Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
Stephen Edward Ambrose was an American historian, most noted for his biographies of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history.
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
Peter Roussel was an American press secretary and public relations executive.
Joseph Raymond Desch was an American electrical engineer and inventor. During World War II, he was Research Director of the project to design and manufacture the US Navy version of the bombe, a cryptanalytic machine designed to read communications enciphered by the German Enigma.
Cecil William Stoughton was an American photographer. He is best known for being President John F. Kennedy's photographer during his White House years.
The Office of Presidential Correspondence is one of the largest and oldest offices in the White House, and is a component of the Office of the White House Staff Secretary. In the administration of Joe Biden, the Office of Presidential Correspondence was led by Director Eva Kemp. Kemp left the office in September 2021 to become Vice President at Precision Strategies. Deputy Director Garrett Lamm was promoted to take over for Kemp after her departure.
The Southern Oral History Program (SOHP), located in the Love House and Hutchins Forum in the historic district of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a research institution dedicated to collecting and preserving oral histories from across the southern United States.
Native American Heritage Day is a civil holiday observed on the day after Thanksgiving in the United States.
Gertrude Bella Feldman was an American reporter, columnist, and member of the White House Press Corps and State Department Press Corps. She regularly wrote for McCall's magazine and for The New York Times Syndicate, The Washington Post, as well as numerous other media, especially publications for the Jewish community. Feldman interviewed every U.S. president from Lyndon B. Johnson until George W. Bush; and every U.S. vice president from Hubert Humphrey to Al Gore. She was a contributing editor for World Tribune.com.
Arnold E. Resnicoff is an American Conservative rabbi who served as a military officer and military chaplain. He served in Vietnam and Europe before attending rabbinical school. He then served as a U.S. Navy Chaplain for almost 25 years. He promoted the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and delivered the closing prayer at its 1982 dedication. In 1984 the President of the United States spoke on his eyewitness account of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. After retiring from the military he was National Director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee and served as Special Assistant to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, serving at the equivalent military rank of Brigadier General.
The United States Marine Corps History Division is an arm of the Headquarters Marine Corps tasked with researching, writing, and maintaining the History of the United States Marine Corps. It also provides reference and research assistance; preserves personal experiences and observations through oral history interviews; and deploys field historians to record history in the making. It is headquartered at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.
The Vietnam Center and Archive collects and preserves the documentary record of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam Center and Archive, part of Texas Tech University, is the nation's largest and most comprehensive collection of information on the Vietnam War. On August 17, 2007, the Texas Tech Vietnam Center became the first U.S. institution to sign a formalized exchange agreement with the State Records and Archives Department of Vietnam. This opens the door for a two-way exchange between the entities.
StoryCorps is an American non-profit organization which aims to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs. Its mission statement is "to help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all—one story at a time". StoryCorps grew out of Sound Portraits Productions as a project founded in 2003 by radio producer David Isay. Its headquarters are located in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
National Life Stories (NLS) is an independent charitable trust and limited company based within the British Library Oral History section, whose key focus and expertise is oral history fieldwork. Since 1987 National Life Stories (NLS) has initiated a series of innovative interviewing projects funded almost entirely from sponsorship, charitable and individual donations.
The Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH), located in Waco, Texas, is a freestanding research department within Baylor University's Division of Academic Affairs. The BUIOH creates oral history memoirs by preserving an audio recording and transcript of interviews with individuals who are eyewitnesses to history; it provides both physical and digital access to these materials for those interested in the stories. The BUIOH is a sponsoring member of the Oral History Association (OHA), hosts the Texas Oral History Association (TOHA), participates in H-Oralhist and is active in the International Oral History Association (IOHA).
Chester Nez was an American veteran of World War II. He was the last surviving original Navajo code talker who served in the United States Marine Corps during the war.
Located within Butler Library, the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research is the oldest oral history program. Pulitzer Prize winner Allan Nevins founded the program in 1948. There is an extensive list of projects belonging to the center, both current and completed. Currently the office holds 8,000 taped memoirs and 1,000,000 pages of transcripts.
The West Virginia Museum of American Glass is located in Weston, Lewis County, West Virginia, United States. It was formed in 1993 for charitable, educational and scientific purposes to discover, procure, publish and preserve whatever may relate to the glass industry in West Virginia, the United States of America, and where ever else glass has been manufactured. Later in 2008, the name of the physical museum building was changed to The Museum of American Glass in West Virginia to better emphasize the scope of its glass collections and educational role beyond West Virginia as dictated by its state charter.
The Coney Island History Project, or CIHP, founded in 2004, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to record and increase awareness of Coney Island's history.
