When Kiron K. Skinner isn't explaining history and public policy on television and radio shows, she is likely to be busy running the international-relations program at Carnegie Mellon University. Or she may be serving on think-tank or policy-advisory panels or traveling to California for her work as a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Now she has another project to squeeze in, one that could affect how future generations will understand the troubled opening years of this century in America: She has been chosen to serve on the advisory board for the George W. Bush Oral History Project, to be conducted by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center has done similar projects on each president since Jimmy Carter.

Ms. Skinner, 48, has created oral histories herself. She interviewed statesmen who shaped policy at the end of the cold war, among them George P. Shultz, a former secretary of state, and Caspar W. Weinberger, a former secretary of defense.

"Often what's in the archives tells one story, and what's remembered and what's told verbally tells a different story," she says. "It helps a scholar to have both sides."...