The Power of Oral Histories

I often believe that a common misconception about history is that it means studying the past and only the past. However, I find that the greatest impact occurs when we connect the past to the present. This is where oral histories come into play.

As my internship here at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA) comes to a close, I wanted to tell you about my experiences with oral histories. As you may know, NBLA is home to over 1,500 oral history interviews with prominent physicists, including Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. The more time you spend in the database, the more you discover. Yet, one glaring trend emerges: the majority of interviews are with White, straight, non-disabled men.

It is no secret that physics, throughout history and into modern times, is a field dominated by that very demographic. However, non-White, non-male, queer, and disabled individuals have long existed in participated in the physical sciences. The issue at hand is that when we are taught the history of physics and its evolution, we typically only learn about actors like Einstein and Newton, reinforcing the notion that physics belongs only to that identity group. Oral histories have the power to change this, as they cement whose legacies will be preserved. Thus, if we give a platform to those who have traditionally been left out of the story, we can rewrite the traditional narrative.

Wanting to give platform to underrepresented scientists, my journey with the Oral History Interviews first began with selecting people to contact. Scouring dozens of websites, two people in particular caught my attention: Dr. K. Renee Horton and Dr. Jan Eldridge.

Dr. K. Renee Horton (she/her)

Dr. K. Renee Horton is currently an Airworthiness Deputy for NASA’s Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstrator Project and previously served as the Space Launch Systems Quality Engineer for the Artemis Project at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. After graduating from Louisiana State University in 2002 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Math, she went on to become the first African American person to graduate from the University of Alabama with a Ph.D. in Material Science, concentrating in Physics. Alongside her career at NASA, Dr. Horton also advocates for Black women in science and disability rights.

Growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she always had a love for science. She dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but when she was 16, she found out that she had a hearing disability while at her Air Force ROTC physical, derailing her plans. From there, she dropped out of school and had three children. After a decade, Dr. Horton decided to return to college and ultimately attend graduate school, where she discovered the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP). Becoming active in the organization, she eventually became its president in 2016—a position she held for two years—and an NSBP Fellow. Since then, she has mentored countless students, served on the Women in Physics Working Group and the Developmental Physics Working Group for the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and is involved with countless nonprofits.

On July 3rd, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Horton myself. For an hour and a half, Dr. Horton recounted her life to me, and there truly is nothing like hearing about someone else’s experience firsthand. As I write this, the transcript is not yet available to the public, but I recommend checking it out once it is published as I cannot do proper justice to her story.

Dr. Jan J. Eldridge (she/they)

A week later, on July 11th, I likewise had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Jan Eldridge , the Academic Head and Professor for the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland. As a nonbinary trans woman, she often likes to say, “I study exploding binary stars while exploding the myth of a gender binary.”

As a young child in southeast London, Dr. Eldridge became enthralled with the world of science fiction, and from there, science as a discipline. After navigating university as a first-generation college student, she graduated in 2001 from Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge with a Master’s in Natural Science. Four years later, they graduated with their Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. Subsequently, she completed post-docs in France, Northern Ireland, and England before moving to New Zealand, where she is currently based. As a researcher, Dr. Eldridge primarily studies the lives and deaths of stars, particularly those of binary star systems. To aid her in this, she co-developed Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis (BPASS) code, which enables her to model binary star interactions.

In addition to her research, Dr. Eldridge is a staunch advocate for science communication and diversity in STEM, particularly amongst LGBTQ+ individuals and women. Eldridge first came out as a nonbinary woman in 2015, but, in 2017, she truly declared herself to the world: she came out in front of an audience of 217 people while giving a lecture for an Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) conference. However, Dr. Eldridge has always prioritized ensuring that people feel safe in the spaces they inhabit, becoming involved with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives early on, including serving on ASA’s Inclusive, Diverse, Equitable Astronomy. From there, Dr. Eldridge became involved with DEI on her campus and continues this work as academic head.

As with Dr. Horton’s interview, the transcript for Dr. Eldridge’s Oral History Interview is not yet available, but you should read through it once accessible. As someone who came from a low-income family, did not go straight into university, and is part of the LGBTQ+ community, Dr. Eldridge, like Dr. Horton, brings a unique and underrepresented perspective to the physics community.

The one piece of advice I can give anyone preparing for an oral history interview is to not underestimate how long it will take you to publish the interview. For each interview, I spent several days reconstructing their timelines, wrote over two dozen questions, and summarized their lives into a brief introduction. The interview itself, although it seems daunting, is probably the easiest part, as I like to think of it like a conversation. However, once the interview ends and the transcriber gets back with the transcript, the tedious part comes. Before sending the transcript back to the interviewee to review and edit, you must first go over the dozens of pages meticulously, ensuring that there are no mistakes. Although monotonous, it is a crucial step of the process. You must then wait for the interviewee to review it, a step that can last months if unlucky. Only then can you publish it. Without a doubt, conducting these interviews is a long process, but you are left with an invaluable final product: you have shaped history, uplifting voices that may not have been represented otherwise.

In recent years, NBLA has made a conscientious effort to diversify the oral histories we keep. Alongside the interviews of Horton and Eldridge, we house those of Ronald E. Mickens , Nergis Mavalvala , Chanda Prescod-Weinstein , and Ximena Cid , amongst others. Although these interviews begin to rewrite the narrative that physics belongs only to White men, we still have a lot of work to do. I hope in the future more oral historians seek out individuals whose stories may not otherwise be preserved and show the true nature and diversity of the physics community. These stories contain the power to reshape how the future tells history.