Calling all local oral historians: HumanitiesDC and the DC History Center are offering their next oral history meetup in Washington, DC! Join us at the DC History Center on Monday, September 8 at 6 pm to be in community with other oral historians. During the meetup we’ll share ideas, talk through challenges and obstacles, and celebrate successes. You do not have to be a practicing oral historian to participate but come prepared to learn from others and to share your own thoughts, perspectives, and experiences.
This meetup might be for you, if you:
We recommend taking public transportation as parking is difficult to find near the building. Metro: Mt. Vernon Sq. Convention Center (yellow, green) Gallery Place Chinatown (red, yellow, green), Metro Center (orange, blue, silver).
Oral history is an intentional effort to document the memories and life experiences of individuals, often referred to as narrators, by recording conversational interviews with them and seeking to preserve those recordings in an institutional or personal archive.
Oral history is closely related to storytelling, journalism, and certain kinds of social science research. It differs from these forms of interviewing in its focus on the life of the individual narrator, its acceptance of subjectivity in the memory of lived experiences, and its impulse to create archival resources that can fill the gaps in existing historical narratives.
The DC Oral History Collaborative was started in 2017 to encourage Washington, DC residents to record the stories of their communities, share them with the public, and preserve them for the future. Since then, hundreds of oral history fans and practitioners have taken the Collaborative’s training, started projects, and attended oral history related events. Learn more about HumanitiesDC at humanitiesdc.org.
Founded in 1894, the DC History Center deepens understanding of our city’s past to connect, empower, and inspire. As the only community-based nonprofit focused on the District’s history, our vision is to reach into all eight wards to preserve and elevate the stories of Washington’s diverse people, neighborhoods, and institutions
Email Jasper Collier at jcollier@humanitiesdc.org