Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-38
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Founded in 1989, CDS connects the arts and humanities to fieldwork, drawing upon photography, filmmaking, oral history, folklore, and writing as catalysts for education and change. CDS supports the active examination of contemporary society, the recognition of collaboration as central to documentary work, and the presentation of experiences that heighten our historical and cultural awareness. CDS achieves this work through academic courses, research, oral history and other fieldwork, gallery and traveling exhibitions, annual awards, book publishing, radio, community-based projects, and public events.
Columbia Oral History Research Office
The Columbia University Oral History Research Office is the oldest and largest organized oral history program in the world. Founded in 1948 by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Allan Nevins, the oral history collection now contains nearly 8,000 taped memoirs, and nearly 1,000,000 pages of transcript. These memoirs include interviews with a wide variety of historical figures. Some interviews, conducted in the late 1940s, contain recollections dating back to the second administration of Grover Cleveland. Topics include: the New Deal, women's history, Black Labor leaders, immigration and many others.
Maritime Labor History - Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, University of Texas A&M
These interviews were conducted in 1982 and 1983 by a Ph.D. candidate in history, Donald Willett, who was writing a dissertation on the National Maritime Union. All are open, and some are transcribed.
Oral History Centers and Collections
A list of links to oral history projects around the country and abroad.
Southern Oral History Program
Founded in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program seeks to foster a critical yet democratic understanding of the South - its history, culture, problems, and prospects. A component program of UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South, the staff of the Southern Oral History Program has recorded more than 2,500 interviews with men and women from all walks of life, and currently maintain an active research and teaching program. Our tapes, videos, and transcripts are preserved in the University's Southern Historical Collection, the country's foremost repository for research materials on the American South. The SOHP's archives contain series of interviews on labor, southern women's history, African American Life and Culture, and many other topics of interest to labor and working-class historians.
State Historical Society of Iowa Iowa Labor Collection
The Iowa Labor History Oral Project was initiated in 1974 by the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. For over twenty years, the Iowa Federation of Labor has funded the collection and, working with SHSI, has ensured the preservation of the rich materials recovered by the project. The Iowa Labor Collection currently consists of over 1,100 oral history interviews with Iowa trade unionists and 800 linear feet of labor records.
U.S. Labor and Industrial History World Wide Web Audio Archive
Features recordings drawn from numerous audio archives, though most come from -- or are processed at -- the University at Albany. They are organized by topic.
Utah Oral History Consortium Labor Oral History Project
Interviews on the history of labor in the state of Utah by BYU students. Topics include the history of Copperton and Castle Gate, Utah; railroad and mining history; and labor unions in the state.
Voices of Labor Oral History Project
The Voices of Labor Oral History Project is an enterprise to record the personal experiences of men and women who participated in the labor movement.
Voices of Workers Online: Oral History Recordings in Labor History
With the completion of its NEH Preservation and Access grant, the award-winning Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive of California State University, Long Beach, now is making available over 150 hours of original oral history recordings in labor history.
With its focus on orality, VOAHA brings to life the timbre and tone of voice, the richness of oral narratives, and the nuances of spoken language of 48 people, including Anglos, African Americans, Chicanos/as, working class men and women, and Southern and Eastern European immigrant women.
5 series, 48 narrators, 150 hours.
Topics: the fight to desegregate unions during WW2; organizing Mexican furniture workers; mobilizing workers in the oil fields in the Long Beach area; women garment workers in various cities, including the organizing of the Women's Local of ACWA in Chicago; and the lives and experiences of four individuals active in the labor movement in different industries and/or who were participants in historic moments in labor history in Flint, Michigan, Ludlow, Colorado and Oakland and or Los Angeles, California.
The interviews are been broken into organic time segments that are summarized and assigned search terms, enabling users to listen to specific interview segments driven by their own or selected search terms. Alternatively, users can browse the collections, working through the hierarchy and listen either to entire tapes or to selected segments. Full bibliographic citations are provided for each segment.
Contact Information:
For more information, contact Sherna Berger Glucksbgluck@csulb.edu or Kaye Briegel
kbriegel@csulb.edu
William Russell Pullen Library,Georgia State University Voices of Labor Collections
The Voices of Labor Oral History Project is an enterprise to record the personal experiences of men and women who participated in the labor movement.
Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting
Another creation of the American Memory Project, "Working in Paterson" presents 470 interview excerpts and 3882 photographs from the Working in Paterson Folklife Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. "The documentary materials presented in this online collection explore how this industrial heritage expresses itself in Paterson today: in its work sites, work processes, and memories of workers. The online presentation also includes interpretive essays exploring such topics as work in the African-American community, a distinctive food tradition (the Hot Texas Wiener), the ethnography of a single work place (Watson Machine International), business life along a single street in Paterson (21st Avenue), and narratives told by retired workers."
Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor
The Youngstown Historical Center of Industry & Labor provides a dramatic overview of the impact of the iron and steel industry on Youngstown and other Mahoning Valley communities. The museum's permanent exhibit, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Forging the Steel Valley, explores labor, immigration and urban history, using videos, artifacts, photographs, and reconstructed scenes.
In addition to the permanent exhibit, the Center offers educational programs and a library and archives. Part of the Ohio Network of American History Research Centers, the Archives/Library serves as a repository for local government records, as well as manuscripts collected from workers, companies and labor organizations.
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