ORAL HISTORY

Websites

ActUp: (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power): Oral History Project includes transcripts of interviews with men and women who participated in the movement. www.actuporalhistory.org

African American Women Online Archival Collection: from Duke University Special Collections Library http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html

Agents of Social Change: lesson plans and primary documents from eight collections in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College: the papers of Constance Baker Motley, Dorothy Kenyon, Mary Kaufman, Frances Fox Piven, Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, and Gloria Steinem and the records of the Women's Action Alliance and the National Congress of Neighborhood Women. http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/curriculum/index.html

American Folklife Society: Extensive center with ample resources, links to many projects, teachers’ guides, folklife and fieldwork, and much more. http://www.loc.gov/folklife/

American Slave Narratives: provides photographs and excerpts of selected interviews with former slaves conducted by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. Seven of the ten interviewees featured on the site are women. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html

Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Archival Resources on the History of Jewish Women in America by Phyllis Holman Weisbard. http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/jewwom/jwmain.htm

The American Experience Series: on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) site has transcripts and related material from programs aired, including A Midwife's Tale about 18th cent. midwife Martha Ballard, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fly Girls, about the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS), Around the World in 72 Days (about Nellie Bly), Hawaii's Last Queen, the life of Lili'uokalani, and more. Use search feature. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/index.html

America's Quilting History:  includes articles, book reviews, and links on the subjects of women and their quilting from Colonial America to the Great Depression, and more. http://www.womenfolk.com/historyofquilts/

American Women: A Gateway to Library of Congress Resources: for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States.  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: http://www.archivesofamericanart.si.edu/collections/oralhistories

Art Institute of Chicago's Chicago Architects Oral History Project: http://www.ssa.gov/history/orallist.html

Black Women at Virginia Tech: includes transcriptions along with audio excerpts of interviews with the first Black women students, staff, and faculty at the University. http://spec.lib.vt.edu/blackwom/

Cambodia - Beauty and Darkness, The Odyssey of the Khmer People: http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/oral_hst.htm

Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History: http://www.cijoh.org/

Chicago Women's Liberation Union's Herstory: includes text, audio and video memoirs, articles, documents, pictures, and more. http://www.cwluherstory.com/

Civil War Women: sources on the Internet, by Ginny Daley. http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/bingham/guides/cwdocs.html

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive: includes interviews with Fanny Lou Hamer, Sandra Adickes, and other women and men in Mississippi. Site includes transcripts and some audio clips. http://avatar.lib.usm.edu/%7Espcol/crda/index.html

Documenting the American South: Housed at the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it includes full-text diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and narratives on slavery. There are many women authors in each category, as well as works about women, including Women of Achievement, by Benjamin Griffith Brawley (1919), about Harriet Tubman, Nora Gordon, Meta Warrick Fuller, Mary McLeod Bethune and Mary Church Terrell. http://docsouth.unc.edu/

H-Oralhist is a network for scholars and professionals active in studies related to oral history. It is affiliated with the Oral History Association.  It links to centers, conferences, projects, resources, bibliographies, sound files, assessment models, and discussion groups. http://www.h-net.org/~oralhist/

Jewish Women's Archive: includes exhibits on Bella Abzug, Rebecca Gratz, Emma Lazarus, Barbara Myerhoff, Molly Picon, Justine Wise Polier, Bobbie Rosenfeld, Hannah G. Solomon, Lillian Wald and others. The newest exhibit documents the role of Jewish women in the feminist revolution. http://www.jwa.org/

Lesbian Herstory Archives: New York, NY. http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/jewwom/jwmain.htm

Lesbian History Project: maintained by Yolanda Retter. http://www-lib.usc.edu/~retter/main.html

The Library of Congress, American Memory: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

MidWest Women's History Resources:  http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/midwhist.htm

Making Do: Women and Work: collection with excerpts from interviews with three women found in the Voices From the Thirties, American Life Histories: Manuscripts From the Federal Writers Project, 1936-1940 Collection.  Includes: "Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921”; "Votes for Women" accompanying pictorial exhibit; "Women's History, an "online display," offers examples of women's letters and other documents in the Manuscripts Division; "African American Perspectives" pamphlets; "California's Early Years," first person narratives by women participants;  "The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920," which includes "women in conservation" as a subject heading; "American Ballroom Companion," more than 200 dance manuals includes social commentary, etiquette, etc.; "America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information, 1935-1945," over 200 shots of women at work in munitions factories and on the farm; Portraits of Presidents and First Ladies; Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910; Quilts and Quiltmaking in America 1978-1996. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Michigan Oral History Association: http://www.h-net.org/~oralhist/moha/

Montana Heritage Project: Classroom resources on oral histories, and basics of conducting interviews plus more resources.  http://www.edheritage.org/tools/orhis.htm

Mystic Seaport Aquarium, The Stonington Fishing Oral History Project: http://www.mysticseaport.org/library/collections/sound.cfm

National Air and Space Museum, Department of Space History: http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/ohp-introduction.html

