Doing Local History with Video

There can be little doubt that the home camcorder gives ordinary people a chance to have their videos seen on that magic box, the television set. But, perhaps more important than the humor of America's Funniest Home Videos, the camcorder gives us the opportunity and the challenge to interpret our own histories. The process can be similar to that used by Ken Burns, producer of the widely acclaimed PBS series the Civil War. That series is stirring, not because of its overarching theories about this critical time in our nation's history, but because it used the stuff of our lives; our diaries, our letters, our mementos to capture the insights from everyday life. Today's video technology makes it possible for us to make similar programs, about our own family, local, or nearby history. These stories are just as real and important as any in our nation. The production of this program is made possible in part by a donation from the over 10,000 volunteer members at the G FWC Federation of Iowa Women's Clubs, supporting cultural programs in the state for over 100 years. Hello, I'm Bob Lindenmeyer, associate director of the Media Resources Center at Iowa State University. Almost 40 years ago, I produced my first television program, and ironically it was recorded in film, because videotape hadn't even been invented. The program was called "Why Hire an Architect?" and in the process I quickly learned that it was not the camera and lighting technique I'd been studying that was essential. But what was important to my little film was my research. Or, perhaps, I should admit my lack of research. Today, the video technology provides us with an amazing flexibility to record our stories but the quality of our storytelling remains the same, dependent on our homework and our ability to draw out that story with insightful interviews and images. During the next few minutes you'll meet a number of people who will comment on the rationale and the techniques of doing local history with video. We begin with Dr. Loren Horton, senior historian of the State Historical Society of Iowa. People have rites of passage and milestones in their lives, and organizations do, and political jurisdictions do. The state was admitted to the Union in 1846. Great many things have changed, great many things have developed. I think it really of sesquicentennial is a time to reflect what has happened, what directions are we going. Perhaps rethink some of those we might want to go in a different direction in some ways. Coming from an academic background, I realized the importance of letting ordinary people have a voice in what told about them. Too often rely on government statistics, census reports, journalists' account in newspapers and that doesn't give us a complete portrait of what life was like. And I think each of us has a responsibility to leave some kind of record about what our lives are like so that we know on a very human scale what happened to people and we're not just looking at a bunch of statistics or generalizations, so local case studies are what create the fabric and the texture for the much larger portrait we can create of our state or a region or of our nation. A term that I use for local history is nearby history. It's- it's the history that surrounds us every day. It's the history of my community, it's the history of my family, it's the history of my church, it's the history of the way I work, it's the history of the way people have leisure within a certain community and those are to me are some of the most most interesting forms of history that one can study. There are only a very few sources of information about the past. We have the written word, we have photographic or graphic record, we have the material culture and then we have the oral tradition. Video is a beautiful medium for combining all of those, because you can have people who have experienced an event talk about it. You have written documents from the time, you have photographic evidence of it, and you have objects. You can combine the four basic methods of understanding the past all in one. Now local history is simply placing what people have thought and done in a time and place. Local could be defined as the family, could be defined as a family farm, or it could be something defined as a small town or even a county. And if you're looking on the national scope, I suppose, Iowa is this sort of a local history. Our historians make a pretty convincing rationale for the importance of doing local history, and obviously, as we approach the sesquicentennial of our state, their challenge takes on heightened meaning. Now I realize that some of you out there are saying 'but I don't know the first thing about making a video'. Well, I'm here to tell you that you can do it. Let's look at a short sequence from Main Street, Pocahontas. [music] This is hysterical, but it was very traumatic, for me. I was in the high school band and I played the drum, the big bass drum and cymbals, in concert band, but when I was in marching band, I always played the cymbals. Well, it was Memorial Day Parade, going out to the cemetery. And the big bass drum person was not there. So for the first time in my life, dear, old Mr. Grant strapped that big bass drum on my stomach, and away we went, marching down the street and he was just sure that I would be able to do this, and I hated it but I knew that I had to do it. So, valiantly, I went marching along and we were at- we came up from the schoolhouse to the corner, where this stop sign not the stoplight is in front of Flynn's of the bank and all that, that four-way- and I went marching in my little row, right in line, just right where I should be, and all of sudden my foot hit something. I went over on top of that drum on my stomach, I rolled with the drum down the street, and ended up flat on my back with my arms and my legs out, and the drum sticking up in the middle, and the back- and the front end of the band kept marching, and the back end of the band came all confused and came over to see what to do, and what was the matter, and they got me up, and I kept marching right on down the street because I was alright. I was in hopes had died but I didn't. unfortunately. so We went marching on down the street, and we went to the cemetery, and did all the playing, and everything we were supposed to do. And at the end of the parade, I went back to the car, and my mother just yelled at me like, everything. 