Oral histories, music, speeches and other recorded sound.
During the 1980s, Historic Madison Inc. board members Ruth Doyle and Hallie Lou Blum led an initiative to conduct a series of oral histories with prominent and impactful Madisonians. The HMI volunteers finished the last interview in 1991. Collectively, they interviewed over 60 Madisonians, some of whom were over 100 years old.
The House of History is devoted to collecting and sharing Black LGBTQ+ history in Milwaukee. Inspired by the experience of Janice Toy (one of the interviewees featured in this collection), Dr. Brice Smith worked with Janice to gather oral history interviews to create an historical record of her community. The oral history narrators documented here include twenty three Black LGBTQ+ Milwaukeeans known for their historical significance and/or unique perspective on culturally relevant experiences. The interviews were conducted in 2022 and 2023, with support from Diverse & Resilient (a non-profit public health organization that is led by, and has primarily served Black LGBTQ+ Milwaukeeans for nearly thirty years), the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This collection includes the full oral histories. Please visit The House of History site for even more history: https://www.houseofhistorymke.org/
This is an ongoing collection of audio stories recorded by the Mount Mary community at the Haggerty Library’s high-tech Storybooth. Begun in 2022, these recordings are from any individuals or classes who wished to share their stories – short, long, or somewhere in between.
Oral history interviews with prominent residents of the Wisconsin Dells and Lake Delton area as well as with local historians. The interviews were conducted by the Dells Country Historical Society in the 1970s and 1980s.
This collection contains oral histories, photographs, documents and color slides from six Mount Horeb residents who served in the Korean War.
The Lester Public Library of Arpin archive, preservation, and digitization project is gathering and preserving area history through video recordings of residents’ personal stories and digitization of physical materials, such as photographs and documents.
The Listening to War digital collection brings together first-person accounts of veterans and civilians in Wisconsin during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War. These stories of everyday life during wartime come from men and women who served on the battlefront; nurses, journalists, shipbuilders, and others who contributed to wartime work at home and abroad; Holocaust survivors who immigrated from Europe to Wisconsin after World War II; and Hmong refugees from Laos who were resettled in the state following the Vietnam War.
The Mills Music Library and the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, along with many partners at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, present a growing collection of unique, historic, regional and endangered sound recordings with related documentation. These include recordings produced for immigrant, ethnic and indigenous audiences by American companies in the first half of the 20th century as well as more than 700 hours of original field and home recordings from the 1950s through the 1990s featuring the Upper Midwest’s culturally diverse traditional musicians.
This growing collection of oral history interviews and images gathered from community members offers a snapshot of Madison neighborhoods, places, people and events. Featured neighborhoods include Greenbush and South Madison.
Photographs and postcards by professional photographer Herman C. Benke from the 1890s and 1900s and images by amateur photographer Frances M. Kadow from the 1920s through the 1940s. Also includes historical texts concerning Manitowoc County, plat books and plat maps, and oral history interviews recorded with area residents in the 1970s.
