Designing an Oral History Project

Notes on Interviewing

Tape Label (example)

Field Notes (example)

Tape Index (example) (pdf)

Transcriber's Guidelines

Budget, Equipment, Materials for an Oral History Project

Equipment Currently Used by the SOHP

Transcript (example) (pdf)

Technical guidelines for Tape Recorded Interviews

Ten Tips for Interviewers

Selected Bibliography and Web Resources




SOHP Home > How To > SOHP Guide > Selected Bibliography and Web Resources

Selected Bibliography and Web Resources

Methods

 

Hoopes, James.  Oral History: An Introduction for Students. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

 

Ives, Edward D.  The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Fieldworkers in Folklore and Oral History. Knoxville, Tenn.: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995, 2nd ed.

 

Jackson, Bruce.  Fieldwork.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.  See especially “Recording Sound,” 128-163. 

 

Ritchie, Donald A.  Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2003.

 

Thompson, Paul.  The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, third edition, 2000.

 

Yow, Valerie Raleigh.  Recording Oral History, Second Edition:  A  Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Walnut Creek, CA:  AltaMira Press, 2005.

 

Uses, Interpretation, and Theory

 

Baum, Willa K.  Oral History for the Local Historical Society.  Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1995.

 

Clifford, James.  “Notes on Field(notes),” Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. 

 

Di Leonardo, Micaela.   “Oral History as Ethnographic Encounter,"  Oral History Review 15 (1987): 1-20. 

 

Dunaway, David K. and Willa K. Baum, ed.  Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology.  American Association for State and Local History Book Series. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1996.

 

Frisch, Michael.  A Shared Authority:  Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.  Albany, NY:  SUNY Press, 1990.  See especially “Oral History and Hard Times: A Review Essay,” 5-13. 

 

Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai, eds.  Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History.  New York: Routledge, 1991.

 

Grele, Ronald J.  Envelopes of Sound: the Art of Oral History.  Chicago, Ill: Precedent, 1985, 2nd ed. 

 

Kammen, Carol, ed.,  The Pursuit of Local History: Readings on Theory and Practice.  Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996.

 

Perks, Robert and Alistair Thomson.  The Oral History Reader.  New York: Routledge, 1998. 

 

Portelli, Alessandro.  The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome.  New York: Macmillan, 2003. 

 

Shrager, Samuel, "What Is Social In Oral History?" International Journal of Oral History 4:2 (1983) 76-98. 

 

Ethics/Legal Issues

 

American Anthropological Association, Revised Principles of Professional Responsibility, 1990.  Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for a New Era, ed. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, pp. 274-279. Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

                       

Graves, William, III, and Mark A. Shields.  "Rethinking Moral Responsibility in Fieldwork," Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology:  Dialogue for a New Era.  ed. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, pp. 132-151.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

           

Neuenschwander, John N.  Oral History and the Law. Oral History Association, 2002.

 

Oral History Association.  Oral History Evaluation Guidelines.  Los Angeles, CA:  Oral History Association, 2000.

 

Journals

 

International Journal of Oral History (1980-    ).  Mecklen Publishing, 520 Riverside Ave., P.O. Box 405, Saugatuck Station, Westport, Conn. 06880.

 

Journal of American History (1964-    ).  The Organization of American Historians, 112 North Bryan St., Bloomington , IN 47408.  (Beginning with volume 74 (September 1989), the JAH periodically publishes a section on oral history.)

 

Oral History: The Journal of the Oral History Society (1972-    ). Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, England.

 

Oral History Review.  Journal of the Oral History Association.  Published twice yearly by the University of California Press, Journals Division, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720; journals@ucop.edu

 

The Public Historian.  (1978-    )  Graduate Program in Public Historical Studies, Dept. of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.

 

Selected Examples of Oral History Texts

 

Ball, Edward.  Slaves in the Family.  New York:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.

 

Bamberger, Bill, and Cathy Davidson.  Closings: The Life and Death of an American Factory.  W.W. Norton and Double Take Books, 1998. 

 

Bennett, Walter.  The Lawyer’s Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

 

Brodkin, Karen.  Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 

 

Brown, Wesley, and Amy Ling, eds.  Imagining America:  Stories from the Promised Land.  New York:  Persea, 2002.

 

Cecelski, David.  Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 

 

Chafe, William, et al., eds.  Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South.  New York:  W. W. Norton, 2001.

 

Davis, Marilyn.  Voices/American Dreams:  An Oral History of Mexican Immigration to the United States.  New York:  Henry Holt, 1990.

 

Egerton, John.  Speak Now Against the Day:  the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

 

Eller, Cynthia.  “Oral History as Moral Discourse:  Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War.”  Oral History Review 18 (Spring 1990): 45-75.  

 

Federal Writers’ Project.  These Are Our Lives.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1939; reprint, New York:  Norton, 1975.

 

Grundy, Pamela.  You Always Think of Home: A Portrait of Clay County, Alabama.  Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

 

_____.  Learning to Win: Sports, Education, and Social Change in Twentieth-Century North Carolina.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

 

Hall, Jacquelyn, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly.  Like a Family: The Making of A Southern Cotton Mill World.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2000, 2nd ed. 

           

Jones, Lu Ann.  Mama Learned Us To Work: Farm Women in the New South.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

 

K’Meyer, Tracy Elaine.  Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.

 

Korstad, Robert.  Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

 

Kuhn, Clifford M.  Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

 

Love, Spencie.  One-Blood:  The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

 

Nabakov, Peter.  Native American Testimony:  A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1494-2000.  New York:  Viking, 1999.

 

Nasstrom, Kathryn L.  Everybody’s Grandmother and Nobody’s Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

 

Payne, Charles.  I’ve Got the Light of the Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995,

 

Rosengarten, Theodore.  All God’s Dangers:  the Life of Nate Shaw.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

 

Rymer, Russ.  American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory.  New York:  Harper Collins, 1998.

 

Stack, Carol B. Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South.  New York: BasicBooks, c. 1996. 

 

Terkel, Studs.  Working:  People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.  New York: Penguin, 1985.

 

Youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center.  Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.

 

Web Resources

 

Southern Oral History Program

http://www.sohp.org

Our brand-new website includes a section entitled “How To: Resources for Planning and Conducting Oral History Interviews.”  There you will find our guidebook, interview forms, and bibliography. 

 

Oral History Association (OHA)

http://www.dickinson.edu/organizations/oha

The Oral History Association, established in 1966, seeks to bring together all persons interested in oral history as a way of collecting human memories.  On their website, you’ll find their Evaluation Guidelines, as well as general information about the organization. 

 

Preserving Community/Cuentos del Varrio: An Oral History Instruction Manual

http://web.nmsu.edu/~publhist/ohindex

This is an online community oral history manual that includes information on planning an oral history project, transcribing interviews and preserving oral history resources.  It also includes lists of sample questions and a useful bibliography of oral history readings.  The manual was published by the Public History program at New Mexico State University. 

 

Regional Oral History Office: The Bancroft Library

http://bancroft.lib.berkeley.edu/ROHO

Under the section labeled “Related Resources”, this site gives brief tips for interviewers, as well as a “One-Minute Guide to Oral Histories.” 

 

International Oral History Association

http://www.ioha.fgv.br/

An international umbrella organization for many national oral history associations around the globe. Additional links are provided to sites in the UK, US, and elsewhere. 

 

 

From the Southern Oral History Program’s “Oral History: A Practical Guide” (November 2005).

 




The Southern Oral History Program
(a component of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South)
CB#9127, 406 Hamilton Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
info@sohp.org