NHPRC Funded Oral History Digitization Project at Evanston History Center Now Complete - by Lori Osborne

NHPRC Funded Oral History Digitization Project at Evanston History Center Now Complete

Lori Osborne, Director of Archives & Outreach, Evanston History Center

Evanston, Illinois was one of the earliest suburban communities settled outside the city of Chicago and is the site of much important American history. Not only was Evanston home to prominent national figures like Frances Willard, Daniel Burnham and Charles Gates Dawes, but Evanston was from its founding, a place where momentous events of national history took place on a smaller scale. From the abolition and temperance movements of the 19th century, to the women’s suffrage movement, civil rights activism and desegregation in the 20th century, Evanston was contested ground and its citizens grappled with big issues in interesting ways. The Evanston History Center has been collecting the material record of this community’s history since 1898, and the collection provides resources for researchers and others that really cannot be matched by many local history organizations.

The EHC archive includes an extensive oral history collection of more than 430 interviews on cassette tapes. The collection spans from about 1970 into the mid-1990s and documents Evanston’s African American, Caribbean, Jewish, Swedish, and World War II veteran communities (among many others). These oral histories serve as a unique and irreplaceable resource for researchers, providing much-needed access to the voices of witnesses and participants in the community’s history. The collection covers the significant moments that created the community, but also, and in some ways most importantly, the community’s daily life.

In 2015, EHC applied for and received a grant from the Illinois State Historic Records Advisory Board (through funding from the National History the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), National Archives and Records Administration) to digitize the collection. The taped interviews were transferred to MP3 files, for ease of access, and to WAV files for long-term preservation. All of the interviews are now available for listening at the history center and the collection is searchable in EHCs online collection database. A complete finding aid for the collection is also available on the EHC website at http://evanstonhistorycenter.org/research/oral-history-research-at-ehc/.

EHC wishes to thank the Illinois State Historic Records Advisory Board, the NHPRC, and the National Archives for their generous support of this project.