Medium History

Medium History explores memories and moments through creativity and expression, capturing the cultural ethos of that time and place through storytelling and representation.

This program explores how creative mediums provide context for history beyond dates, and names, and figures.

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Episodes

What They're
Saying

"I think there's something very powerful about the physical object. There's something very emotive about something that was in a particular person's home and that they saved it, and they chose that particular object to save, of all the different things that impacted their lives."

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Julia Huynh
Medium History, EP519

“For a good number of years, most Americans, middle Americans, white Americans had a high degree of agreement which is important to note because what you see in the cultural sphere you can interpret as being pretty indicative of what's appealing to and what's being consumed by the vast majority of Middle Americans.”

Gordon H. Chang
Medium History, EP507

"You couldn't deport people, but you could make it so that the whole time they were in the US, they would be forever foreigners. This is the name of a stereotype people talk about, but it wasn't a stereotype, it was literal. You were a non-citizen no matter how many years, 5 or 80 that you had stayed in the US."

Sylvia Chong
Medium History, EP501

"I realized that our family has this beautiful story about not only the ugliness of those kinds of policies and the pain that they cause but also, the incredible resilience and the power of the people that they often victimize."

Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Yas Imamura
Medium History, EP498

"...I wouldn't be able to tell an entirely accurate story of camp because so many of the records are limited in certain ways. There's a lot of inaccessibility when it comes to these sorts of historical stories, especially when there's so much generational silence around them."

Kiku Hughes
Medium History, EP497

"That's the function of all good art, is that it creates that empathy so that you understand that these people were treated as the other. They were demonized by the American government and by the people at large as the other. What you see is the consequence of that kind of othering of those that we do not know or understand, and now we get their story."

Frank Abe
Medium History, EP496

Podcast
Series

Word Choice: The Structure, Form, and Discourse of History

This special series will explore how poetry consecrates the human experience during times of upheaval; civil unrest, climate crises, global conflict, and also in times of celebration; equity, freedom, progress. Poets capture the soul of history, giving words to the moments that leave us speechless.

Produced with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University with support from the Orange County Community Foundation.

Episodes coming soon

Through Internees Eyes: Japanese American Incarceration Before and After

Partnering with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University, this series will explore how photographs and film, specifically candid or vernacular documentation, captures history, the emotion of a moment before devastation, in the midst of tragedy and triumph, and in the common day-to-day of days long forgotten.

Supported by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library, this series is designed to be a companion to the project, Through Internees Eyes: Japanese American Incarceration Before and After.

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Images and Imaginings of Internment: Comics and Illustrations of Camp

Partnering with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University, this series will explore how comics, comic books, and graphic novels from and about the Japanese American Incarceration following Executive Order 9066, humanize the tragic experience, allowing the stories to live long past the lives of those who experienced it, and ensuring this never happens again.

Supported by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library, this series is designed to be a companion to the interactive web project, Images and Imaginings of Internment: Comics and Illustrations of Camp.

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