Angelica Ramos
Contributing Writer
MONTGOMERY COUNTY- Dr. Jason Higgins and his students are working toward recording local oral histories and changing how we tell our stories.
Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Virginia Tech and also an assistant professor who works closely with the Virginia Tech University Libraries. Higgins teaches history at Virginia Tech with his classes spanning subjects such as the Vietnam War, African American History and Oral History. He is also a published author, publishing a book with University of Massachusetts Press titled Pioneers After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
Higgins’ career started with his undergraduate degrees in English and history, where he focused on war history, specifically the pacific war. Higgins has always worked and at one point in his past was a waiter. He explained that veterans used to come into his old job and order coffee. Through striking up conversation and studying history, he was able to interview veterans. He began to become interested in their histories, their stories, not just war stories but life after the wars and the trauma that followed.
“The best way,” Higgins said, “to retell history is from the bottom up. History is never in the past.”
Regarding telling the stories of others and teaching history, Higgins says that we need to engage the source of that history as people are witnesses to history and contain history within themselves, as we, as humans and storytellers, naturally carry the past with us. As Higgins works with history, oftentimes trauma is present. Higgins believes that teaching and understanding history will help us understand generational traumas, not just within individual people, familial units, but in the case of generations or whole countries that are affected by trauma. During his education, he was able to interview and is still interviewing Vietnam Veterans and what Higgins has come to realize is that these experiences are not singular, although individuals experienced them, they are shared within this veteran community. Through interviewing them, the veterans share their stories with him, as they may or, in some cases, may not have shared with their families. Through the sharing of history and experiences, Higgins believes that resolutions may be possible.
Currently, Higgins and his students are working on recording oral histories of the descendants of Historic Smithfield. The students work with him on this project through an internship. This is the second year of the internship program, and they currently have five paid interns who are paid about 15 dollars an hour and two student workers. The students and Higgins have a collaborative environment where they have ownership over the work they do. Those they interview are always aware that they have consented to the interviews and do not have to share information they are uncomfortable sharing. This reinforces that the interviewees have empowerment as well as the students. The students do not just learn the histories of the people they are interviewing for various projects, but they also learn the publishing aspects, how to edit and enhance sound and picture. The students fact check and learn how to create and index so that the recorded histories are able to be navigated. They learn to use the technology efficiently and it provides them real field experience and shows them the joy of the work they do.
During the pandemic, they made recording kits to send out to those they were interviewing that couldn’t make it to Virginia or, because there was a nationwide lock down, to make it more accessible to those they were working with. The kits had instructions and were very user friendly even for those who are not very tech-savvy. They still have these kits and are willing to send them out as a resource to collect as many oral histories as they can.
Having a professor who has experience in this field and with recording oral histories, Higgins inspires these students as well as encourages them to value the histories within us all. Currently, the projects Higgins and his students are not “done” but when asking Higgins what “done” would look like for these projects, he explained that he hopes this leads to community events, to give back to the communities they serve, to have these projects possibly used as case studies in the future and to hopefully inspire others to do something similar, connect with those who want to learn and who want to be better ancestors than those that came before them.
