Links to Audio Available on the Internet

The audio accessible on these sites varies from lengthy to very brief. Some sites lead you directly to the audio, while with others you have to go digging. There is a fair amount of interconnectedness among sites, as is the case with most websites on the same subject. This is a very small subset of the many, many places on the internet where audio and oral history is available and more are coming online every day. You will be able to access audio much more easily if you have a high-speed internet connection but you should be able to get to some of these even with a dial-up connection.

The Veterans History Project site now has 1,321 stories online, many of which include audio interviews, photographs, diaries, letters and other materials, consisting of more than 60,000 online items. Since the launch of this site on Memorial Day 2003, the Veterans History Project has been selecting stories to illuminate certain themes and making them available online. Past themes have included D-Day, prisoners of war, life-altering moments and military medicine. The latest addition of stories focuses on “VE” and “VJ” (Victory over Europe and Victory over Japan), highlighting personal accounts from veterans recalling the hours after the announcement of the end of World War II. www.loc.gov/warstories

The Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University

In 1999 the Vietnam Center initiated the Oral History Project. An element of the Vietnam Archive, the mission of the Oral History Project is to create and preserve a more complete record of the wars in Southeast Asia by preserving, through recorded interviews, the recollections and experiences of the men and women who participated in these wars, as well as those military and civilian personnel involved in activities surrounding the wars on the homefront. The Archive believes that the history of the wars in Southeast Asia is not complete without the inclusion of the voices of the men and women who were involved in the wars.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/oralhistory/interviews/index.htm

After the Day of Infamy: "Man-on-the-Street" Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor presents approximately twelve hours of opinions recorded in the days and months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor from more than two hundred individuals in cities and towns across the United States. On December 8, 1941 (the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Alan Lomax, then "assistant in charge" of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center), sent a telegram to fieldworkers in ten different localities across the United States, asking them to collect "man-on-the-street" reactions of ordinary Americans to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by the United States. A second series of interviews, called "Dear Mr. President," was recorded in January and February 1942. Both collections are included in this presentation. They feature a wide diversity of opinion concerning the war and other social and political issues of the day, such as racial prejudice and labor disputes. The result is a portrait of everyday life in America as the United States entered World War II.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afcphhtml/afcphhome.html

Duke University, American Communities: An Oral History Approach
African American Experiences in Durham, North Carolina

Students in the American Communities seminar interviewed African American elders in Durham. They worked with staff and faculty at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies and the Center for the Study of Black History. The website includes biographies of the interviewees and interview excerpts.

http://www.duke.edu/web/hst195.15

The Whole World Was Watching: an Oral History of 1968

…is a joint project between South Kingstown High School and Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group. The project was sponsored by the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities and NetTech: the Northeast Regional Technology in Education Consortium. The resource contains transcripts, audio recordings, and edited stories of a series of interviews conducted in the spring of 1998. http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/1968/narrators/default.htm

American Slave Narratives:

HBO website for Unchained Memories program:

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/unchained_memories/#, click on “audio narratives” in left side menu, then click on one of the three listed (name and length of audio)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wpa/wpahome.html

index of narratives: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/index.html

Transcript and audio clips from interview with former slave:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/HUGHES1.HTML

Library of Congress, Voices from the Days of Slavery

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/

The Black Oral History Interviews, 1972-1974

consists of interviews conducted by Quintard Taylor and his associates, Charles Ramsay and John Dawkins. They interviewed African American pioneers and their descendents throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, from 1972-1974. Since it seemed that few blacks left a written record of themselves, important information was passed on from one generation to the next by word of mouth. Topics discussed in the interviews include early black settlers, job opportunities, social life and community, living patterns, black churches, and black political involvement from the late 1800s through 1974. Most of the interviews follow a standard set of questions. http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/xblackoralhistory.html

Sparrow’s Point Steelworkers

Sparrows Point is a promontory jutting into the Chesapeake Bay east of Baltimore, MD. In 1887, Frederick Wood, working with an industrial combination of The Pennsylvania Steel Co. and the Bethlehem Iron Co., began the construction of the enormous works that would first become Maryland Steel and subsequently Bethlehem Steel. From its opening in 1890 until today, the works have been a major industrial producer in the Baltimore area. This project tells the story of these steelworkers in a unique way: through oral history interviews, photographs and music. http://www.sparrowspointsteelworkers.com/

Studs Terkel’s Website

Studs Terkel's multifaceted life has produced an equally rich and varied legacy of research materials. He is best known as a radio network personality and as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books. His award-winning books are based on his extensive conversations with Americans from all walks of life that chronicle the profound and often tumultuous changes in our nation during the twentieth century. On "The Studs Terkel Program", which was heard on Chicago's fine arts radio station WFMT from 1952 to 1997, Terkel interviewed Chicagoans and national and international figures who helped shape the past century. The program included guests who were politicians, writers, activists, labor organizers, performing artists, and architects among others. Terkel is remarkable in the depth of his personal knowledge of the diverse subjects explored on his program and his ability to get others to talk about themselves and what they do best. Many of the interviews he conducted for his books and for his radio program are featured here. http://www.studsterkel.org/index.html

Historical Voices

A substantial portion of our cultural heritage from the 20th century is recorded in enormous collections of spoken-word materials. Yet much of it may be lost or remain hidden away in archives and private collections, making the voices inaccessible to students, teachers, scholars, and the general public. The purpose of Historical Voices is to create a significant, fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century - the first large-scale repository of its kind. http://www.historicalvoices.org/

Library of Congress’ American Memory Project provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?format=Sound+Recording

The British Library Sound Archive

Te British Library Sound Archive is one of the largest sound archives in the world. Opened in 1955 as the British Institute of Recorded Sound, it became part of the British Library in 1983. http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/nsa.html

Early Voices

The inaugral gallery for Historical Voices, Earliest Voices is a multimedia site presenting some of the most significant voices captured during the first fifty years of sound recording, 1877-1927. The late nineteenth to early twentieth century was a period of tremendous technological progress, and politicians and orators quickly took advantage of these innovations. In 1888, Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph, delivered a heady proclamation. He declared that sound-recording would ensure that the words of statesmen could be "multiplied a thousand-fold" and "be transmitted to prosperity, centuries afterwards, as freshly and forcibly as if those later generations heard his living accents." Nearly a century after the recordings of prominent speeches from this period were made, this gallery perhaps sees the culmination of Edison's vision.

http://www.historicalvoices.org/earliest_voices

Traders: Voices from the Trading Post

Upon occasion, a library or archives is provided with generous funding to collect, preserve, and disseminate a significant body of material. The United Indian Traders Association (UITA) Legacy Project proved just such an opportunity. As part of the project, NAU conducted 45 oral history interviews, designed a World Wide Web exhibit (www.nau.edu/library/speccoll/exhibits/traders), and produced an educational, multimedia CD-ROM. "Traders: Voices from the Trading Post," focuses on late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century trading posts in the Four Corners region, encompassing the Navajo and Hopi Reservations.

http://www.nau.edu/library/speccoll/exhibits/traders/oralhistories/oralhist.html