I spent a lot of my senior year in college working for the pioneering Judge Leon Higginbotham, a presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, who was writing a book about the precepts of slavery. My job was to go back in time. During the Great Depression, the WPA put writers to work by sending them, seven decades after Emancipation Proclamation, to find and interview every living former slave. Judge Higginbotham assigned me to read these oral histories, and glean insights and anecdotes, which I would then pass on.

These voices, everyday people relaying the everyday details of slavery directly to a college kid who had known nothing but freedom a century-and-a-quarter later, remain with me today. I thought about them this evening while listening to Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, the oral history project that turns up often on NPR, speak at the TED conference in Vancouver. Isay, the recipient of the 10th annual TED Prize, a $1 million grant designed to launch an audacious idea, announced what he did with his windfall: he built an app, released tonight, which empowers everyone in the world to lend their voice to history in the same way the WPA writers did for those humble ex-slaves.

“The big wish is that we’re going to collect the wisdom of humanity,” says Isay, a few hours before his talk.

For the past decade, StoryCorps has put 65,000 people through their mobile or temporary studios to be interviewed for 40 minutes, usually by an accompanying younger family member or friend. The largest body of recorded voices ever. The project has affirmed that every person has experienced something that should not be lost to humanity — that their life mattered.

Sometimes, StoryCorps has focused on a specific purpose: Having the families of 9/11 victims chronicle the lives lost. Sometimes, a telling take on history emerges: The World War II veteran who describes what it was like to liberate Auschwitz, tearing up as his wife saw, for the first time in 65 years, what it looked like when her husband cried. But mostly, it’s regular people telling regular stories, with wisdom and poignancy. The very process of sharing often turns into a form of therapy, bonding, closure.

With this app, that ability is now universal. ...