History class interviews veterans

Full Feed

Interviewing war veterans was the class project for Professor Marianne Kamp’s History Research Methods. The purpose is for the students to contribute to the Veteran’s History Project, which is an oral history archive that the U.S. Congress created in 2000. The archived interviews are all compiled at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

“It was really worth doing,” Robert said of the interview, in which her subject gave specific accounts of the warfare. “It was neat to meet this guy and talk to him.”

Robert found the veteran through a network of contacts she has as a Wyoming Air National Guard aircraft loadmaster.

Roberts said many of her classmates interviewed grandparents. She said she thinks the Veteran’s History Project works to get family interviews for the archive. Even children can interview family members, she said, because contributions don’t need to be scholarly or academic.

Robert knew about the project before she took the class because she attended a public history conference on campus last year. There was a representative from the project who said almost anyone could participate in it.

Kamp is an oral historian. “I strongly believe in giving people a chance to tell their stories,” Kamp said. “Doing these interviews and contributing to the Veteran’s History Project is a goal in itself, for me.”

She conducted an interview herself with World War II veteran Herb Dietrich, who is a retired emeritus professor of history at the University of Wyoming. The class witnessed their interview as a demonstration, Kamp said.

Dietrich was based in India in the Signal Corps, creating communication infrastructures like radio transmission towers. “For every person that actually was out there on the front line, there were lots and lots of people behind them, doing all the other stuff. And so he was one of the guys doing the other stuff,” Kamp said.

Oral history, as a method of research, is engaged in for two reasons, Kamp said. The first is for the stories and renowned accomplishments of important people to be recorded in their own words. The second is to hear the ordinary perspectives on everyday life from normal people.

“For me, when we look at a big event that affected most Americans in a direct and personal way, like World War II, having, collecting oral histories about the ways that ordinary experienced that gives us some really different insights than reading official histories or military documents…there isn’t that same personal and individual perspective on what happened,” Kamp said.

Email the author

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites