oral history

Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and Slavery's Descendants

by Koritha Mitchell

Public history sites have the potential to spark intellectual engagement because when they make embodied connections between people and the sites they visit—even when those connections evoke the cruelty of the past. 

A Small Village's History During the Third Reich Raises Big Questions about Complicity

by Julia Boyd

A new history of the personal experiences of the residents of a small Bavarian village show that, while Nazism was driven by ideologues, it was able to maintain power because the personal risks of nonsupport convinced many to put their moral objections aside.

Aging is Threatening the History of Many Black Communities in Maryland

Black community historians have long been the keepers of historical knowledge about places and local traditions that elite institutions have considered unimportant. As they age, who will carry on their work and preserve and keep the documentary record? 

Anthropologist on Gathering Family History: Ask Your Elders the Right Questions

University of Texas professor Elizabeth Keating was shocked by how few of her students could discuss their own family's history, and created a guide to investigating. 

Inside the New Deal Project to Preserve the Oral Histories of 300 Formerly Enslaved Virginians

That initiative, led by Howard University’s Sterling Brown, included a plan to interview thousands of formerly enslaved people across the South before they died.

University of Mississippi Makes Available Oral Histories of Student Protesters Sent to Parchman Prison Farm

Historian Garrett Felber and his students began a project to document the experiences of Mississippi students arrested in 1970 and sent to the notorious prison farm. 

The Theodore Roosevelt Oral History Collection Proves There's More to Learn about TR

by Michael Patrick Cullinane

Seven audio recordings from the 1950s, found at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, opened a window into the memories of TR's relatives and contemporaries of his political and social world, showing there's always more to discover about even the most famed figures of history. 

(Re)locating Sites of Memory in Appalachia Through Black Spaces and Stories

by Kristan McCullum

"I grew up in Jenkins not knowing its full history. I never knew the church I was raised in was once the movie theater that required Black patrons to sit in the balcony."

"Civil Rights in Black and Brown" Examines Texas's Forgotten Activists

Todd Moye and Max Krochmal's history of multiracial Texas activism grew out of oral history projects with their students; they realized how much of the grassroots history of civil rights struggle in the state could be lost if it weren't recorded. 

“If Black Women Were Free”: An Oral History of the Combahee River Collective

Writer Marian Jones gathers together the recollections of the participants in the 1977 efforts to define the relationship between struggles against sexism, racism and capitalist exploitation and reminds that the group's coinage of the term "identity politics" was meant to bring multiple groups together.

Pancho Villa, My Grandmother, and the Revolutionary History of the Border

by Carlos Sanchez

Conflicting family and neighborhood stories about the life of Pancho Villa – bandit or revolutionary? – showed the author how little of the complexity of the Mexican Revolution and the experiences of ethnic Mexican people made it into his school books in El Paso. Will new Texas laws push this knowledge back into the shadows? 

In New Orleans, Documenting History Of Iconic Black Street

Two New Orleans area activists, Raynard Sanders and documentary filmmaker Katherine Cecil, head the Claiborne Avenue History Project which aims to document and publicize the street's history. 

Preserving the Stories of the Second World War

by Colin Heaton

Colin Heaton's latest book of oral history (with Anne-Marie Lewis) is based on oral histories he conducted with five significant Allied Airmen from World War II. Here, he discusses his work collecting veterans' stories from all sides of the airborne war and why those stories matter. 

In Fury We Trust (Review of Sarah Shulman)

Sarah Shulman's book seeks to recover the histories of AIDS activists beyond white gay men, using two decades of oral history work to show the breadth of a coalition including women, lesbians, people of color, drug users, and the incarcerated, who all experienced the stakes of AIDS differently. 

Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance

The author reflects on the experience of collecting oral history interviews from Black Brooklynites. The way her respondents understood death offers insight into the communal impacts of the COVID pandemic. 

Behind The Former Slave Narratives Captured By A New Deal Program

Writer Clint Smith: "the narratives are full of those moments that remind you of the personhood of these people who in so much of our teaching of history are sort of these silhouettes or these abstractions."

Man Travels to Virginia in Quest to Interview WWII Veterans

A young Californian has traveled across the world after founding a nonprofit agency to collect and preserve the stories of surviving World War II veterans. 

Pandemic Forces Holocaust Survivor Interviews Onto Zoom

COVID forced a fast shift to video chat to record interviews with Holocaust survivors for the US Holocaust Museum's oral history project. 

New Oral History Project Spotlights Roles of Nashville’s Women Musicians

Musician and historian Tiffany Minton's new oral history project tackles the stereotype of the Nashville session musician – the backbone of the city's recording industry – as a white guy. 

Crowd-Sourcing the Story of a People

Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the new director of the Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. She discusses the practice, teaching, and value of public history as "a boisterous, crowd-sourced endeavor."