New Haven Oral History Project

New Haven is defined by extraordinary people whose lives are defined by extraordinary stories. Stories about waves of Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican immigrants starting new lives; about building Erector Sets at the A. C. Gilbert factory and learning Latin at Yale; about hamburger sandwiches and pizza pies; about urban renewal and the Black Panther Party. The list goes on and on.

Compelling as they are in their own right, each of these New Haven stories and others like them have much to teach us about race, class, education, government, immigration, and the other broad themes of American history. What’s more, these are all important stories that cannot be understood accurately, if at all, without the insight of the people who were there. Traditional methods of historical inquiry depend largely on the sort of evidence that only the famous leave behind, offering a disparagingly bare picture of the past. Relying on personal memories rather than newspaper headlines, oral history has the power to give voice to people whose lives would otherwise remain obscure.

Under President Richard Levin’s tenure, the University has improved its relationship with the city dramatically. As part of that process, with support from the President’s Office, the Yale College Dean, the History Department and the University Library, the NHOHP was founded in September, 2003 by New Haven native Andy Horowitz (JE 2003), and Glenda Gilmore, Yale’s Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, as a special project of the Yale History Department — an innovative experiment in education, scholarship, and town-gown cooperation.

All NHOHP interviews are conducted by Yale students. The NHOHP, working through courses and with volunteers, trains students to do oral history. Being an effective interviewer involves extensive research into the topic being studied; listening carefully; questioning respectfully; and thinking like a historian — being attuned to stories the interviewee has to share that are historically significant, and helping the interviewee to share those experiences. In the broadest sense, oral history teaches students “you don’t have to be famous for your life to be history.” The people students meet through the interview process — radical teachers and rebellious students, political party bosses and factory workers, civil rights activists and community organizers — all demonstrate, through their life experiences, what is extraordinary about seemingly ordinary people. They teach the power of human agency, showing that history is made by people more or less like ourselves.

The NHOHP reverses the traditional campus community service model. Most of Yale’s existing service programs send Yale students into the city as experts, providing help to a needy community. The NHOHP complements these programs by offering an opportunity for students to enter New Haven as students — learning from the valuable insights of experienced and intelligent New Haven citizens. In an oral history interview, the interviewee is the expert; the interviewer is there to assist and to learn. This dynamic is one that unites Yale and the larger New Haven community in a unique opportunity to create a shared body of scholarship.

We believe the process of the interviewing itself — inspiring dialogues across age, race, class, all the differences that might otherwise keep these conversations from happening — can be transformative, but the NHOHP’s work does not end when the interview is over. Instead, we always try to put the interviews to work in a variety of public forums, from oral history-based museum exhibits to lectures and contributions to community projects. In the broadest sense, sharing these local stories in a way that underscores their significance can contribute to a common sense of place, a shared sense of civic agency, and promote the exchange of ideas and experiences that is the essence of urbanity.