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Concord Free Public Library
Talking Across the Lines has been contracting with this famous Massachusetts institution since 2008 to conduct interviews regarding changes to the built and social environment in the Town of Concord, Massachusetts. Interview themes have spanned from Transcendentalism, to the Revolutionary War, to issues of land use and development, along with the evolution of community relations in this small but pivotal New England town. Transcripts, photos and audio are all available at The Concord Free Public Library _______________________________________________________________
Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike Audio History Project
Imagine interpreting a community's history through its own narratives and music. Talking Across the Lines contracted with The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike Alliance to complete seven audio history CDs highlighting life along the Turnpike from Native American life to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, gristmills and waterways, slavery and the Underground Railroad, coal mining, timbering and the oil and gas boom, as well as family and community life. The history is told through the voices of old timers in oral histories, and filled out with plenty of local music. The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike National Scenic Byway follows this historic route across West Virginia.
Carrie & Michael Kline are Talking Across the Lines, a folklife documentary consulting and production firm. The Klines created the 7-CD set of oral history, local music, and ambient natural sounds that bring the old Turnpike back to life in story and song. Click here for more info. _______________________________________________________________
Underground Railroad, Heritage Music, Cherokee Culture, Coalfield Ethnic Life, Chesapeake Bay
Michael and Carrie Kline have worked extensively in West Virginia and Ohio where they produced recordings on the Underground Railroad and local heritage music, with Cherokees in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania and in Southern Maryland's Chesapeake region where they produced a fast-paced documentary, Born and Raised in Tobacco Fields, and a two volume series of CDs featuring African American sacred music. _______________________________________________________________
Overview
of the Wheeling National Heritage Area
and the Wheeling Spoken History Project
Wheeling, West Virginia, population 34,000, is a declining, industrial
city sixty miles southwest of Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, just
north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The most ethnically diverse city
in West Virginia, Wheeling's history is imbedded with the enriched
intermingling and also the conflicts of race, class and ethnicity
which characterize most American industrial cities.
With only half its population of sixty years ago, Wheeling's long,
narrow, river valley is made up of distinct inner-city and suburban
neighborhoods. There is little of the hostility and violence one
would encounter in a larger city, but just as little interaction
across geographic and socioeconomic parameters.
For most of Wheeling's young people, the future lies elsewhere.
A large shopping mall built ten miles to the west in Ohio has long
since sucked the downtown dry. The last of the coal mines have closed,
and the reign of steel has diminished. Industrial might is history.
Yet Wheeling's greatest resources of all, it's cultural pluralism
and pivotal labor and industrial history, have remained undervalued
commodities.
With a resurgence of interest in local heritage led by City fathers
and mothers à la funds from Senator Robert Byrd and oversight by
the National Park Service, the Wheeling National Heritage Area Corporation
has come into being. Don Briggs was the United States Park Service
staff person assigned to assist the City in its plans to become
a National Heritage Area. He informed the local Heritage Core Group
that in order to arrive upon themes to showcase to tourists, the
City would have to contract to undergo an ethnographic survey. His
plan was to let the people of Wheeling talk about their community
and, based on the topics that emerged from their discussions, design
meaningful tourist attractions.
This grassroots approach to designing a National Heritage Area is
both sensible and rare. The value of this approach to recording
local history is that those who are seldom consulted have a chance
to determine what is important to tell visitors about their world.
A premise here is that if the Heritage exhibits appeal to Wheeling
citizens, then the honesty and humanity of the displays will probably
attract tourists as well.
In April, 1994, Carrie and Michael Nobel Kline were awarded the
contract to conduct Wheeling's Ethnographic Survey. The team soon
renamed their work, launching "The Wheeling Spoken History Project."
By the end of July, 1994, the Wheeling News-Register had agreed
to publish what evolved into a 30-part series entitled, "Wheeling's
Spoken History," in which Dr. and Mrs. Kline intercut excerpts from
several narrators each week and sought out compelling artwork to
round out the articles.
The newspaper series quickly expanded the Spoken History Project
from a research effort into a public forum for generating new conversations
about an old city. With the Project's phone number printed with
each article, citizens have not hesitated to correct the survey's
findings or offer additional names of people to interview.
The Spoken History Project also had an opportunity to create a series
of audio tapes to accompany museum exhibits, as well as a 22-part
series of radio programs for commercial broadcast on AM-radio, all
produced by interweaving portions of different people's life story
interviews across thematic lines and mixing in relevant music.
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Click
here to view the products of the Wheeling Spoken History Project
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U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District
Oral Historical Update
From 1996-1998, under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
Huntington District, Michael and Carrie Kline conducted 60 oral
historical interviews with Corps employees, retirees and those
affected by Corps projects. They produced a ninety-minute historical
audio tape entitled "Working A Square Watch" to commemorate the
75th anniversary of the Huntington District.
| Click on Soundbytes
(above) to hear samples from: |
| "Working a Square Watch"
-Senator Robert C. Byrd |
| "A towboater's life" |
In addition the Klines produced a full length manuscript comprised
of transcribed and interwoven portions of the interviews. In
Their Own Words is written as a conversation amongst those involved
with the Huntington District of the Army Corps from the 1960s through
the mid-1990s.
Read an article written by Carrie N. Kline
based on the Klines' research with the Huntington District of
the Army Corps of Engineers. |
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