Registration and continental breakfast

Jennifer J. Raab, President, Hunter College

"Documenting the Memories of 9/11"

Discussion

Lunch
(12:00 - 12:20: OHMAR Business Meeting)

"Interviewing Pioneers in the Preservation Movement"

Discussion

The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute of Hunter College seeks to support the programs and values advanced by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt which include the New Deal efforts to promote social and economic justice, revive the economy through public works, and support for practitioners of the arts and humanities. The origins of this conference can be traced to innovative projects of the New Deal. Contemporary American oral history projects have roots in the interviews with former slaves conducted under the aegis of the WPA programs during President Roosevelt's first two terms, and to the battlefield interviews undertaken by Forrest Pogue during World War II. Serious historic preservation documentation began with the Historic American Buildings Survey inaugurated during the New Deal.

Mary Marshall Clark is the Director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office since 2001 and was Associate Director from 1990. She is immediate past president of the Oral History Association. Before joining Columbia, she was engaged with oral history and film work for the New York Times. She has published numerous articles on oral history techniques and conducted many interviews. She is directing a longitudinal oral history project on the events and aftermath of 9/11 with interviews of over 450 people.

Dr. Steven Jaffe was the Curator at the South Street Seaport Museum and in that capacity became engaged with an interview and exhibit project about the maritime workers who assisted in the evacuation of Lower Manhattan on 9/11. He is now Special Projects Historian at the New York Historical Society. He is the author of Who Were the Founding Fathers?: Two Hundred Years of Reinventing American History.

Dr. John Lonnquest is the director of the oral history program in the Office of History, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and the leader of the Corps' September 11 Documentation Project. The project collected approximately 75 oral history interviews, plus thousands of documents, photographs, and artifacts to document the Corps of Engineers role in relief operations following the September 11 attacks.

Marjorie Landa, JD, now the General Counsel for the New York City Department of Investigation, was working at the New York City Department of Law as Deputy Chief of the Affirmative Litigation Division on 9/11. She organized the expedited death certificate process for 9/11 victims and families in which documents and verbal testimony were considered as evidence.

Dr. Susan Turner-Meiklejohn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College. Before starting to teach, she worked for ten years in the field of historic preservation and planning. She does extensive interviewing in her work and is the author of Wages, Race, Skills and Space: Lessons from Employers in Detroit's Auto Industry. She is completing a book, based on over 150 interviews with city dwellers, of how experiences with racial discrimination impede their search for work.

Anthony C. Wood is the Chair and Founder of the New York Preservation Archive Project whose mission is to preserve and promote the history of preservation in New York where he has been active in historic preservation work for over 20 years. He has served on the governing boards of the Partners for Sacred Places, the Preservation League of New York State, and the Historic Districts Council, and was the chief program officer at the J.M. Kaplan Fund. In addition, he has taught in the Historic Preservation program at Columbia, and published articles and interviews about the historic preservation movement.

Dr. Mary Beth Betts is the Director of Research at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission where oral testimony is a critical component of the public hearing process. She has publications concerning the history of New York's City Hall, the New York waterfront, and most recently, a chapter in Inventing the Skyline: The Architecture of Cass Gilbert.

Laura Hansen and Marci Reaven are the Co-Directors of Place Matters, a joint project of the Municipal Art Society of New York and City Lore, New York's Center for Urban Folk Culture. The mission of Place Matters is to foster the conservation of New York's historically and culturally significant places, and oral history is used for surveying and documentation work. Ms. Hansen worked in arts administration, folklore documentation, and preservation and program planning before joining Place Matters. Ms. Reaven is an historian and film maker who has also done interpretive planning for historic sites and public spaces. Her Guidebook for Building Stronger Communities through Public Dialogue (a component of the NEH program National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity) is in national distribution.

Edward Linenthal is the Edward M. Penson Professor of Religion and American Culture and Chancellor's Public Scholar at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. His work is focused on the relationship between memory, preservation, and commemoration in the stories of important places and events. He is the author of Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum, and Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields; and an editor of History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, American Sacred Space, and The Nuclear Age.