Marcello earns lifetime achievement award

Ronald E. Marcello, director of the UNT oral history program and professor of history, has received the Thomas L. Charlton Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Oral History Association.

Founded in 1982 and chartered as a nonprofit corporation by the state in 1983, the Texas Oral History Association serves as a network for oral history practitioners and promotes the use of professional interviewing and archiving standards. TOHA brings together public and academic historians, librarians, archivists, teachers, folklorists, local historical societies and museums, independent researchers, and others sharing an interest in high-quality oral history.

The association's Thomas L. Charlton Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual whose research produced oral history tapes that are preserved and made available for research in an archive or library; who has used professional standards in oral history research over an extended period of time; and whose work is a model for the use of oral history in research.

Marcello, a member of the UNT history faculty since 1967, became director of the oral history program in 1968. The fledgling collection then consisted of interviews with Texas political figures.

In the early 1970s, Marcello expanded the collection by beginning a Pearl Harbor survivors project, gathering memories of soldiers and sailors, their wives, nurses and chaplains. The Pearl Harbor project now includes interviews with more than 350 people.

Marcello received certificates of appreciation from the Texas Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and the National Pearl Harbor Survivors Association for his work.

Now the largest public university collection of oral history interviews in Texas, the UNT Oral History Collection also includes interviews from former World War II prisoners of war, Holocaust survivors, and those who participated in the Pacific naval war and air offensive in Europe.

In addition, memories of Texans who worked in local civil rights and who were employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, National Youth Administration and Home Owners Loan Corp. during the New Deal are preserved.

The oral history program has more than 1,500 bound volumes of interviews representing more than 117,000 pages of transcript, available in the university archives.

Marcello is the co-author of three books based on the interviews — Remembering Pearl Harbor: Eyewitness Accounts by U.S. Military Men and Women; Building the Death Railway: The Ordeal of American Prisoners in Burma, 1942-1945; and With Only the Will to Live: Accounts of Americans in Japanese Prison Camps, 1942-1945.

He is also co-editor of Our Nation's Heritage and has published articles in American History Illustrated, North Carolina Historical Review and Southwestern Historical Quarterly, among other publications. He received the H. Bailey Carroll Award given by the Texas State Historical Association for the best article in Southwestern Historical Quarterly for 1992.

Marcello served as an adviser or consultant for 25 other oral history projects sponsored by the National Council on Aging, the Texas Council for the Humanities, the Library of Congress and libraries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, among other institutions.

He was executive secretary of the Oral History Association for 10 years and was president from 1988 to 1989. Marcello was also a member of the executive board of the Texas Oral History Association and is the recipient of the Professional Service Award from the Mid-Atlantic Oral History Association.

A native of Wrightsville, Pa., Marcello received his bachelor's degree in education from Millersville State College in Pennsylvania and his master's and doctoral degrees in history from Duke University.

BY NANCY KOLSTI nkolsti@unt.edu

Other web references

• Oral history program
• Texas Oral History Association

Other featured articles in this issue

• Hearing at UNT explores nanotechnology
• La Point to serve on national committee
• New UNT center offers cyber security certifications
• New grading system announced to senate
• International group elects Holden president
• UNT community's donations make the holidays brighter
• Three honored for 40 years of service to university
• Film historian discusses 2003's best movies

homepage