'Darlene, what in the world did you get into? The whole back of your coat was all dirty and I was just embarrassed to tears.' Of course, she had been out of the cemetery waiting for the band, and she didn't know of my calamity on Main Street. As the credits of Main Street Pocahontas reveal, it was conceived and produced by Ruth Ahlrichs, the director of the Pocahontas public library, with the production and technical assistance of video maker Helen Gunderson. Their collaboration is just one of many models of production that can be employed in producing local video history. Ruth Ahlrichs comments on the experience I think every time that the video is shown, a part of it will jolt a memory or nostalgia or something. And I- as I have observed people watch- watching the video, they'll turn to their neighbor and nod or laugh or smile or make it, make some kind of a response to it. And- and after- that after the video is shown, they they will relate their own stories and, maybe not to me, but to someone who will understand. And- and, I think, also, it tells people that their stories are important and just as valuable as what they have seen on the videotape. I think most historians write a narrative and a narrative tells a story. You start at a certain point, then there's a certain development, and- and you end at a certain point, and that's a story. And at the same time it's more than a story. The thing that, I suppose, distinguishes the professional historian from the non-professional historian is the professional historian puts it in a certain context that puts a frame around it. It's not just telling you about women who worked in Iowa, but it's helping you understand how Iowa women were either the same as or different from women working in other areas. So there's- there's a wider context. And there's, also, letting the reader know it may be a subtle way, how many- what the other main points of view are, regarding that particular topic but it all comes out as a story, I think. I think you can empower people. I don't think the technology has to be intimidating. There's a lot you can do in a very simple manner, just going out with a notebook and taking notes or taking a simple tape recorder out. You don't have to get involved in any high-tech operation, but if you do, there's lots of technicians around that you can hire to do that kind of work for you. But I do think it's important that we do express our feelings about the communities that we live in, or where we- where our roots are, where we came from, in order to have any sense of our own identity, let alone the values and identity that our society adheres to. We need to go out and investigate and ask questions and document. And I think it's possible for anybody to be a local historian, if they have the ambition. Some of the most exciting history I have ever read is family history, done by people within the family who have a commitment to find out about their roots, and to find out about when their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents came from the old country and and then what their experience was in the United States. That's some of the most exciting history I've ever encountered. Professor Schwieder has suggested that some of the most important history is family history. So let's look at how to record your favorite family historian on video. Here's a simple setup that will yield good video. Place the source in a comfortable chair, directly in front of you- you're the interviewer. And the camera is just offline, over your shoulder, and on a tripod. Instruct the interviewee to look at you, paying no attention to the camera. And use a lavalier microphone. The sound will be far superior to using the mic on the camera. Listen and respond to what develops during the interview. And have some questions, some pictures, and some memorabilia ready which will prompt the stories you're looking for. Dr. Rick Knupfer, executive director of the Iowa Humanities Board, comments on the value of storytelling. For the average person who's putting together a video, the important things are to get the flavor of the human being that you're dealing with, and always to be aware of that and to listen for the things that make them laugh or make them upset, and to get information. And one of the key ways, I think, to reach people, personally, is to have them tell stories. The most important thing I learned about interviewing people, I think is, what was to make them feel comfortable, and to make them feel good about themselves, and whatever they had to say was important. Another thing is when we are interviewing, was learning to be quiet because you never knew when the gem was coming. My dad's youngest brother. -Okay . -Marni's Do you know Marni? I think that that doing oral histories of our elders, of the ninety year olds, of people in their 80s, who are at the point in lifew where they're doing a great deal more summing and summarizing than the rest of us are, who have a perspective, who have long view, have seen many different generations come and go, and who more importantly have seen different styles and different