Friday, March 27, 2026, at 8 AM
Breakfast will be provided.
Van Dyck Hall, Room 301
16 Seminary Pl,
New Brunswick, NJ 08091
Raven Manygoats and Sarah Coffman, Ph.D. candidates in History at Rutgers-New Brunswick, will speak to how they use oral history collections to interrogate this year's Susman Conference's theme of "Bearing Witness, Challenging Myths: Imperial Pasts and Fascist Presents" in their research.
Raven Manygoats, “ ‘The Whole Thing Was A Fantasy’: Native American Women Remember Relocation and the Rise of Red Power in the Bay Area”
My lecture, “‘The Whole Thing Was A Fantasy’: Native American Women Remember Relocation and the Rise of Red Power in the Bay Area”, discusses using the American Indian Community History Center’s oral history collection to trace Native American women’s experiences of the Federal Relocation Program to California’s Bay Area from 1952 to 1972. My lecture provides context for the rise of Red Power activism in the late 1960s and examines Native Americans’ motivations for urban migration and the foundational struggles they faced in cities.
Raven is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in United States History and Gender and Women's History. She received her B.A. in History from Otterbein University in 2019. Her dissertation, “The Birthright of Generations Unborn: Native American Women’s Quests for Sovereignty in the Era of Red Power,” aims to be a comprehensive history that considers women’s place within the many facets of the Red Power Movement and contends that women sustained the movement from 1968 to 1996. Her work draws upon the experiences of both urban and rural Native American women and their participation in organizations like Indians of All Tribes, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Women of All Red Nations, and efforts surrounding environmental activism following the demise of AIM in the mid-1970s.
Sarah Coffman, "'Goin’ North': Using Oral Histories to Probe Class Tension in Philadelphia’s Great Migration.
I will discuss "Goin' North: Stories from the First Great Migration to Philadelphia," an underutilized online repository of oral history interviews with native Black Philadelphians and new Black migrants to the city. My lecture will cover the ways historians of African American history, the Great Migration, and northern cities in the twentieth century can use "Goin' North" to ask critical questions about how class manifests differently in Black urban communities.
Sarah Coffman is a fifth-year history PhD candidate focusing on twentieth century African American and urban history. She received her BA in History and African American studies from Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois in 2021. Her research, centered in late-nineteenth and twentieth century Philadelphia, examines how Black people across property ownership categories—homeowners, renters, housing-insecure, and unhoused—navigated the violent constraints of urban real estate markets on a daily basis. Within these stories, she is thematically interested in the maintenance and persistence of segregation, racial capitalism in real estate, how gender impacts Black shelter seeking, and public health and environmental illness.
The Chambers Oral History Graduate Student Fellowship is a reflection of The Cobb Foundation and The Ware Foundation's desire to honor the scholarly and scholastic legacy of Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History John Whiteclay Chambers II.
The Chambers Oral History Graduate Student Fellowship Lecture is presented by the School of Arts and Sciences' Executive Dean's Office, Department of History, Rutgers Oral History Archives and its affiliate community organization, the Rutgers Living History Society.