Everyday history saved on tape

Mr. Isay (pronounced EYE-say) hopes to win funding to install StoryBooths around the country. For those unable to come to a booth, his organization will offer StoryKits for recording personal histories anywhere. They'll include a minidisc recorder, microphone, headphones, and instructions.

Today there's a "need for individuals to tell their own story, maybe because there's a need for it in a culture where mass media flattens out the contours of individuality," says Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University in New York. She notes that oral history is "unabashedly" about each person's unique identity: "It's about their gender, their culture, their color, about their work."

Recording of audio or video reminiscences has taken hold since the invention of the portable tape recorder. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in the 1930s when the federally funded Works Progress Administration hired 300 unemployed writers to interview about 2,300 former slaves. Those recordings have become an invaluable resource to researchers studying African-American history.

More recently, filmmaker Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation videotaped some 51,000 Holocaust survivors, who told of their experiences. And today, the Veterans History Project, sponsored by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, is in the process of collecting reminiscences from veterans of World War I through the 1991 Gulf War.

Besides these large efforts, smaller projects have collected stories such as those of the Assiniboine Indians, passed along by those who watched the Lewis and Clark expedition cross Montana, and the braceros, Mexican immigrant farm workers who played a key role in America's food production during World War II. And all across the country, towns and historical societies have made individual efforts to capture the recollections of local citizens.

"Telling Lives," funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of Toronto, will expand to other sites later this year in Hartford, Conn.; Atlanta; Los Angeles; and Toronto.

Today, laptop computers with CD burners and DVD players, along with high-quality low-cost digital audio recorders, make it easy and cheap to capture and edit personal histories.

"My dream is that someday kids will be passing around MP3s [compressed music files] of the oral histories they've done, and put together with music or whatever," Isay says. "I think that would be amazing."

For Cathy Ogden, who heads an oral-history project for Greenwich, Conn., these reminiscences can provide gripping evidence of the past. The town has collected more than 700 recollections since 1973, producing 131 bound volumes of material.

One of those accounts is from a man who recalls the 1938 hurricane that hit the town. He was only 14 at the time and walking near a seawall when a giant wave washed his friend off his feet. While the friend clung to a telephone pole, he managed to throw him a rope and rescue him. When listening to this story, Ms. Ogden says, "you just go right back to that scene" with that boy.

Both Rabinowitz and Isay emphasize that they want to make "living" archives of people's lives that can and will be utilized and enjoyed. They don't want to, as Rabinowitz puts it, "wind up with a shoe box of tapes" that no one ever listens to.

"Each of us is uniquely a bridge to the past which would be lost if it were not for our history, our memory," he says. Each person "may be the only witness, the only connection" to some past event. Capturing those memories is "just tremendously important.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3