St. Andrew's Hosts 27th Annual Oral History Night

The St. Andrew’s Oral History Project is the largest pre-collegiate collection of oral histories in North America, and with the addition of 99 new primary source interviews on Tuesday, it now sits at a robust 1,744.

 

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

 

On Tuesday night, students and their parents heard from Jake Williams, a civil rights activist who joined the Selma to Montgomery Voters March during the Civil Rights Movement in 1965 at the age of 12. Seven students presented on their topics - Ellie Rand, who interviewed Rosie Casals on Women in Tennis; Talia Brodsky who interviewed Dr. Myron Essex on the AIDS Crisis; Justin GResham who interviewed Senator DOug Jones on the Birmingham Church Bombing; Zelda Berrent who interviewed Mark Sly who was in the Twin Towers on 9/11; Dareen Bradosti who interviewed General David Peteaus on the Iraq War; Serena Hardy who interviewed Hiyam Abudabbeh on the Israeli-Palestinian War of 1948, and Katharyn Nugent, who interviewed Katiti Kironde on Black women and beauty standards.

The Oral History Project begins with the selection of an interviewee followed by a 10-page scholarly research paper aimed at helping students become experts on their subject and to develop interview questions. Next comes an interview and a full transcription. The transcription creates an original primary source, valuable to the many college graduate students who come to the Oral History Project looking for original sources. Next comes the analysis paper discussing how this new primary source fits into all of history. Lastly, there is a visual representation of the project that can be in the form of a trifold poster, a PowerPoint or iMovie presentation, or even a podcast.

 

Among the more famous past interview subjects are John Glenn, Colin Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, Marion Barry, Mike Eruzione, Doug Williams, Peter Berg, Helen Thomas, Charlie Wilson 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).