Admissions and remade the City University of New York into one of the most consequential experiments in democratic higher education. That history survives in flyers, photographs, and above all in participants' telling — gathered in the CUNY Digital History Archive and a wave of fiftieth-anniversary oral history work. Learners study the movement through the archive their own university keeps of itself, then turn the method outward: alongside the Bronx's largest African American oral history collection and the bracero program's migrant testimonies, the unit ends with learners recording a story of their own — because the unit's deepest claim is that collective memory is not inherited but made, and they are eligible makers. The unit's critical edge comes from Sujatha Fernandes: stories are powerful, which is exactly why institutions curate, extract, and defang them — empowerment storytelling has a political economy, and learners should know it.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain Portelli's claim that oral history's "errors" are evidence, and apply it to an actual interview excerpt.
• Analyze a social movement through its self-documentation, using the 1969 CUNY student movement and its archive as the central case.
• Evaluate the politics of storytelling: who solicits stories, who curates them, and when narrative empowers versus when it is extracted or domesticated.
• Plan, record, and reflect on a short oral history interview following established ethical practice (consent, care, narrator authority).

Keywords

• Oral history
• Collective memory
• Counter-narrative
• Narrator authority / shared authority
• Curated stories (extraction critique)
• Open Admissions

Open Educational Resources

• CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA). Explore the archive.

Participatory digital archive · Open access.

The participatory archive of CUNY's own history — built on contributions from the students, faculty, and staff "whose lives, in diverse ways, have shaped and been shaped by CUNY" — holding the documents of the 1969 City College takeover and Open Admissions struggle: the Five Demands flyer, Black and Puerto Rican Student Community press releases, strike photographs, and later movements against tuition and austerity. For learners, a double lesson: a primary-source trove for the unit's central case, and a working model of the community archive — the university's memory kept by its members rather than only its administration.

• American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning (ASHP/CML), CUNY Graduate Center. Explore the projects.

History-education center (documentaries, curricula, digital projects) · Open access.

The Graduate Center's pioneering public-history shop — Who Built America? and decades of documentaries, classroom materials, and digital projects (including co-creating the September 11 Digital Archive) built on the premise that history belongs to, and is made by, working people. ASHP supplies the unit's pedagogical lineage: history-from-below as teaching practice, produced inside the same university the unit studies. Its open materials give instructors ready-made scaffolding and give self-directed learners the people's-history register the unit's scholarship formalizes.

• Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), Fordham University. Explore the collection guide.

Oral history archive (300+ interviews) · Open access (interview access via guide).

One of the largest community-based oral history projects in the country: hundreds of interviews documenting Black life in the Bronx — migration from the South and the Caribbean, the building of neighborhoods, music from doo-wop to hip hop's birth, displacement and renewal — founded in 2002 with community members as co-researchers, and extended through projects like the Bronx COVID-19 Oral History Project. For Lehman-based learners this is the archive of their own borough; the unit uses it as the worked example of collective memory assembled interview by interview, and as a source bank for the practicum.

• Bracero History Archive. Explore the archive.

Digital oral history and document archive · Open access.

The collaborative archive of the bracero program (1942–1964), the largest guest-worker program in U.S. history: hundreds of oral histories with former braceros and their families, alongside photographs, contracts, and pay stubs — testimony gathered decades later from workers whose paper trail was thin and whose treatment went officially unrecorded. The unit's migration case: collective memory doing evidentiary work, including in actual wage-claim litigation, and a Spanish- and English-language archive that widens the unit's storytelling beyond New York.

Key Scholarship

• Fernández, Johanna. The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Publisher page.

Book.

The definitive history of the Young Lords — the Puerto Rican radicals whose garbage offensives, church occupation, and patient-led health organizing remade East Harlem and the South Bronx politics of 1969–76 — built from oral histories with surviving members and from an archive Fernández (a Baruch/CUNY historian) had to force into existence: her litigation compelled the NYPD to surface its lost Handschu surveillance files. The book carries the unit's movement thread beyond campus, its method thread (oral history where the state's files were hidden), and its CUNY thread at once — the same city, the same year, the same struggle the Five Demands named. (Reads: members' oral histories against recovered police surveillance records.)

