Oral History at Shippensburg University

This episode is part of the COVID in the Cumberland Valley project that students in Dr. John Bloom's Oral History class at Shippensburg University have been conducting since the fall of 2021.

Three people in the Cumberland Valley who work in various aspects of education, one a high school teacher, one a college professor, and one a university administrator, discuss their challenges, both personal and professional, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode, Shippensburg University Graduate Students Kathleen Foley, Sarah Hoffeditz, Richard Jones, and Flipe Lupian-Gonzalez look at how COVID affected education in the Cumberland Valley. They focus upon the issue of preparedness. What were we ready for nationally, should we have been more prepared, and how did our national lack of preparation affect education locally? It's a local story, but one relevant to people who live outside the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania. 

Taking a detour from our oral histories of COVID in the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania, this podcast looks at an oral history about a painful event in the memories of some who lived in Woodbine, New Jersey during the 1930's. Woodbine, created as a Jewish colony in the late 19th century, had a police chief who moonlighted as a bootlegger of liquor. That all ended during a late night raid of his still, an event that cost him his life. Drawing from an archived oral history interview, Lonna Anderson, Kalyn Clites, and Josiah Vieland take a deep dive into this tragic event, connecting it not only to crime, but to issues of policing and identity that are still relevant to this day.

Shippensburg University students Nicholas Collare and Christopher Ott discuss their interviews with their narrators: Dr. Jim Freeman, a medical doctor who resides in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania; and with Bethany Salzarulo, Cumberland County Director of Elections and Voter Registration. They address the difficulties that both encountered as they maintained their professional stature during the early pandemic, encountering lockdowns, new sanitary procedures, and patients who resisted medical advice. 

Episode One: In the spring of 2017, students Emily Keating, Taylor Little, Taylor Mason, Tyler Newcomer and Andrea Readshaw in HIS 433 (Oral History) at Shippensburg University conducted an oral history of faculty members who had participated in the first ever strike in the history of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. The three day strike had taken place the previous fall. Students interviewed union officers as well as other faculty who walked the picket line and organized for the faculty union, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty (APSCUF). They produced this podcast from their work. There will be more coming from HIS 433 in May of 2019!