Brunswick Dr. VA

Oral History Project

The idea of oral history is to select some 20th century event of importance and then interview as many people as you can find who remember that event well enough to shed some light on it for you. After the interviews and your background reading on the subject are finished, you are expected to pull together what you have learned in a well-organized and illuminating 5-page essay.

I want you to use a wide variety of sources, the more the better. Warning: for this assignment option, you must conduct formal interviews with at least 5 different people of your choice, making sure that each would be likely to remember interesting things about the topic you are studying. That topic can be anything that interests you: the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Kennedy Assassination, a womens’ rights issue, a Supreme Court decision, or anything else you happen to fancy. For those of you who may have some interest in the history of Brunswick or Greenwich Academy, this kind of research could generate original material that would be useful for all of us (and for me in particular!). For oral history purposes, an important school event or development counts just as much as a valid choice of subject as any national event does.

Talk to your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, acquaintances, or anyone else you think might be able to help you with vital information and insight. Anybody who has witnessed or been in some other way part of your event can be treated as a primary source for this study.

The paper will probably follow the usual interpretive essay format: thesis, body, conclusions, etc. In it, of course, you will also have to find ways to work in revealing pieces of your interview material: quotations, descriptions, anecdotes, or whatever. You must, by the way, include proper footnote or endnote citations to show how you used your research.

This time, also, I do require an annotated bibliography, and if your paper does not include one it will be considered incomplete and, therefore, ungradable. To be “annotated,” a bibliography must feature several lines of descriptive commentary on each source, including each person you interviewed (why you chose this person, what his/her testimony reveals to you as a historian, what it doesn’t reveal, etc.) This is in addition to the usual bibliographical information for the books you use for background (author, title, place and date of publication).

I expect to receive your final drafts no later than: