St. Andrew’s Hosts 28th Annual Oral History Night

The Oral History Project asks students to select a topic, interview someone who can serve as a primary source on the subject, and write a 10-page context paper, in addition to transcribing the interview, which then gets added to the largest pre-collegiate oral history archive in the United States that is housed in the Dreyfuss Library at St. Andrew's.

 

Now in its 28th year, the Oral History Project has more than 1,800 archived interviews and includes interviews with Supreme Court Justices, Olympians, and astronauts, and this year was no exception. Among those interviewed by the current class of student oral historians was former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Jim Craig, goalie for the 1980 gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic Hockey team, and James Obergefell, lead plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges which legalized same-sex marriage.

 

Founded at St. Andrew’s in 1998 by then history teacher and now Dreyfuss Family Director of The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, and author of "Dialogue with the Past: Engaging Students and Meeting Standards through Oral History," Glenn Whitman, the Oral History Project is one that engages all American History students in the junior class.

 

This year, Mr. Whitman conducted a live oral history with Bernard Scott, who of the nearby Scotland Community and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church who spoke about the community and the congregation’s struggles and triumphs. Then, in front of family and friends, four students shared their Oral History project in Alex Allbritton ’26 (Tom Johnson, The Civil Rights Movement) Lucas Chao ’26 (Loch K. Johnson, The Church Commission), Elle Toomey ’26 (Jim Craig, The 1980 Olympic Hockey game between the US and USSR), Chrissy Graves ’26 (Dr. Kelley Therisa Jones, Presidential Response to 9/11 and the Iraq War).

 

Among the more famous past interview subjects are John Glenn, Colin Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, Marion Barry, Mike Eruzione, Doug Williams, Peter Berg, Helen Thomas, Charlie Wilson, and Pierre Omidyar (St. Andrew’s Class of 1984). Interviews for the oral history project currently reside in the Civil Rights Museum (Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine), and the National Baseball Hall of Fame (Ernest Burke, a former Negro League Player).

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