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Later this year, when Kent Germany asks his students to conduct research for their final projects, he hopes they won't put all of their findings down on paper.
"I'm encouraging students who are interested in radio or film documentaries to experiment with sounds and images to communicate ideas about the past," said Germany, a new assistant professor of history and African American Studies who has been charged with developing an oral history initiative at USC.
He certainly leads by example. As deputy director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia, Germany coordinated the Lyndon B. Johnson project for the Miller Center of Public Affairs and co-founded an award-winning website, www.whitehousetapes.org.
The LBJ project publishes scholarly volumes of transcripts of President Johnson's secretly recorded conversations. Germany is an editor of the first three volumes of transcripts--The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson, volumes 1-3: The Kennedy Assassination and the Transfer of Power, and is a co-producer of the companion DVD-Rom. These initial volumes cover the first 65 hours of the nearly 800 hours of Johnson's White House recordings.
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| LBJ in the Oval Office |
Germany also hosted a nationally distributed history talk show on PBS called "For the Record." And he helped to develop a radio series called "From the Oval Office" that highlights key moments from the 1960s. The pilot episode is on LBJ's predicting a quagmire Vietnam in 1964.
Of course, Germany also puts his findings into written work. His dissertation, completed at Tulane University, is now a book due out in February 2007. New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society is about how New Orleanians fought poverty and racism 40 years before Hurricane Katrina.
Germany grew up in rural Louisiana, guided by his schoolteacher parents and listening to relatives who were great storytellers.
"I have a deep interest in Southern politics and politics of race and poverty," he said. "I'm sure it comes from trying to figure out all of the contradictions you learn to live with as a child of the South.
"Growing up in Louisiana is great training for a historian, but it can leave you in a perpetually agonized state," he said. "I spent a lot of time in church. The tensions between how we were taught to treat human beings at Sunday School versus how I saw people being treated at school and in our community probably locked in my interest and made me wonder why there was such a disconnect."
10/06
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Kent Germany, history and African American Studies
