In 1986, I published History From Below: How To Uncover And Tell The Story Of Your Community, Association, Or Union, a guide to doing participatory history based on the experience of the Brass Workers History Project and other work.[1]
Download a free copy of History from Below here.
I have continued to create community-based historical and cultural products in the Naugatuck Valley. From 1988 to 1996 I was part of the Waterbury Ethnic Music Project team that collected and recorded hundreds of songs and tunes in more than 20 ethnic groups and produced 13 public radio programs in the Brass City Music series and the public television documentary Brass City Music as well as six Brass Valley Music Festivals.[2] I served as project historian for the 1986-2005 exhibit Brass Roots at Waterbury’s Mattatuck Museum and again served as project historian for the Mattatuck’s new 2008 permanent exhibit, Coming Home, Building Community in a Changing World. Between 1990 and 2006 I served as project historian for a series of oral history projects and community exhibits on particular neighborhoods and the African American, Jewish, and Puerto Rican communities in Waterbury.
I also served as historian for the Naugatuck Valley Project, a community coalition formed in 1986 to confront plant closings and deindustrialization that has continued for twenty-five years as a significant vehicle for community action in the Naugatuck Valley. I recorded approximately one hundred interviews with NVP leaders, staff, and participants. My Connecticut Public Television documentary Rust Valley told the story of the Naugatuck Valley’s deindustrialization and the early efforts of the Naugatuck Valley Project to address them. My 2010 book Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley presents the development of the Naugatuck Valley in the decades following the publication of Brass Valley and describes community-based efforts to respond to its deindustrialization.[3]
In 2001 I collaborated with a local community working group in my home town of Cornwall, CT to write the text for Cornwall in Pictures: A Visual Reminiscence, 1868-1941.[4]
[1] Jeremy Brecher, History From Below: How To Uncover And Tell The Story Of Your Community, Association, Or Union (New Haven: Commonwork, 1986)
[2] Ruth Glasser, “Community and Academic History Projects: A Creative Interplay,” in Jean J. Schensul et al, Using Ethnographic Data (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1999) pp. 150-158.
[3] Jeremy Brecher, Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley (Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, The Working Class in American History series, 2010).
[4] Cornwall in Pictures: A Visual Reminiscence, 1868-1941 (Cornwall: The Cornwall Historical Society, 2001).