Presenter: Leonie Schulze
Co-Presenters: Jennifer Esparza
Faculty Mentor: Alexander Dracobly
Presentation Type: Poster 92
Primary Research Area: Social Science
Major: English, History
Funding Source: Tom and Carol Williams Fund for Undergraduate Education; Department of History; Kira Homo and James Fox at Special Collections; Kirstin Hierholzer and her staff at the Center for Media and Educational Technologies
Every person has a story to tell and everyone’s story deserves to be told. These stories can be recorded and stored in archives to be read and possibly used for research in the future. This is exactly what students of the UO Veterans Oral History Project have been doing for the past five years and will continue to do for however long there are veterans out there willing to tell their story. For students, the project is an opportunity to learn about how to prepare and successfully conduct interviews, as well as how to transcribe them in a way that lets the interviewee’s character shine through black letters on white paper. For the veterans who are interviewed, the project is an opportunity to reflect on their military past in a safe environment, to perhaps tell a story they have not told before and to know that their names will not be forgotten. For future researchers this project will hopefully be useful in various ways. During the past five years that this project has been pursued, UO students have collected enough material for researchers to ask a wide variety of questions. Why did people decide to join? How did one individual’s experiences in Iraq or Afghanistan differ from those of another soldier? What did the service mean for the members’ families? Our project will hopefully serve as a public record and as a tool for future researches and historians to find answers to their questions.