The Southern Oral History Program actively promotes a wide range of oral history outreach efforts designed to facilitate the use of oral history in classrooms and community settings in Chapel Hill, around North Carolina, and across the South. The SOHP periodically conducts basic oral history workshops tailored to fit the needs of a variety of institutions interested in embarking on or improving interview projects.
Oral History Workshops
One of the most exciting aspects of our mission at the Southern Oral History Program is presenting workshops on how to do oral history. Workshops give us a chance to share our own interviewing experience with people from all over North Carolina. We help workshop participants plan oral history projects in their own communities and institutions by offering suggestions on how to select interviewees, how to formulate interview questions, what type of recording equipment to use, and how to present the finished product. We ask participants to practice interviewing each other, and then we exchange suggestions on different interviewing techniques.
These training sessions - complemented by our detailed instruction booklet on how to conduct oral history projects - provide one of the program’s most important means of community outreach. Over the years, SOHP staff members have led oral history training sessions in high schools, community centers, retirement homes, university classes, and libraries throughout North Carolina. The interest and attendance at these workshops has been phenomenal, demonstrating a groundswell of grassroots commitment to local oral history projects.
The reach of SOHP workshops has extended to groups interested in researching the history of Episcopal women in the South, documenting prison life at a state correctional facility, and conducting an oral history project focusing on the recent politics of welfare. Closer to home, the SOHP has offered workshops at numerous locations in the Triangle area - including the Page Walker Arts and History Center in Cary, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the Raleigh City Museum - and presented training sessions to a variety of schools and departments at UNC-CH.
Contact us about scheduling a workshop through the Southern Oral History Program. Workshops are contingent on staff availability and fees (most of our staffers require a modest stipend for workshops conducted outside the university).
Resources
For Oral Historians
Use these resources in designing and realizing your oral history project.
- The SOHP Practical Guide. Our popular Practical Guide represents a comprehensive introduction to critical aspects of oral history fieldwork. The Guide includes a full complement of resources to assist in the design, execution, and processing of oral history interviews.
- Interview Forms. Our standard interview forms—Interview Agreement, Life History Form, and Proper Word Form—are required to complete the documentation of every interview.
- An Oral History Bibliography. Our bibliography includes sections on oral history theory and methodology, ethical considerations and legal issues, citations to key journals and videotapes, and a compendium of exemplary books and articles based at least in part on oral history research.
Time and resources permitting, the SOHP offers workshops for groups of people interested in embarking on interview projects. Click here for more.
For Teachers
These websites will help you integrate oral histories into your classrooms.
- Like a Family, the online companion to the acclaimed history, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, is a great resource for teachers.
- Oral Histories of the American South offers quick access to audio and transcript of more than five hundred oral histories.
- Documenting the American South offers exceptional teaching resources that use oral histories, in particular Stories of the American South.
Links
Some sites of interest.
- The Oral History Association
- H-oralhist, a network for oral historians
- Baylor University's Institute for Oral History
- The University of Florida's Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
- Crossroads to Freedom, a digital archive of civil rights materials from Memphis, TN
- StoryLine, a fabulous oral history project out of Winston-Salem, NC