Award-winning oral historian Sherrie Tucker will present "Dance Floor Democracy: Remembering WWII's Hollywood Canteen," on Feb. 28 at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History at UNLV.
During the multi-media presentation, Tucker will discuss the history and importance of the canteen and its place in the social geography of memory. The Hollywood Canteen was founded in 1942 by movie-star Bette Davis and was the night club/lounge of choice for service men and many of Hollywood's biggest names.
After the presentation, students from the UNLV Women's Studies Department will be on hand to take the names of men and women willing to participate in an oral history project documenting Las Vegas residents' memories of World War II. Participants will be interviewed at an arranged time later in the semester. The interviews will be transcribed and archived in UNLV's Oral History Research Center special collections.
Tucker, a tenured professor at the University of Kansas, is the first woman ever to be awarded the prestigious Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor of Jazz Studies at Columbia University, and is the author of the award-winning book, "Swing Shift: 'All-Girl' Bands of the 1940's."
The UNLV Women's Studies program offers students a broad, interdisciplinary understanding of the ways in which gender interacts with race, age, class, and sexual orientation to shape human consciousness and determine the social, political, and cultural organization of human society throughout history. A major and minor are offered in Women's Studies .
