Bette Weidman Oral History Papers

Dr. Bette Weidman was Associate Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Queens College. She began her career in the school in 1969 as a specialist in 19th-century American literature, and was introduced to the field of oral history by her faculty mentor, Dr. Helene Brewer. Before joining the Queens faculty, Brewer had been a founding member of the Regional Oral History Office at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1978, at Brewer’s suggestion, Weidman took a training course in conducting oral history interviews at Columbia University with Dr. Louis Starr, director of Columbia’s Oral History Research Office. Excited about this growing field of inquiry, Weidman tried to establish a course in oral history at Queens but was met with a lack of enthusiasm. Instead, she began incorporating oral interview assignments into her regular American Studies and Women’s Studies courses as well as the English department elective, The Immigrant Experience. She also offered several oral history workshop classes as Special Studies courses in the English department.

In the 1990s, Weidman met Queens College Higher Education Officer Sydney Lefkoe who shared her interest in oral history. In 2003, they collaborated on a project to videotape interviews with 50-year alumni who returned to campus to be recognized at Commencement. Eighteen members of the class of 1953 were interviewed for the project.

The interviews in this collection are drawn from several of Weidman’s classes. The bulk currently comes from a Fall 1987 English department course; a grant-funded Women’s Oral History Project, conducted in 1992; and a collaborative oral history course taught in Spring 2012. More recordings will be added to the collection on an ongoing basis.