“Doing history” means something different for 11th grade students at St. Andrew’s. Since November, students in Alex Haight's AP U.S. History and Dave Brandt's U.S./European History since 1860 classes preserved and contributed to the largest pre-collegiate oral history archive in the United States. To date, the Oral History Project at St. Andrew’s has collected and preserved more than 1500 oral histories. This project has been featured in such books as Dialogue With The Past and The Oxford Handbook of Oral History and has been a model for similar oral history projects throughout the country.

It is only fitting that we end this complex school year by celebrating the work of this group of student oral historians. The 2021 Oral History Celebration not only celebrates the work of each student, but also recognizes the history they have uncovered. Student videos contextualize the history of the event they researched as well as provides direct excerpts from their live interviews.

For their projects, students are responsible for selecting an individual of no relation to interview about a particular period or event in American history. They then develop a short biography (with photograph) that provides a sense of the interviewee’s background and a context for understanding the place of the interview in each person’s life. After securing an interviewee, students are responsible for a research paper that examines primary and secondary source documents, creating a context for better understanding the interview. Prior to the interview, students use their research to formulate a logically ordered set of questions that are refined during a conference with the teacher. Each interview lasts approximately one hour. Students analyze the strengths and weaknesses of oral history as a historical methodology in a historical analysis paper. They determine where their interview fits into the existing primary and secondary sources that they examined in their historical contextualization and how it might add or detract from an overall understanding of the American past. Students examine questions as to whether their interview was biased, if it shed new light on a particular period or event, and whether or not it complements or contradicts their research. They also examine their own biases as historians and consider how their place in time might foster certain questions and responses.

Visit the project’s web site at http://documentinghistory.org.