• Okechukwu, Amaka. To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

The sociological account of what the unit's central movement won and what was later taken back: Okechukwu traces the struggles that created affirmative action and CUNY's Open Admissions, then the decades-long retrenchment that dismantled them — ending Open Admissions at the senior colleges in 1999 — analyzing how students, administrators, and conservative campaigns fought over the meaning of merit and access. The scholarly companion to the CDHA documents: learners read the flyers, then the analysis of the policy world the flyers made and lost. (Reads: movement records and policy archives, from victory through retrenchment.)

• Fernandes, Sujatha. Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

The unit's critical conscience: Fernandes shows how the storytelling boom — campaign testimonials, NGO story banks, legislative hearings — curates narratives into portable, defanged units that move audiences while detaching stories from the movements and analyses that gave them force. Domestic-worker and DREAMer campaigns supply the cases. Assigned mid-unit deliberately: after learners feel storytelling's power and before they wield it, Fernandes makes them ask who is doing the curating — including, reflexively, this curriculum. (Reads: campaign testimonials and story banks against the movements they came from.)

• Portelli, Alessandro. "What Makes Oral History Different." In The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, 45–58. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Read the chapter (JSTOR).

Book chapter (field-defining essay).

The essay every oral historian starts with. Portelli's Italian steelworkers misdated a comrade's death, moving it from a 1949 protest to the 1953 strikes — and the "error," he shows, is the finding: memory had relocated the death to where its meaning lived. Orality, narrative form, subjectivity, and the interview's shared authorship are not contaminations of evidence but its distinctive content. The unit's methods foundation, and the answer to every "but is it reliable?" the practicum will provoke. (Reads: his own interview tapes, against the documentary record.)

• Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1925/1941]. Publisher page.

Book (foundational theory).

The source of the unit's organizing concept. Halbwachs — Durkheim's student, murdered at Buchenwald in 1945 — argued that individual memory is sustained by social frameworks: families, congregations, classes remember together, and what loses its group loses its past. The book explains both the unit's possibility (communities hold what archives never filed) and its stakes (urban renewal, school closure, and displacement are also memory demolition). A century old and the module's deepest margin-to-center recovery: sociology's own classic, returned to active duty. (Reads: the social frameworks — family, religion, class — through which any recollection survives at all.)

Case Studies

• The Five Demands at Fifty-Plus: A Movement in Its Own Archive

The CUNY Digital History Archive's 1969 documents, with the Five Demands exhibit, documentary, and teaching materials · Archive-based movement analysis.

An archive-based movement analysis in which learners work the April 1969 City College takeover through the university's own records: the Five Demands flyer, Black and Puerto Rican Student Community press releases, photographs of the renamed "University of Harlem," the fiftieth-anniversary exhibit and documentary built from participants' telling, and the teaching materials CUNY educators have assembled around them. Learners reconstruct the demands, the occupation, and the Open Admissions outcome, read Okechukwu's account of the retrenchment that followed, and close with the reflexive question the unit is built for: studying this inside the institution the movement made, what does the university's own archive include, omit, and owe? For Lehman learners — a campus born in 1968 and transformed by Open Admissions — it is an institutional origin story.

• Record One Story: An Oral History Practicum

A learner-recorded interview (15–30 minutes), with oral-history ethics scaffolding · Oral history practicum.

The module's signature practicum: learners plan, record, and reflect on one short oral history — fifteen to thirty minutes, with a narrator of their choosing: a family elder, a coworker, a neighbor — on a focused theme such as a migration, a school experience, or a movement moment. Method and consent scaffolding follow established oral-history ethics; the recording stays with narrator and learner, never submitted to any archive without separate consent. The deliverable pairs the recording with a short reflection applying Portelli — what did memory do in the telling? — and Fernandes — who would want this story, and for what? Learners don't just study the tradition BAAHP and the Bracero Archive demonstrate; they join it.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Portelli: His steelworkers "misremembered" a death's date — and the error carried the meaning. Find or recall one family or community story you suspect is factually imperfect. What does the imperfection preserve? What would correcting it cost?
2. On Halbwachs: Memory lives in groups and their frameworks. Identify one institution whose loss would take memories with it — a church, a barbershop, a school, a block. Whose past would become harder to keep, and what (if anything) could substitute?
3. On the Five Demands: The 1969 students demanded that the university reflect the city that funds it — and won Open Admissions, later rolled back. From inside CUNY today, assess one demand's afterlife: where do you see its achievement, its erosion, or its unfinished business on your own campus?
4. On Fernandes: Storytelling empowers — and is curated, solicited, and consumed. Recall a context where you were asked to "share your story" (an application, an orientation, a campaign). Who set the terms, what shape did the story have to take, and who benefited? Would you tell it differently on your own terms?
5. On the practicum: After recording your interview: what did you hear that no document about your narrator would contain? Where did you feel the interviewer's power — in the questions, the silences, the editing — and how did you handle it?
6. Synthesis across the unit: Portelli holds that what memory changes is evidence of what the past means; Halbwachs holds that memory survives only in groups and their frameworks; Fernandes warns that stories, once solicited, are curated by someone. Choose one telling from the unit's archives — a CDHA participant account, a BAAHP interview, a bracero testimony — or the interview you recorded yourself, and run all three claims through it: what does the telling's shape reveal, which group's framework holds it, and who curated it into the form you met it in? Where do the three frames reinforce each other, and where do they pull apart?

