St. Andrew's Hosts 29th Annual Oral History Night

The Oral History Project asks students to select a topic, interview someone who can serve as a primary source on the subject, and write a 10-page context paper, in addition to transcribing the interview, which then gets added to the largest pre-collegiate oral history archive in the United States that is housed in the Dreyfuss Library at St. Andrew's.

The Oral History Project has 1,917 archived interviews and includes interviews with Supreme Court Justices, Olympians, and astronauts, and this year was no exception. Topics this year included Vietnam, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iranian Revolution, the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks, and the January 6 Insurrection. 

Founded at St. Andrew’s in 1998 by then history teacher and now Dreyfuss Family Director of The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, and author of "Dialogue with the Past: Engaging Students and Meeting Standards through Oral History," Glenn Whitman, the Oral History Project is one that engages all American History students in the junior class.

This year, Mr. Whitman interviewed Dr. Daniel Kerr from American University on the topic of Oral History, Public History, and the Humanities Truck, which is an experimental mobile platform for collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and expanding dialogue around the humanities. 

Then, in front of family and friends, seven students from the Class of 2027 shared their Oral History project – Lukas Anderson and Lauren Chappell (Paul Fermin and Stephan Hoffman, The Fall of the Berlin Wall), Spencer Berrent (Lisa Kavanaugh, the Exoneration of Death Row Inmate Fred Clay), Tolly Gershberg (Daniel Diaz, Medical Aid in Dying), Davidson Miner (Leon Rattler, Siege of Wounded Knee 1973), Arad Mehrabian (Dr. Mohsen Sazegara, Iranian Revolution and Founding of the IRGC), and Ava Scafide (Dr. Mary Ellen O’Toole, Investigation of the Green River Killer).

Among the more famous past interview subjects are John Glenn, Colin Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, Marion Barry, Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, Doug Williams, Peter Berg, Helen Thomas, Charlie Wilson, Gov. Jeb Bush, and Pierre Omidyar (St. Andrew’s Class of 1984). Interviews for the oral history project currently reside in the Civil Rights Museum (Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine), and the National Baseball Hall of Fame (Ernest Burke, a former Negro League Player).