Curator of Local History
Theory and Practice of Oral Histories
- Remote Interview ResourcesPublished August 2020, by the Oral History Association (OHA)
- Remote Oral History Interviewing (2021)Recording of a webinar by the Oklahoma Archives Association. (Note: They discuss using various online tools. WashU is using a similar product, TheirStory, which is not covered in this video)
- Web Guides to Doing Oral HistoryHow-to guides and resources maintained by Oral History Association (OHA)
Many books on the practice of oral history are available from Washington University Libraries. Search for "oral history" in the library catalog.
Rethinking Oral History and Tradition by ISBN: 9780190681685Publication Date: 2019-11-06Drawing on a Maori indigenous case study set in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book advocates a rethinking of the discipline, encouraging a broader conception of the way we do oral history, how we might define its form, and how its politics might move beyond a subsuming democratization to include nuanced decolonial possibilities.
The oral history review.
Full text available from JSTOR Arts & Sciences VII: 01/01/1973 to 07/31/2011 and Full text available from Oxford Journals 2017 A-Z Collection: 1996 to present
Call Number: full text onlinePublication Date: 1973 - present
Oral History Collections - Archived at Washington University
- Washington University School of Medicine oral history project.From the Bernard Becker Library, Archive & Rare Books
- African oral history collection.Department of Special Collections, University Archives.
- Eyes on the Prize InterviewsVideo and transcripts of recorded interviews conducted with civil rights activists for the award-winning documentary, "Eyes on the prize." From the Department of Special Collections, Film and Media Archive
- The Great Depression interviews.Video and transcripts of recorded interviews conducted with individuals who survived the Great Depression. This collection includes 148 interviews totalling over 110 hours of footage. Includes conversations with Maya Angelou, Gore Vidal, Ossie Davis, a grandson of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others. All transcripts are fully searchable. From Department of Special Collections, Film and Media Archive.
- American Culture Studies Program Oral History CollectionFrom Department of Special Collections, Local History Archives
- Documenting the Queer Past in St. Louis Collectionrecorded for the course WGSS3172 "Documenting the Queer Past in St. Louis" at Washington University in St. Louis, as part of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The class was designed by Professor Andrea Friedman, with a goal "to create the possibilities for a more inclusive LGBTQ history of St. Louis that will be available to researchers and the public" (course handbook). To meet this goal, the project focused on interviewing LGBTQ elders, with a general guideline that much of their life was spent in the St. Louis area prior to the year 2000. Particular efforts were also made to include groups especially missing from archived LGBTQ records, such as working-class women, trans* individuals, and African Americans.
- Transgender Spectrum Conference Oral History ProjectRecorded at the 29109 conference by attendees.
- Homer G. Phillips Hospital Oral History CollectionRecorded by Dr. Ezelle Sanford, III as part of his dissertation research on St. Louis’s Homer G. Phillips Hospital—the nation’s largest segregated hospital which operated from 1937-1979. Ezelle earned his Ph.D. in History and History of Science from Princeton University in 2019. (source: http://www.ezellesanford.com/aboutme )
Oral History Collections - subscription access provided by WU Library
- Oral History Online This link opens in a new windowThe collection also provides keyword searching of more than 329,400 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to over 4,200 audio and video files and almost 19,000 bibliographic records.
- Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement (Archives Unbound) This link opens in a new windowThe Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.
- Cold War: Voices of Confrontation and Conciliation (Archives Unbound) This link opens in a new windowThis collection will provide a unique opportunity to read the recollections of many of the players in the Cold War. These transcripts of oral recollections will assist scholars in understanding the motivations for conflict and conciliation.