The goal of CEHO's oral history program is to collect history as it happens and to capture voices and perspectives that are often not found in the official record. Over the last three decades, an era when collecting and preserving electronic documents has gotten increasingly more difficult, the office's oral history program has become increasingly more important, both as a source of information and as a guide to the digital records we are collecting. All in all, CEHO's oral history collection contains about 3,000 interviews. The earliest interview notes on file date back to the 1940s, and the oldest transcript is from 1967. In recent years, the office and its contractors have conducted approximately 700 interviews about events, programs, and operations ranging from support to the recovery effort after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to response and recovery after natural disasters to military construction in support of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Oral History Resources