OH. Oral Histories / Queens Memory

Scope and Contents

The interview, which took place on May 14th, 2020, is about Meghan Moore-Wilk, who is the Queens College Chief of Staff, and her hand in managing and stratigizing next steps for the college when in-person classes were shut down in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scope and Contents In this interview, Michael Kail talks about spending the first twenty-five years of his life in a square mile in the vicinity of Queens College. He narrates that he was born in the Bronx but his family moved to Queens at an early age, first to Jackson Heights, then shortly after to the newly-opened Pomonok Housing Project, and then to Aguilar Gardens on Parsons Boulevard. Queens College, along with City College and Brooklyn College, were the city colleges that had the most prestigious...

Scope and Contents In this interview, alumni Mike Wenger, Stan Shaw, and Mark Levy discuss their impressions of life at Queens College in the early 1960s. The three discuss the culture of campus, the impact of the Virginia Student Help Project in 1963, and subsequent student activist movements on campus and in society at large. Wenger, Shaw, and Levy recall student-driven civil rights activities such as the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, Freedom Week, and Freedom Fast initiatives. Also in the conversation,...

Scope and Contents In this interview, Mohamed Amin talks of the transformation of Richmond Hill from 2005, when he moved there, to 2017, when he was interviewed. He talks of how he felt reintegrated to Guyanese culture through the food, music, and nightlife in the area. Despite the strong presence of his Guyanese community, however, he still felt, as a gay Caribbean American man, some racism and homophobia. And one night, in a bar, he was pushed and called an anti-gay slur, and his brother was assaulted. He...

Scope and Contents

In this interview, Lucchi discusses the pandemic as it happened in Italy, one of the epicenters of which occurred in a small town in southern Lombardy where he grew up and where his parents still live. He also talks of his experience as a professor at Queens College who had to quickly transition to remote teaching, and how he felt his undergraduate and graduate language classes fared in the online setting.

Abstract

This oral history records Richard Branciforte's interview as conducted by Rebecca Rushfield as part of the Queens Memory Project in October 2018. In it, he recalls his time at Queens College in the mid 1960s and specifically the role of house plans in the social fabric of the campus. He founded Kingston House, one of the most influential house plans, in 1963.

Scope and Contents Rosalind Andrews (then Rosalind Silverman) grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens and was a student at Queens College between 1960 and 1965. While at Queens College, Andrews spent the summer of 1963 in Prince Edward County, Virginia among a cohort of selected students who helped tutor and prepare local students for the reopening of public schools that fall, which were closed since 1959 in massive resistance to integration. Andrews describes a typical day in Farmville as a tutor, the failed media...

Scope and Contents These interviews took place in April of 2013, between Ruth Frisz and Eric Jablon. In the first interview Dr. Ruth Frisz discussed her career at Queens College, which started in 1966. She began her career as an advisor to the fraternities, sororities and house plans, eventually becoming the coordinator of student activities. She lost her job in the New York Finanial Crisis and rejoined the college in 1978 as a professor and coordinator of the counseling program and then retired in January of...

Abstract

This oral history was an interview of Samuel Heilman, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College, by Obden Mondesir in April, 2020. In it, Professor Heilman talks about the effects of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 in his personal life and his primarily Jewish Orthodox community of New Rochelle, New York, the site of the first major American outbreak of the disease.

Scope and Contents

In this interview, Dr. Sarah Covington discusses her journey from being a media studies major in college to becoming a history professor at Queens College, the book about Cromwell that she was writing at the time of the interview, the benefits of a sabbatical she recently took, and the various history classes she enjoys teaching. This interview was conducted as part of English 395W, "Theory and Practice of Oral History," taught by professors Bette Weidman and Ben Alexander.