Oral History - guide to resources: East Midlands

This research project was established by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in 2000 to record the experience of Hindus who migrated to Britain. The oral history interviews focussed on both the interviewee’s personal history and on his or her religious practices and beliefs. Interviews were conducted with members of Hindu communities from across Britain. The recordings and transcripts of 46 interviews are available online. The complete archive of over 300 interviews is accessible at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Oxford.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; migration; race; religion

This British Academy project aimed to identify variation and changes in the East Midlands dialect which have taken place over the last century. It examined a number of recently recorded oral history interviews and compared them with those conducted in the latter half of the last century. Between six and eight speakers were selected as a representative sample for both male/female, younger/older and urban/rural speakers from each of four East Midlands counties: Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Audio extracts from each of the interviews, many of them collected specifically for this project, are available to listen to online. The accompanying linguistic notes for each extract are also available to read online. These made note of any particularly interesting features of non-standard pronunciation (phonology), grammar and lexis (region-specific dialect words).

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: childhood; community; language

This website provides access to a number of videos created as part of a project to record stories of migration into the East Midlands from the UK and further afield since 1945. The project, which was managed by the East Midlands Oral History Archive, trained a number of local groups to conduct and edit the oral history interviews into a number of short videos about their communities. The videos can be accessed by clicking on an interactive map of the East Midlands area on the website homepage. It is worth noting that this map does not seem to load correctly when using Firefox web browser but works fine when using Internet Explorer.

Topics: People

Keywords: migration; refugees

Amongst other sources related to the history of the area, this website provides online access to approximately 150 complete audio recordings held by the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA). The interviews primarily relate to life in Leicestershire from the turn of the century to the 1930s and cover a wide variety of topics from WWI to influenza, education and work. A number of recordings also relate to the interviewees experiences abroad, particularly in India. The interviews are all summarised and categorised and available to search by keyword.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Education; People; Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; engineering; family; religion; WW1