The past is present
For history education in college today, instructors must engage students with humanities research in meaningful ways. This piece outlines the procedure of the project, from recruiting students to engaging them in community-based research, and can be adapted to other topics and locations.
By visualizing subjects—both the individual tagged topics and the holistic individual who provided their story—we were able to grapple with big picture questions and identify where opposing or overlapping experiences existed. This analysis helped us tell these stories in new ways and aided us in acknowledging that they expand far beyond what we deemed interesting.
In this assignment for an upper-level class on the Vietnam War, students conduct oral history interviews with Vietnam veterans. The project was designed to support the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. The assignment prompt also provides links and resources for learning and conducting oral history interviews.
This syllabus approaches the history of the Vietnam War through social history, engaging a variety of perspectives and teaching through oral history narratives and novels. The course schedule includes readings, films, oral histories, and other resources.
Clio and the Contemporary 