“I’ve never been a radical,” insists former anti-Vietnam War activist Pierce Bounds. —Oral history project by Sarah Goldberg, History 118, Spring 2016
On Doing Oral History interviews
Insights from HIST 118 projects
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Pierce Bounds
Focus on specific historians
- “Bounds’ memories of student protest culture ultimately complicate Brands’ radical narrative by framing the trajectory of Dickinson’s moderate anti-war movement in the context of a larger generational shift towards new campus norms rather than radical politics.”
- Find striking details
- “Bounds and his friends liked “irritating our elders” by flaunting a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. “I never read it. Most people never read it. But we loved to hold that little red book,” Bounds reminisces.”
- Deploy multiple perspectives
- “Former Dickinson College President Bill Durden recalls similar restrictions: “We couldn’t go upstairs [in a women’s dormitory]; we would have been, you know, arrested or something.”
- “Marihuana [sic] is part of the student’s environment,” admitted Dickinson’s Drug Education Committee.”
- Describe key turning points
- “This new attention to student’s rights culminated in D.E.C.L.A.R.E Day, or Dickinson’s Expression Concerning Learning and Re-Evaluating of Education. On March 5, 1969, the administration announced a moratorium on classes so that students could participate in discussions with faculty. Students hoped to address the conservative academic environment that felt anachronistic among the social and cultural shifts of the late 1960s. “My courses add up to a degree – do they add up to an education?” questioned the front page of The Dickinsonian.”
- Anticipate interpretive objections or alternatives
- “At Dickinson’s largest anti-war protest, more than a thousand marched through Carlisle to the War College in May 1970 in reaction to the shootings at Kent State and the invasion of Cambodia.”
