Family in the Fifties: Hope, Fear, and Rock 'N Roll (Mss. Gr. 116)

Historical Information

"Oral history... is a way of capturing the voices and experiences of every day people.... The narrators' voices form a harmony which is complex and subtle, revealing the history of a decade."

Thus does Linda Wood describe the essential value of oral history in making the recent past meaningful in her introduction to "The Family in the Fifties: Hope, Fear and Rock In Roll," the oral history project of which she was project director. "The Family in the Fifties" was a project designed to "explore and probe personal experiences and memories" of Rhode Island residents who grew to adulthood in the decade of the 1950s.

The interviews for the project were conducted in 1993 by fifteen members of a tenth grade English class from South Kingstown High School. The students interviewed twenty-four Rhode Island residents who recalled their experiences in the 1950s. The interview subjects were asked to focus in particular on such topics as rock and roll, the Cold War, McCarthyism, racism, the advent of television, and their impact on the "nuclear family." Based on the interviews they conducted, the students wrote papers or "stories" in which they summarized the content of the interview and recorded their own impressions and observations.

The project was funded with a grant from the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities and co-sponsored by South Kingstown High School and the Rhode Island Historical Society. The students worked under the supervision of project co-directors Linda Wood and Judi Scott, as well as receiving input from humanities scholars Professor Sharon Strom and Professor James Findlay of the University of Rhode Island History Department.

In addition to the oral history tapes and transcripts generated by this project, there was also a publication produced entitled The Family in the Fifties: Hope, Fear, and Rock 'N Roll. This sixty page, illustrated, magazine-format publication contains edited versions of the twenty-four student papers resulting from the interviews. These are the records of the oral history project "The Family in the Fifties: Hope, Fear and Rock 'N Roll," which were donated to the Special Collections Department of the University of Rhode Island Library in June 1994 by the project co-director Linda Wood.