Oral history offers tremendous opportunities for interpreting the past and the increasingly complex present through the words of those who have lived it. The recorded interview, along with careful planning, solid background research, and archiving, form the basis of oral history methodology. Practitioners in public history, cultural heritage, library science, education, documentary, community activism, and local history groups wish to incorporate oral histories into their own work, and they need a road map for doing so.
The 'Practicing Oral History' series fills this gap. Titles consist of concise, instructive books that address the special circumstances of oral history within a specific user community. Each title provides practical tools for conducting and presenting an oral history project that interprets the best practices and ethical considerations of a particular context.
Ideas and proposals for new titles are welcome. Send queries to series editor Nancy MacKay, [email protected]
By Sharon Raynor
December 30, 2022
Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans focuses predominantly on conducting oral history with men and women of recent wars and military conflicts. The book provides a structured methodology for building interest and trust among veterans to conduct interviews, design oral history ...
By Clare Summerskill
September 14, 2020
Offering a roadmap for practicing verbatim theatre (plays created from oral histories), this book outlines theatre processes through the lens of oral history and draws upon oral history scholarship to bring best practices from that discipline to theatre practitioners. This book opens with an ...
By Marella Hoffman
December 11, 2019
Practicing Oral History among Refugees and Host Communities provides a comprehensive and practical guide to applied oral history with refugees, teaching the reader how to use applied, contemporary oral history to help provide solutions to the ‘mega-problem’ that is the worldwide refugee crisis. ...
By Teresa Bergen
August 09, 2019
Transcribing Oral History offers a comprehensive guide to the transcription of qualitative interviews, an often richly debated practice within oral history. Beginning with an introduction to the field and an overview of the many disciplines that conduct and transcribe interviews, the book goes on ...
By Fawn-Amber Montoya, Beverly Allen
August 07, 2018
Practicing Oral History to Connect University to Community illustrates best practices for using oral histories to foster a closer relationship between institutions of higher learning and the communities in which they are located. Using case studies, the book describes how to plan and execute an ...
By Christine K. Lemley
September 18, 2017
Practicing Critical Oral History: Connecting School and Community provides ways and words for educators to use critical oral history in their classroom and communities in order to put their students and the voices of people from marginalized communities at the center of their curriculum to enact ...
By Marella Hoffman
September 13, 2017
The use of contemporary oral history to improve public policies and programs is a growing, transdisciplinary practice. Indispensable for students and practitioners, Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs is the first book to define the practice, explain how policy-makers ...
By Angela Zusman
October 15, 2010
Angela Zusman offers an informative guidebook with step-by-step directions for planning and implementing intergenerational oral history projects, using youth to interview elders. An expert on these programs, Zusman uses her experiences and those of other oral historians to show how community ...
By Carol McKirdy
August 31, 2015
In addition to the problem of language, conducting oral histories with immigrant narrators often requires special considerations: past violence, cultural sensitivity, and lack of trust. Yet, these narrators are often witnesses to, or participants in, important historical events, or can describe ...
By Nancy MacKay
October 15, 2015
For the past ten years, Nancy MacKay’s Curating Oral Histories (2006) has been the one-stop shop for librarians, curators, program administrators, and project managers who are involved in turning an oral history interview into a primary research document, available for use in a repository. In this ...
By Barbara W Sommer
September 30, 2015
It has been half a century since the last book that addressed how historical societies can utilize oral history. In this brief, practical guide, internationally known oral historian Barbara W. Sommer applies the best practices of contemporary oral historians to the projects that historical ...
