Oral History essays

Oral History essays At its most basic definition, oral history is an account of the past conveyed through word of mouth. Oral history tells of cultures and individuals by presenting oral commentary of events, situations and feelings of individuals. Oral history has made important contributions to the ways in which historians and the general public understands and interprets the past. (Stursberg 1997) The beginning of the modern form of oral history is said have originated with Allan Nevins of Columbia University. According to Peter Stursberg, in his Canadian Encyclopedia article on oral history, the modern oral-history movement began in 1948 when Nevin interviewed subjects accompanied by a graduate student who took long hand notes. Nevin evoked a sort of stream of consciousness, or as Stursberg calls it, "stream of reminiscences" from his subjects. Oral histories provide an effective tool that allows historians and anthropologists a chance to preserve oral traditions, skills and crafts. (Vansina 129) In her book, "Oral Tradition as History," Jan Vansina writes that, "The full cultural or individual significance of quilting or the making of a musical instrument can only be obtained through the nuance and subtlety of oral language. Thus we can learn much from a personal history that we could never obtain from a textbook." The practice and method of oral history has had a tradition probably as long as history itself. Herodotus used the method of interviewing survivors' experiences about the past for his account of the Persian wars in the 5th century BC for example. (Stursberg) Ancient cultures would pass down the history of their tribes using the oral tradition. Chosen tribal "historians" would memorize long tracks, usually in the forms of poems or ballads, of tribal history and be charged with maintaining the facts in memory and passing it down to following generations. (Vansina, ...

Doing Sales the Old Fashioned Way. Yup it’s Cold Calling.

Doing Sales the Old Fashioned Way. Yup it’s Cold Calling. The Dreaded Cold Call Does the very phrase â€Å"cold calling† send shivers down your spine? A September 2014 Forbes article, 10 Sales Techniques To Never Cold Call Again, notes that â€Å"cold calling is a dreaded and daunting task that strikes fear down the backs of even the most fearless of marketers.† I’m not a stranger to cold calling. As a fairly new college graduate, I worked at the Volunteer Legal Services in Oakland, CA, where part of my job was to call attorneys and ask them to accept pro bono cases. Most of them said no. But since then, I’ve had very little need to cold call- and frankly have avoided it, believing that it was simply inefficient. When Mark, one of my first unofficial business coaches, yelled at me because I wasn’t making enough cold calls to drum up business, I blatantly ignored him. Nothing Else is Working! When the print version of my book, How to Write a KILLER LinkedIn Profile, became available in November 2015, I had a dream that the book would be snapped up by every college bookstore in the country. But I soon faced the harsh reality that this was not happening- not even slightly. Without a publisher and its attendant publicity machine, I had a challenge: How would I let college bookstores know about the availability of my book? One thing was for sure: My dream would not be realized if I didn’t do something. I reached out to my resources for help. A friend who has connections to college career services failed to return my emails and phone calls. â€Å"Contact the National Association of College Bookstores (NACS),† said my business coach. So I contacted NACS and discovered, after 3 months of waiting, that â€Å"We don’t have a good means of single title promotion.† I tried going to the marketing department at the distributor of my book (Ingram), who came back with, â€Å"It would be up to you as the ‘publisher’ to promote and market your book and direct people to our distribution partners to place an order.† Gee thanks. Biting the Bullet- Picking Up the Phone Finally, it got through my thick skull that there was no easy way to do this. So I started cold calling. First, I walked into the University of Wisconsin Bookstore in my home town of Madison. They ordered two copies. Encouraged, I called the Yale Bookstore (my alma mater). They ordered two copies too! Not only that, but the Barnes Noble in Madison was happy to order a couple of copies for their shelves! I called some more college bookstores. Some of them said no. Others, to my great joy, said yes! Here’s where my book will be carried as of this writing: Yale University NYU University of Wisconsin-Madison (downtown and Hilldale) University of Chicago Evergreen State College Alabama University Iowa State University University of Utah Barnes Noble, East Towne Mall, Madison, WI Here I was looking for a broad solution that would not require the work of making individual phone calls to individual bookstores. I was so stuck in thinking there must be a better way that I missed out on the opportunity to do it the old fashioned way. Once I started calling, I started getting results. Of course I can’t possibly call every book store in the country and ask them to carry my book. But I can call a lot of them, and if people buy the book, at some point I trust the balance will tip. Coach Mark, if you’re reading this, guess what?! I’m making cold calls. And it’s working. If you like How to Write a KILLER LinkedIn Profile and want to see the print book in your local Barnes Noble or other bookstore, please let them know about it and let me know if I can add to the above list! And if there’s a situation in your life where you’re waiting for a magical solution, maybe that solution is simply picking up the phone, and dialing.