Grand Valley Magazine - Fall 2013 - (Page 30)

Q&A ER ITH &A Q SM ES AM J es eotyp au ster th Lien Elizabe elling hoto by p isp and d tory ns' his for years. As someone who trained in the tera study of the Renaissance, you really can't ng ve uri do that. So this was pretty cool. Capt by Mary Isca Pirkola History professor James Smither has personally interviewed about 700 American military veterans over the past six years. As director of Grand Valley's Veterans History Project, he collects and preserves the personal accounts of veterans, from World War I to the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, and makes the stories accessible to everyone, in part, through a project with the Library of Congress. 30 Fall '13 Congress created the Veterans History Project in 2000 to collect and archive the personal accounts of American war veterans. How did you get involved? My first actual work in this field was doing a live presentation with World War II veterans in 2003. I was on stage with three men who fought on D-Day, and Ralph Hauenstein, who served on Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's intelligence staff. The event was organized by the people who were trying to bring a military museum to Grand Rapids. They had reached out to me and others from many of the area colleges and libraries. You had developed a military history course at Grand Valley, but it was not your primary area of expertise then, right? Military history has been an interest of mine since childhood, but at the time, European history was my primary teaching focus. Then there I was on a stage, talking with people who actually lived the history I'd read about How did Grand Valley become involved? After the plans for a military museum fell through in 2005, I set up the Veterans History Project at Grand Valley, through the Department of History. My main goal was to simply continue to conduct interviews of veterans, to archive the hundreds of interviews that this group had recorded, and to complete a documentary film we were working on with the School of Communications. The interviews hadn't been processed yet to send to the Library of Congress. It has actually taken us until this year to work our way through the backlog of older interviews and the hundreds we have done since then. You also created an online home for these interviews at Grand Valley, which includes more than 1,000 interviews. How are the projects different? The Library of Congress Project is geared for the general public and doesn't provide for the expanded type of thing we want

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Grand Valley Magazine - Fall 2013

Campus News
Athletics
Arts
Donor Impact
A Laker bucket list
Bridging the justice gap
Seidman House holds hidden national gems
International Education
Research
Why the humanities still matter
Q&A James Smither
Off the Path
Focal Point
Sustainability
Alumni News

Grand Valley Magazine - Fall 2013