Primary Sources: Oral History: Books - U.S.A.

Oral History Interviews
First book to describe the African-American experience in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Consists of oral histories, memoirs, and old photographs as well as selected data from public records.

"... offers first-person monologues by 40 addicts whose stories retain each speaker's idiom. .."

Includes 15 slave narratives, including those of William and Ellen Craft, Olaudah Equinao, and Harriet Tubman; seven WPA narratives from the Federal Writers' Project and 47 oral histories collected through interviews or from existing materials found in archives.

"... excerpts from never-before-published diaries and journals; firsthand recollections from native Appalachians including Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs, and Ralph Stanley; indigenous song lyrics and poetry; and oral histories from common folk whose roots run strong and deep."

Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam, and Cambodia

Jesse Abbott, Christia Adair, Frankie V. Adams, Kathleen Redding Adams, Frances Mary Albrier, Bazoline Usher, Dorothy West, Addie Luck Williams, Frances H. Williams, OzelineWise, Deborah Wolfe, Arline J. Yarbrough,

Spanning the 1930s to the present

"Interweaving photographs, concert programs, scores, and drawings with the texts of more than fifty interviews with family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues..."
2nd Copy ML410.I94 P5 1976

An Oral History of School Desegregation in Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1954-1965

Voices of a South Carolina Gullah Community from WPA Oral Histories

Through her edited interviews with these women, Melissa Walker provides firsthand descriptions of the influence of modernization on ordinary people struggling through the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s and its aftermath. Their oral histories make plain the challenges such women faced and the self-sacrificing ways they found to confront hardship.

Oral Histories compiled by Fran Leeper Buss ; introduction by Susan Contratto.

Eighty narratives originally recorded by members of the Federal Writers' Project.

"Followers of the Trail, a Jewish leftwing workers' camp, was founded in upstate New York in 1929 by a group of immigrants, many of whom helped unionize New York City's garment and fur trades. Leviatin, a lecturer at Harvard whose four grandparents belonged to the camp, assembles scores of unpretentious reminiscences in this oral and photographic history." Publishers Weekly

"... features the voices of men and women who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s."
Amazon.com

"This book relates the personal experiences of medical people in Alabama..."

Includes an edited transcript of interviews with Vito Palermo

""This oral history collection brings together extended interviews with fifteen women who share the common experience of homelessness. "

"The whole history, past and present, of Appalachia is in this book in the words of the people most fit to tell it. The editors have done a superb job of arranging and commenting on the interviews—juxtaposing contrary opinions about issues as varied as strip-mining, traditional way and modern life, tourism and local politics, and the future of the whole region." -- New York Times Book Review

"With this collection of more than 600 oral histories recalling the Great Depression, Bindas provides a detailed, personal chronicle of the 1930s from a rural Southern perspective and captures a historical era and its meaning. "

"... three generations of Iowa workers tell of their unrelenting efforts to create a labor movement in the coal mines and on the rails, in packinghouses and farm equipment plants, on construction sites and in hospital wards. "

"Ira Gitler interviewed more than 50 leading jazz figures, over a 10-year period, to preserve for posterity their recollections of the transition in jazz from the big band era to the modern jazz period. "

Life Histories from the Alabama Writers' Project, 1938-1939