Session Abstract

Although “Behind the Veil:  Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South” (Center for Documentary Studies; Duke University) was formally launched as a research project in 1990, the first field workers did not go out and conduct oral history interviews until the summer of 1993.  Twenty years later, this roundtable will bring together one of the Behind the Veil project directors with its research coordinators and select field workers in order to consider the legacy of the project, oral history as public history, and how the practice and methods of oral history have been transformed by the ongoing digitalization of history.  Overall, this session on a major oral history project speaks powerfully to the conference theme of “Lives, Places, Stories,” by considering how sundry dynamics of racial segregation in the United States shaped lived experiences within specific place-based contexts.