Indiana Magazine of History considers the legacy of Ryan White
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The most recent issue of the Indiana Magazine of History offers a look into the Ryan White Oral History Project, started in 2010 by the Howard County Historical Society.
Project participant and chronicler Allen Safianow, emeritus professor of history at Indiana University Kokomo, details how the society’s Oral History Committee chose potential interviewees, gained participants’ consent and learned to navigate interviews that centered on a topic of past and continued controversy. Safianow’s reflections on doing oral history on a challenging subject within the context of a community should be of interest to anyone who has been or is involved in local and county history projects.
Ryan White contracted HIV at age 13 from tainted blood products used to treat his hemophilia. He became a national poster child for HIV/AIDS in the United States after he was expelled from his rural Indiana school because of his illness. The Ryan White Care Act, the single largest federal program designed for people with HIV in the United States, was created in his honor in 1990, the year he died.
Elsewhere in the issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, Nancy Brown looks at the rise of Wayne Knitting Mills, a major employer in early 20th-century Fort Wayne.
Drugstore owner Theodore Thieme took advantage of changes in U.S. tariff law to travel to Chemnitz, Germany, and bring back German knitting machines and skilled German workers. Those workers began producing some of the first full-fashioned hosiery -- made to fit left and right feet as well as the shape of the leg -- made in the United States. Brown looks at the challenges faced by the company as it grew into one of the major manufacturing companies in the city and the state.
The Indiana Magazine of History is published quarterly by the history department of Indiana University Bloomington. For general information on the articles, contact the editorial office at 812-855-4139; to order a copy of the issue, call 812-856-5394.
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Dawn Bakken
Associate editor
- Indiana Magazine of History
- Office 812-855-4139
- dbakken@indiana.edu