annually at kenyon college. gregory wilson is associate professor in the department of history at the university of akron. his research and teaching interests include 20th century united states political economy, public and environmental history, ohio history and the scholarship of teaching and learning. he is the author of communities left behind: the area redevelopment administration 1945 to 1965 as well as the co-author on an upcoming state history of ohio. his oral history project done with ua students, the times they were a-changing, akron remembers 1968, won the ohio academy of history, public history award in 2010. their paper is entitled above the shots, the kent state shootings and the politics of truth, trauma and reconciliation. craig? okay. thank you, barbara. the shootings of may 4, 1970 lasting all of 13 seconds have reverberated for approximately 40 years. in purely factual terms, they were the culmination of a clash at kent state university between stude
been dormant for a few years, the special collections librarian, which was me, took over and managed the project until about 2010 when i left ksu and went to indiana university. we collected approximately 40 interviews, we being myself and then a few students that i supervised. and we wanted this new part of the project to reflect some new goals and one of these goals was to have more variety of narraters. what i mean by that is the initial stage of the project, because it was heavily commemoration-based, inevitably you ll get primarily former students and then some faculty. now, we still did collect those and we did collect interviews during the big commemorations like the 35th and then the 40th which was the last one i attended in 2010, but we also wanted to collect a wide variety of interviews which we did just kind of informally throughout each year. and so as a result, we cast a bit of a wider net. so, for example, during that five-year period we interviewed two former p