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Oral History Interviews Guide

This guide offers resources, samples, best practices, and other useful information for conducting oral history interviews at the College of William and Mary.

Interviews by W&M People

  • Williamsburg Documentary Project: The Williamsburg Documentary Project collects, preserves, interprets, and distributes information on the Williamsburg area’s rich non-colonial history. The WDP collection contains oral histories and digital artifacts pertaining to Williamsburg and the College of William and Mary in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The project is run by the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary, and American Studies undergraduate students provide most of the research work for the Project.
  • The Stephens Project: The Stephens Project seeks to document the stories of the lives of William & Mary gay and lesbian alumni, faculty, staff, and students. It is a long range (multi-year) gay and lesbian oral history project which will record the personal experiences of individuals while concentrating on their college years. The project will focus on recalling what gay and lesbian life was like at that time at William & Mary, coming out stories during the college years, the impact of being gay or lesbian at William & Mary on one’s post college life, experiences related to William & Mary GALA, Inc., and other memories relative to William & Mary life.
  • College Oral History Project, 1974-1978: The oral history interviews included in this series were conducted as part of a College of William and Mary sponsored oral history program in the 1970s. Transcripts are available for all of the interviews in the W&M Digital Archive. Reel-to-reel tapes and audiocassette tapes of the interviews were saved, but have not been reformatted so as to allow access to audio of all of the interviews.
  • Stony the Road We Trod, 2005: "Stony the Road We Trod" was an independent study project conducted by College of William and Mary student Jenay Jackson (class of 2005) in 2005. This oral history project was intended to serve as the initial part of an ongoing project to document African American history at the College of William and Mary. Ms. Jackson interviewed College administrators, faculty, and alumni.Transcripts of the interviews are available in the W&M Digital Archive.