High School Ethnic Studies Initiative Library Guide

Designed with community archives in mind, this toolkit contains six modules that take you through the steps of preparing, conducting, and preserving oral history interviews.

Oral history is a technique for generating and preserving original, historically interesting information – primary source material – from personal recollections through planned recorded interviews. Below are suggestions for anyone looking to start recording oral histories based on best practices used in the Smithsonian Oral History Program at the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Filmed oral histories with Japanese Americans who experienced incarceration during World War II.

The Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee Legacy Project preserves the history of SNCC. The website contains resources and reflections from those who were a part of SNCC as well as dozens of oral histories.

The Oral History Center provides resources for K-16 educators to help students learn through oral history, as well as opportunities for undergraduates to get experience in oral history process and production. For decades, the Oral History Center has partnered with educational resource organizations, such as the California History-Social Science Project, to build curriculum content for K-16 educators using our oral history collection. Our collection provides a wealth of firsthand accounts relevant to classes on American history, world history, and government, including interviews on civil rights, immigration, politics, and LGBTQ history, to name just a few. The resources in this section include individual lesson plans for specific topics, such as epidemics in history; user guides for our search tool; and sample projects with multimedia components. Opportunities for undergraduates include internships, student employment, and prizes.

The Warrior Women Project combines oral history, contemporary media, and transformative scholarship to bridge the divide between frontline communities, the Ivory Tower of academia, and the mainstream media machine. From Alcatraz, to Wounded Knee, to uranium mines, and the fight against pipelines on sovereign Treaty land, these histories are compelling, they are complex, and they are urgent. Our collective liberation cannot be determined by the gatekeeping of history.