National Women's History Project (U.S.): includes links to women's history organizations, costumed performers across the U.S. , Women's History Month programs, ideas, and materials, links for student researchers, and online selections from the NWHP catalog of books, posters, videos, etc. available for purchase. Living the Legacy site, sponsored by the NWHP offers an essay and extensive chronology about the Women's Rights Movement and links to activist women's issues organizations. http://www.nwhp.org/

The Oral History Association: The Oral History Association, established in 1966, seeks to bring together all persons interested in oral history as a way of collecting human memories. With an international membership, the OHA serves a broad and diverse audience. Local historians, librarians and archivists, students, journalists, teachers, and academic scholars from many fields have found that the OHA provides both professional guidance and collegial environment for sharing information.   With a list of Regional Centers centers and collections worldwide (see who's doing oral history close to you).    http://www.dickinson.edu/organizations/oha/

Oral History Resources: Special attention given to doing family and community oral histories, includes groups, information on getting started and preservation of findings, and much more.  http://www.ourmedia.org/node/237072

The Remembering Site: Excellent source for information and inspiration on doing family story collecting and much more.  http://www.therememberingsite.org/

Story Corps: All kinds of amazing information from NPR’s superb oral history project that has family and friends interviewing each other in Story Corps booths all over the country.  The interview question generation is at: http://www.storycorps.net/participate/question_generator/  And at the main site, you can learn how to participate, listen to stories and find ample inspiration.  http://www.storycorps.net/

Suffragists Oral History Project: was conducted by the Univ. of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office in the early 1970s. Seven interviews with prominent women are on the site, including Alice Paul, Sara Bard Field, Burnita Shelton Matthews, Helen Valeska Bary, Jeannette Rankin, Mabel Vernon, and Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, plus oral histories of five rank-and-file suffragists. http://ark.cdlib.org/?mode=oac-text;relation=roho%20--%20suffragists

Tides of Men: The Lives of Gay Men in British Columbia, 1936 - present, A Documentary: http://www.tidesofmen.org/

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 mostly young women on March 25, 1911. The site was compiled by the Kheel Center for Labor-Managment Documentation and Archives, Cornell University. http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/

The Utah Storytelling Project: http://www.ultimate-storytelling-guide.com/

The Vermont Folklife Center: http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/

Vietnam Veterans Oral History & Folklore Project: http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/fishlm/folksongs/

The World Bank Group Archives: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,pagePK:38167~theSitePK:29506,00.html

The World War II Oral History Web Site: http://www.tankbooks.com/

Women and Timber: The Pacific Northwest Logging Community, 1920-1998 is a project of the Center for Columbia River History. http://www.ccrh.org/oral/women&timber/oralhistories.htm

Women Airforce Service Pilots ("WASPS"): project is at Texas Women's University. http://www.twu.edu/wasp/oral.htm

"What Did You Do In the War, Grandma?" project of Rhode Island women's experiences during World War II, conducted by ninth grade students at South Kingston High School in 1995; see also the interviews with women conducted by the 1998 class for the project The Whole World Was Watching: an Oral History of 1968: http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/

Women’s Oral History Project: http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/hist.htm

Women's Studies electronic texts from University of Pennsylvania's Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image: includes several 19th and 20th century diaries, as well as cookbooks, and other texts. http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/flash.cfm?CFID=227749&CFTOKEN=12651556

The Women's Rights National Historic Park and the National Collaborative of Women's History Sites website are sponsored by the U.S. National Parks Service: The Collaborative site links to historic sites: Susan B. Anthony House, the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, the Matilda Joslyn Gage website, Alice Paul's birthplace, Paulsdale, and the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. Other National Park Service websites: Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, and Places Where Women Made History, which visits sites in New York and Massachusetts. See also the Sewall-Belmont House (headquarters of the National Woman's Party). http://www.nps.gov/wori/

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1820-1940:  consists of projects by undergraduate and graduate students at SUNY Binghamton, directed by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Each project poses a question and has 15-20 primary documents that address the question. Topics range from African-American Women and the Chicago World's Fair, 1893, to Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and Right-Wing Attacks, 1923-1931. http://womhist.binghamton.edu/

 

Colleges and Universities

University of California at Berkeley Regional Oral History Office: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/

Baylor University Institute for Oral History: http://www.baylor.edu/Oral_History/

California Digital Library: includes finding aids and other material for more than 30 collections housed by University of California Libraries of papers from individual women, including director Dorothy Arzner and children's book author Lois Lenski, and organizations. See also the California Heritage Collection of images. http://www.cdlib.org/

The UCLA Oral History Program documents the history of Los Angeles and the institutional history of UCLA and undertakes selected projects that are national and international in scope. http://www.library.ucla.edu/special/ohp/ohpindex.htm

University of Connecticut, Center for Oral History: http://www.ucc.uconn.edu/~cohadm01/

Five College Archives Digital Access Project (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Univ. of Massachusetts) focuses on the history of women's education at those institutions. Included are oral histories, papers from student organizations, personal papers of women faculty members, and more. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/