Further Readings and Resources

• Naison, Mark, and Bob Gumbs. Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Publisher page.

Book.

BAAHP's interviews carried into book form: Naison — the project's founding historian — and Gumbs assemble oral histories of African American life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s: the neighborhoods, churches, schools, and music scenes built by Southern and Caribbean migrants before the borough's burning years. For learners who meet the project's archive in this unit, the book is the worked demonstration — interview by interview becoming a community's written history, told by the people who built it.

• Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2016. Publisher page.

Book (anthology).

The field's standard anthology, gathering its foundational and contemporary statements in one volume — Portelli on what makes oral history different, Frisch on shared authority, alongside chapters on interviewing, memory and trauma, advocacy, and digital practice. For adopting instructors it is the bench reference behind this unit's method thread; for self-directed learners it is the map of where the practicum's questions have been argued before, and where to read next on any of them.

• The CUNY 1969 Project (Baruch College). Visit the project site.

Teaching-materials hub · Open access.

The teaching hub assembled around the takeover's archive: lesson plans and assignments — close reading of the Five Demands, blackout poetry from movement documents, video reflection — built by CUNY educators, including Lehman-affiliated contributors, for classroom use with the CDHA's primary sources. Adopting instructors can lift assignments directly; self-directed learners can use them as structured routes into the documents. The unit's central case, already made teachable by the university community that inherited it.

• The Five Demands. Directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, 2023. Visit the film's page.

Documentary film (2023).

The first documentary of the 1969 City College takeover, built from participant interviews half a century on — strike veterans narrating the occupation, the Five Demands, and what Open Admissions made and cost. Oral history as film: the unit's method in its most public register, and companion viewing for the unit's archive-based case study. The filmmakers' page carries screening and access information.

• Densho Digital Repository. Visit the site.

Digital repository and oral history archive · Open access.

The Japanese American incarceration archive: a community-built repository of oral histories, photographs, documents, and an encyclopedia documenting the World War II removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans — memory work undertaken by survivors and descendants so that the erasure would not complete itself. Beside the unit's New York collections it is the comparative case: another community assembling the record of a forced erasure, at national scale, with narrator authority at the center.

• Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. Publisher page.

Book.

The source of the practicum's ethical keyword. Frisch's essays argue that the oral history interview is co-authored — interpretive authority shared between interviewer and narrator rather than owned by the scholar — and work out what that sharing demands in practice, from interviewing through editing to public presentation. The concept underwrites the unit's consent-and-care scaffolding: "narrator authority" is not courtesy but method. For learners who want the idea in its original.

• High, Steven. Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014. Publisher page.

Book.

Community-engaged oral history at scale: High's account of the Montreal Life Stories project, which recorded hundreds of interviews with survivors of war, genocide, and displacement — Rwandan, Cambodian, Haitian, and other communities — as genuinely shared work, with narrators as partners in design and interpretation. The methods companion to the unit's migration thread: what consent, care, and collaboration look like when the stories carry survival and the narrators keep authority.

• NYPL Community Oral History Project. Visit the archived site.

Oral history project (archived site) · Open access.

The library-based neighborhood model: the New York Public Library's project recorded interviews with residents of Harlem, the Bronx, Greenwich Village, and other neighborhoods, community by community, through its branch libraries. The project is no longer active, and the link leads to its preserved site in a web archive — itself a small lesson in the unit's terms: even memory projects need keepers. A third institutional form beside the university-based BAAHP and the participatory CDHA, and a destination for learners who want to keep going.