Listening to War: Uncovering Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories was a yearlong project to identify oral history collections documenting the lives of Wisconsin veterans and civilians during wartime, held by small and mid-sized libraries, archives, museums and veterans centers across Wisconsin. Recollection Wisconsin worked with an Advisory Committee and a consultant from AVP to develop a plan to digitize, preserve and provide access to this important content. This planning project was supported by a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
In 2016-2017, grant-funded Digital Archives Assistant Dana Gerber-Margie visited more than two dozen cultural heritage organizations across Wisconsin to assess their oral history collections. Read about Dana’s fieldwork in this interview and her blog posts.
Grant Products
Directory: Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories
This directory describes oral history collections documenting the experiences of Wisconsin veterans and civilians during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War. This is not a comprehensive list, but offers a sample of the range of wartime oral history resources held by libraries, archives, historical societies, museums and veterans memorial sites across Wisconsin.
Guidelines and Recommendations for Oral History Projects
These tip sheets created by Dana Gerber-Margie and Advisory Committee members Ellen Brooks and Troy Reeves provide guidelines and resources for creating and preserving oral histories.
- Part 1: Questions to Consider
- Part 2: Best practices for collecting veterans’ oral histories
- Part 3: Curated Resource List
White Paper
Read the final white paper submitted to NEH.
Advisory Committee
- Ellen Brooks, Oral Historian, Wisconsin Veterans Museum
- Paul Hedges, Emerging Technologies Archivist, Wisconsin Historical Society
- Erika Janik, independent author and producer, Wisconsin Public Radio/Wisconsin Public Television
- Stephen Kercher, Chair and Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
- Susan McLeod, director emeritus, Chippewa Valley Museum
- Troy Reeves, Head, Oral History Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Dorothea Salo, Faculty Associate, iSchool at UW-Madison
- Mark D. Van Ells, Professor of History, Queensborough Community College, City University of New York
