The West Point Center for Oral History is one of the United States Military Academy's Centers for Excellence. This Center is devoted to capturing the story of the American soldier in both war and peace. Unlike other oral history archives, the West Point Center for Oral History is a video archive that records interviews using state-of-the-art video technology and produces documentary films using their footage. [1]
The Center for Oral History was started in 2008 by Colonel Lance Betros, then head of West Point's history department. The founding director was noted journalist and author Todd Brewster, who served in that capacity from 2008 to 2013. Brewster remains a member of the Center's distinguished advisory board, which includes, among others, Ken Burns, Sebastian Junger, Martha Raddatz, Brent Scowcroft, and Jack Jacobs. [2] The Center officially launched in October 2011 with its website and its first documentary film, Into Harm's Way . This film was produced by The Documentary Group, a New York City based film production company founded by Tom Yellin and Kayce Freed Jennings, with Brewster serving as Executive Producer of the project. [3]
The Center contains hundreds of interviews from soldiers, policy makers, politicians, and others whose lives have touch the profession of arms. Its interview subjects currently include veterans of World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Bosnia, and the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The United States Military Academy (USMA), also known metonymically as West Point or simply as Army, is a United States service academy in West Point, New York. It was originally established as a fort, since it sits on strategic high ground overlooking the Hudson River with a scenic view, 50 miles (80 km) north of New York City. It is the oldest of the five American service academies and educates cadets for commissioning into the United States Army.
Alcatraz Island is a small island in San Francisco Bay, 1.25 miles (2.01 km) offshore from San Francisco, California, United States. The island was developed in the mid-19th century with facilities for a lighthouse, a military fortification, and a military prison. In 1934, the island was converted into a federal prison, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. The strong currents around the island and cold water temperatures made escape nearly impossible, and the prison became one of the most notorious in American history. The prison closed in 1963, and the island is now a major tourist attraction.
Stephen Edward Ambrose was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
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Sebastian Junger is an American journalist, author and filmmaker who has reported in-the-field on dirty, dangerous and demanding occupations and the experience of infantry combat. He is the author of The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (1997) which was adapted into a major motion picture and led to a resurgence in adventure creative nonfiction writing. He covered the War in Afghanistan for more than a decade, often embedded in dangerous and remote military outposts. The book War (2010) was drawn from his field reporting for Vanity Fair, that also served as the background for the documentary film Restrepo (2010) which received the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Junger's works explore themes such as brotherhood, trauma, and the relationship of the individual to society as told from the far reaches of human experience.
The Anderson Platoon is a documentary feature by Pierre Schoendoerffer about the Vietnam War, named after the leader of the platoon - Lieutenant Joseph B. Anderson - with which Schoendeorffer was embedded. Two decades later, a sequel was released as Reminiscence.
Sir! No Sir! is a 2005 documentary by Displaced Films about the anti-war movement within the ranks of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. The film was produced, directed, and written by David Zeiger. The film had a theatrical run in 80 cities throughout the U.S. and Canada in 2006, and was broadcast worldwide on: Sundance Channel, Discovery Channel, BBC, ARTE France, ABC Australia, SBC Spain, ZDF Germany, YLE Finland, RT, and several others.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. The novel is broken into five chapters: Warnings, Blame, The Great Panic, Turning the Tide, and Good-Byes, and features a collection of individual accounts narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following the devastating global conflict against the zombie plague. Other passages record a decade-long desperate struggle, as experienced by people of various nationalities. The personal accounts take place all over the world including: China, the United States, Greece, Brazil, Barbados, Israel, Finland, Antarctica, Russia, Germany, and even in outer space. The "interviews" describe the resulting social, political, religious, economic, and environmental changes that occur as a result of the zombies.
In the Year of the Pig is an American documentary film directed by Emile de Antonio about American involvement in the Vietnam War. It was released in 1968 while the U.S. was in the middle of its military engagement, and was politically controversial. One year later, the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In 1990, Jonathan Rosenbaum characterized the film as "the first and best of the major documentaries about Vietnam".
Sherman's March is a 2007 American Civil War television docudrama film first aired on the History Channel, which describes the titular March to the Sea of the Union Army led by William Tecumseh Sherman, and the ensuing Campaign of the Carolinas which ended the war. The film was directed by Rick King and narrated by Edward Herrmann. Sherman's campaign became the mythic symbol of the Civil War's destruction; the film's opening sequence poses the question "Sherman: Terrorist or Savior?".
The Pritzker Military Museum & Library is a non-profit museum and a research library for the study of military history on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. The institution was founded in 2003, and its specialist collections include material relating to Winston Churchill and war-related sheet music.
Allan Bérubé was an American historian, activist, independent scholar, self-described "community-based" researcher and college drop-out, and award-winning author, best known for his research and writing about homosexual members of the American Armed Forces during World War II. He also wrote essays about the intersection of class and race in gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, working-class family, his French-Canadian roots, and about his experience of anti-AIDS activism.
Waltz with Bashir is a 2008 Israeli adult animated war documentary drama film written, produced, and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman's search for lost memories of his experience as a soldier during the 1982 Lebanon War.
The Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II is a 1992 documentary film co-produced by Bill Miles and Nina Rosenblum and narrated by the actors Louis Gossett Jr. and Denzel Washington. Using interviews, photographs, and diary readings, it tells the story of the primarily black 761st Tank Battalion and 183rd Combat Engineers during World War II, including their experiences of racism in the United States and their involvement in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
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Restrepo is a 2010 American documentary film about the Afghanistan war, directed by American journalist Sebastian Junger and British photojournalist Tim Hetherington.
Todd Brewster is an American author, journalist, and film producer. He is presently the senior visiting lecturer in journalism at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Sri Lanka's Killing Fields was an investigatory documentary about the final weeks of the Sri Lankan Civil War broadcast by the British TV station Channel 4 on 14 June 2011. Described as one of the most graphic documentaries in British TV history, the documentary featured amateur video from the conflict zone filmed by civilians and Sri Lankan soldiers which depicted "horrific war crimes". The video filmed by civilians included scenes during and after intense shelling of civilian targets, including hospitals, by the Sri Lankan military. The "trophy video" filmed by Sri Lankan soldiers showed scenes of blindfolded victims being executed and dead bodies of naked women being dragged onto trucks by soldiers as they made lewd remarks about the victims. The documentary also included interviews with civilians who managed to survive the conflict, United Nations staff based in Sri Lanka during the conflict, human rights organisations and an international law expert. The documentary was made by ITN Productions and presented by Jon Snow, of Channel 4 News.
Into Harm's Way is a 2012 American documentary. The film features a series of interviews with the members of the United States Military Academy class of 1967 and their experiences during their college career at West Point and later in the Vietnam War. The movie was produced and directed by Jordan Kronick for the West Point Center for Oral History. The Center's director, journalist Todd Brewster, served as the film's executive producer. The film opened at the GI Film Festival on May 15, 2012.