community reactions to key events. Getting those voices down, and getting the flavor and texture of those lives, in the long view is important, not only to those people, and to the larger sense of community history, but- but to young people who, as I did and as most of us do ,think with good reason at a given time that they're seeing everything. Do not rush to the nursing home and interview the oldest person. You do do that, but you also interview a fourth grader. One of the things that we know least about now, is what children really did and thought in the late 19th century. Nobody asked them. I'm afraid nobody's asking them now. And I don't mean after they passed puberty, I'm talking about less than 10. They go to school, they have opinions. What is their school day like? I have no concept of what an ordinary fourth grader school day is like now. I'm sure it's not like mine was. I think we should be interviewing everybody who knows something that's historically valuable and that's literally almost every human being. It's a big order, and we're never going to do it, but we should do representative samples of that. I can see a 50 year old making a video of a 4th grader, I can also see a fourth grader making a video of a 50 year old. And you get, in those two things, some information about the 50 year old and the 4th grader, and you also get some information about what 50 year olds think of fourth graders and fourth graders think of 50 year olds, that's important. What do they think of this, because they're going to behave on the basis of what they think. Well, I'm really an advocate of using video for oral history because there are so many nuances that are not conveyed when you just pick up the audio portion of the interview, I'm talking about body language, facial expressions, the pauses that we take when we start speaking are just as important as what we're saying, and I think that that's conveyed a lot more readily on the video. Another example would be someone like Dirk Ison with his Around Round Barns video. It meant so much to me to see those farmers in their own environment, wearing their bib overalls, and their seed caps, standing in their barn yards or inside their barns. I had the whole ambience in which they lived, by having groups of farmers together I could see how they interacted with one another, I could see the the patterns of their dialogue, and the sense of humor, and who was the jokester in the group, and who was the straight man, that type of thing and that would not have been conveyed in a simple audio recording, the video was the key on that for a success. We have to sort of predict what historians in another 50 or a hundred years will need to know and will need to have to understand us, and to better understand the people that preceded us. Is everything that we're doing as historical for future people? And we have to keep that in mind. History is not only the pioneers, it's also us. The more you tie your story together, the more important and significant it will be. If there's just fragments of information, or the information is scattered around and no one can make sense of it or make meaning of it, then it will not be of much value to historians so you do need to go that extra effort to tie your package together, and make sure that it's a complete picture, that there're not gaps in it, or missing information, or questions that are going to arise when someone views it later. I think someone in the community must have a commitment to the project, and not only one someone, but it would be helpful to have two or three someone's, because it's pretty lonely just to be the only one, without any more support than that. I don't think it's hard to find support for it, necessarily, I think it's just a matter of talking to people and- and finding out who's behind you, who is with you. And, but- but it is important to have that initial vision and to know that it can be done, to know that your community is valuable, as valuable as anyone else's, to know that time is passing and that person that you've always wanted to interview, that person who knows it all, won't be here forever, and it's up to you to get it on on tape or get it somehow. Well, there you have it, a direct challenge to record your own family, local, community, or nearby history and interpret it with video. Now, if you're hesitant about being a video maker, there are other ways to support video history projects. Perhaps you're the person who will run the camcorder or be a grip, do the research, or collect the old pictures, be the interviewer, or agree to be interviewed, organize a video steering committee, or raise funds for the project, or be the catalyst that will make video history projects a reality in your community. Your efforts will provide a significant contribution to Iowa's sesquicentennial and the future of our state. You know at the heart of it, video history projects are a way of expressing our identity, defining who we are. We conclude with Dorothy Schwieder's eloquent summary and definition of our state. Iowa is the middle land in a geographical sense. It's located in the middle of the country. Iowa is the middle land, in terms of the time that Iowa was settled. Iowa is the middle land in the Middle West. in terms of being part industrial, part agricultural. I think Iowa is the middle land in terms of people's, in terms of the culture, and I think in terms of people's attitudes. I think that family values are still tremendously important in Iowa. I think Iowans to me have a tremendous amount of common sense, good old common sense, I think they use it. And I think they're thoughtful, I think they're intelligent, and I guess to me all those things would fit in with that sort of overarching view Iowa as the middle land. [ music ]