James Cook University, Oral History Archives: http://www.jcu.edu.au/gen/Archivist/oral.html

Indiana University Center for the Study of History and Memory: http://www.indiana.edu/~cshm/

University of Kentucky, Oral History Program: http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/page.php?lweb_id=472

Rutgers University, New Brunswick History Department, Oral History Archives: http://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/

University of South Dakota's South Dakota Oral History Center: http://www.usd.edu/iais/oralhist/ohc.html

University of Southern Mississippi Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage: http://www.usm.edu/oralhistory/

University of Texas at El Paso Institute of Oral History: http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?alias=academics.utep.edu/oralhistory

Tulane University, Hogan Jazz Archive: http://www.tulane.edu/~lmiller/JazzHome.html

Yale University - Oral History, American Music: http://www.yale.edu/oham/

 

BOOKS:

Allen, Barbara, and Linwood Montell.  From Memory to History:  Using Oral Sources in Local History Research 

American Social History Project  Who Built America?, Vols. I & 2

American Women's History: A Research Guide
By Ken Middleton, Todd Library, Middle Tennessee State University. Best source for finding digital collections by topic. Also includes bibliographies and brief reviews of recent books, as well as links to biographical sources, online journals, and other resources.

Baum, Willa K.  Oral History for the Local Historical Society

            ---.  Transcribing and Editing Oral History. 

Bender, Thomas.  Community and Social Change in America

Benmayor,Rina and Andor Skotnes, eds. 1994. Migration and Identity: International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Volume III

Bertaux, Daniel and Paul Thompson, eds. 1993. Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories: International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Volume II.

Coles, Robert.  Doing Documentary Work

Dunaway, David K. And Willa K. Baum, eds.  Oral History:  An Interdisciplinary Reader, 2nd ed

Felt, Thomas E.  Researching, Writing, and Publishing Local History, 2nd ed

William Fletcher, Talking Your Roots

Foner, Eric, ed.  The New American History, 2nd ed

Frisch, Michael.  A Shared Authority:  Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History

Gardner, James B., and George Rollie Adams, eds.  Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on The New Social History

Gerber, David A.  "Local and Community History: Some Cautionary Remarks on an Idea Whose Time Has Returned."  History Teacher

Gluck, Sherna and Daphne Patai.   Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History

Grele, Ronald.  Envelopes of Sound:  The Art of Oral History

Bob Greene and D.G. Fulford, To Our Children's Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come.

Hoopes, James.  Oral History: An Introduction for Students

Ives, Edward D.  The Tape Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History.

Jackson, Bruce.  Fieldwork

Jeffrey, Jaclyn and Glenace Edwall, eds.  Memory and History:  Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience

Kammen, Carol.  On Doing Local History: Reflections on What Local Historians Do, Why, and What It Means

            -----, ed.  The Pursuit of Local History: Readings on Theory and Practice

Susan Kitchens, Family Oral History

Kyvig, David, and Myron A. Marty.  Nearby History: Exploring the Past around You

Kuhn, Cliff and Marjorie L. McLellan, eds.  Magazine of History, v. 11, no. 3 {Srping 1997}; special "oral history" theme issue of the magazine; published by the Organization of American Historians and directed at secondary and undergraduate teachers. 

Karamanski, Thomas J, ed.  1990.Ethics and Public History.

Langer, Lawrence. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Leydesdorff, Selma, Luisa Passerini and Paul Thompson, eds. 1996. Gender and Memory: International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Volume IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McMahan, Eva. 1989. Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and Coherence

Mercier, Laurie and Madeline Buckendorf.  Using Oral History in Community History Projects

Metcalf, Fay D., and Matthew T. Downey.  Using Local History in the Classroom

Neuenschwander, John H.  Oral History and the Law

Oblinger, Carl.  Interviewing the People of Pennsylvania. 

Oral History Association. 1992. Evaluation Guidelines

Passerini, Luisa, ed. 1992. Memory and Totalitarianism: International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, Volume I.

Powers, Willow Roberts. 2005. Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word.

Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson.  The Oral History Reader

Portelli, Alessandro.  The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories:  Form and Meaning in Oral History

            ---.  The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue

Ritchie, Donald A.  Doing Oral History.

Ransel, David. 2000. Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria.

Rogers, Kim Lacy, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, eds. 1999. Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives. Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative.

Russo, David.  Families and Communities:  A New View of American History. 

Shopes, Linda.  "Oral History and Community Involvement: The Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project," in Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public.  Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, eds. 

Schorzman, Terri A.  A Practical Introduction to Videohistory:  The Smithsonian Institution and Alfred P.  Sloan Foundation Experiment. 

Thompson, Paul.  The Voices of the Past: Oral History, 2nd ed

Terkel, Studs. 1995. Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century By Those Who've Lived It.

            --- Working.

            (see all Terkel’s books – all magnificent oral histories)

Yow, Valerie Raleigh.  Recording Oral History:  A Practical Guide for Social Scientists.  

See also the September issue of the Journal of American History, which since 1987 has included short essays on oral history as it relates to various topics and themes in United States history.