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Ellis Island Oral History Project
Read through hundreds of transcribed interviews with immigrants who passed through Ellis Island in the early 20th century. These first-hand accounts describe what life was like for these immigrants in their country of origin, family history, reasons for emigration, their journey to New York, processing at Ellis Island, and adjustment to life in the United States.
Civil Rights Documentation Project
USM Libraries cooperated with the USM Center for Oral History to offer more than 60 oral history transcripts on the civil rights movement, such as those by civil rights leaders Charles Cobb, Charles Evers, Aaron Henry, and Hollis Watkins. This collection also includes oral histories of race-baiting governor Ross Barnett, national White Citizens Council leader William J. Simmons, and State Sovereignty head Erle Johnston. Audio excerpts were added to several of these transcripts. The project was expanded in 2001 by the addition of twenty-two letters from the Joseph and Nancy Freedom Summer Collection and four diaries of freedom schoolteachers in 1964.
Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive: Oral Histories
JARDA is a digital "thematic collection" within the California Digital Library’s OAC documenting the experience of Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps. Curators from the eight participating OAC members selected a broad range of primary sources to be digitized, including: photographs, documents, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, letters, and oral histories. Over 10,000 digital images have been created complimented by 20,000 pages of electronic transcriptions of document and oral histories.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress and includes more than 200 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division.
