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Primary Sources: Oral Histories

Finding Oral Histories for Research

Native American History Project (NAHP)

Native American History Project (NAHP) includes the Native Peoples of the Americas Oral History Collections of more than 8,000 interviews representing the lives and history of Native Americans.

Veteran's History Projects

The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans from World War I to the present.  You can search by name, war, location, military branch, ethnicity, gender, etc.

Participate in the Veteran's History Project:  if you or someone you know is a veteran, you can contribute your oral history to the Library of Congress Collection.

UC Berkeley Regional Oral History Office

Regional Oral History Office (University of California Berkeley) Transcripts of Oral Histories collected at the Regional Oral History Office at UC Berkeley. Organized by subject.

Oral Histories of former Slaves

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery. 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 17 vol. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from interviews with former slaves.

StoryCorps

StoryCorps Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 45,000 interviews with nearly 90,000 participants.  Covers recent history such as September 11, Hurricane Katrina, and more.