The Bear Basics of Oral History with Steven Sielaff

Welcome to Amplifying Identities, the podcast. My name is Dr. Priscilla Martinez, and I’m a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I work on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and I’m trained as an oral, public, and digital historian.This semester—Fall 2025—I had the privilege of teaching one of my favorite courses, HIS 5823: Theories, Methods, and Uses of Oral History.Don’t worry, I’m not going to drag you through every theory or methodological debate we covered in this graduate history course. Instead, here on Amplifying Identities, I want to share with you some of the stories my students and I uncovered throughout our class together.In this fourth season, we collaborated with Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, tapping into their expansive oral history collections to tell an incredible range of stories. From narratives rooted in our local communities to recollections gathered across the world, this has been one of our most exciting seasons yet. And my graduate students co-producers and I are genuinely thrilled about what we’ve put together for you.Before we plunge into the season, I wanted to spend a little time talking with one of our partners, Steven Sielaff, the Senior Collections Manager at Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History (BUIOH).BUIOH is a fantastic program and remain one of the leaders in oral history today. They’re home to the national Oral History Association, the Texas Oral History Association, and one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. I could gush about them all day long.My hope, though, is that in this conversation with Steven, we’ll get into what oral history actually is, why it matters to historical inquiry, and why oral stories continue to be such powerful tools for understanding the past.So without further ado, here’s my interview with my dear friend, Steven Sielaff. And of course—Sic ’em, Bears.__________This limited podcast series produced by Dr. Priscilla Martinez and her students for her HIS 5823: Theories, Methods, and Uses of Oral History class at UT San Antonio during the Fall 2025 semester.Follow us on Instagram, BlueSky, and Facebook at @ampidpod, for added content. For more information about our episodes and our research process, visit us at https://amplifyingidentitiespodcast.com You can contact us by email at [email protected] M. Martínez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio.You can find her on Instagram @dr.priscilla.m.martinez; on BlueSky at @drprismmartinez.bsky.social ; or at her website www.priscillamariemartinez.com.Thank you to Baylor's Institute for Oral History for partnering with us this season. For more information on BUIOH, please visit them at https://library.web.baylor.edu/oralhistory Thank you to CEDISH at UT San Antonio for your support during this season. For more information on CEDISH, please visit https://cedish.utsa.edu/ _________Copyright Amplifying Identities Podcast 2025, All Rights Reserved