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History and the people who make it: David Barsamian

Transcript edited by Pierce Butler

This is the 27th in a series of transcript excerpts from the collection of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.

David Barsamian was interviewed by Paul Ortiz [O] and Matthew Simmons [S] in 2014.

B: I was born in Manhattan in 1945. My parents were from Turkish Armenia. They came to the United States in 1921. They were refugees from one of the major genocides of the twentieth century: the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, which began in 1915.

So growing up in New York, I was bilingual, bicultural, very much part of a different culture while being at the same time a hundred percent American, whatever that means: eating hot dogs, playing stickball in the street, punch ball, basketball, off the point, all these street games, box ball.

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