ral histories are the first-person accounts of historical information obtained in interviews. “They connect the past with the present, with people who have a living memory of a particular event or episode,” says Robin Bachin, the Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of History in the University’s College of Arts and Sciences, who conducted several oral histories when she was a project coordinator for the National Park Service.

In many cases, oral histories are tape recorded as part of a dedicated project or the result of investigation or tragedy. The Slave Narrative Collection, compiled in 17 U.S. states from 1936 to 1938 as part of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, for example, consists of more than 2,000 interviews with former slaves, mostly about slave life and their reactions to bondage. In August the City of New York released 9/11 oral histories rendered in the voices of hundreds of firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians who endured the unimaginable struggle against surging fire, confusion, and horror.

Oral history initiatives, however, are not always prompted by events of national importance. They also can be informal—such as stories told by the small-town elementary school teacher who has educated generations of families or the efforts of the StoryCorps project, a national initiative in which two mobile recording booths contained in Airstream trailers are traveling the United States capturing stories of ordinary Americans. The recorded archives will be housed at the Library of Congress.

“A lot of oral histories have mostly been done with elites and famous people, but we all have family stories and collective memories,” says Eugene Provenzo, a professor of teaching and learning in UM’s School of Education who has captured oral histories on the Mariel boatlift and Hurricane Andrew.

“We hardly know anything about our local neighborhoods and cities,” says Greg Bush, director of UM’s Institute for Public History, who has used oral histories extensively in projects in conjunction with Miami-Dade County Public Schools and the National Park Service. “Most people think such material is boring or trivial, but these are overlooked facets of our lives.”

After Hurricane Andrew devastated Miami 13 years ago, Provenzo led a group of his students in south Miami-Dade communities to record the personal experiences of people who lived through the destructive storm and subsequent recovery efforts. The interviews they conducted became the basis of a book, In the Eye of the Storm: Hurricane Andrew and the South Florida Community (University Press of Florida, 2002), and they are now archived in full text and selected digital audio files on the Voices of Andrew Web site at digital.library.miami.edu/andrew.

“I don’t know anybody else who went down to Perrine and talked to the police chief about what it was like for him and his family to be bombed out of their house by the hurricane, yet he still had to do a 15-hour shift while trying to help his family recover,” says Provenzo.

In an effort to document the social and cultural aspects of Miami-Dade County’s diverse neighborhoods, Bush is teaming with the school district, governments, and citizens on interviews of local individuals. The “We Live Here: The Worlds Within Our Community” project will create a Web site and perhaps television programs on places like Overtown, Little Havana, and Coconut Grove.

Meanwhile, Eugene Rothman, ICHEIC Service Corps project coordinator and a visiting associate professor in the Feldenkreis Program in Judaic Studies, is collaborating with the University’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies on an oral history project to interview members of the Cuban Jewish community in Miami. “At one point, there were as many as 14,000 Jews in 1960 in Cuba, but with the revolution, all but about 800 of them left, and about 12,000 of them settled in South Florida,” Rothman says.

Today, that community of South Florida “Jewbans,” as they are called, is assimilating within the general community, raising concerns that their own unique experiences and culture will be lost forever.

And using audio and video oral histories obtained from South Florida’s Cuban exile community, the Cuban Family History and Genealogy Project at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies is preserving several aspects of Cuban folklore, from songs and fairy tales to childhood games and recipes.

Provenzo believes an oral history component should be incorporated into all undergraduate coursework. “We often get so caught up in the flow of our lives that we don’t realize the extent of what we’re observing and participating in might be important a decade, two decades, or even 100 years from now,” he says. “Oral history is a way of capturing it.”