Oral history is the spoken reminiscences of a person with recollections and stories of past events.
Oral history can be a project in itself or a means of gathering information for another activity.
Either way, it can be very satisfying and a wonderful way to connect youth to the community and your community to the larger themes of American history. Oral histories, like all primary sources, are the raw material of historical scholarship, and working with any primary source can be very exciting, especially for young people. Recording oral history has an element of detective work, as the interviewer hears the subject's story unfold and tries to understand what happened. And through oral history, young people can get a firsthand account of the impact of events on people and communities, not simply a description of the events. Oral histories are only as accurate as human memory and individual perspective.