Oral History Projects:

Welcome

The Regional History Project has been documenting the history of the Central Coast of California and the institutional history of UC Santa Cruz since 1963, through oral history. This web site includes the complete catalog of our collection, oral history resources, and links to other oral history sites on the Internet. All of the oral histories are available in full text (PDF) through our Digital Collections site and many are available on the University of California's escholarship site at http://escholarship.org/uc/rhp. Copies of our oral histories are also available for the cost of photocopying, which varies according to the length of the document.

Viewing Note: If you experience technical difficulties with accessing the PDFs though Digital Collections, try a different browser or contact us to let us know you are experiencing difficulties. For the best viewing experience, we recommend the following browsers: Safari 5+, Internet Explorer 8.0+, Google Chrome 12+. The recommended viewer for PDF transcript and text files is Adobe® Reader® version 8.0+.

Please contact Irene Reti at ihreti@.ucsc.edu for ordering information on the particular oral history in which you are interested. All of our oral histories are available to the public at the Special Collections and Archives  of McHenry Library. Call 831-459-2547 for their hours. Most of the oral histories are available in the circulating stacks of the library. You may search the library's Cruzcat catalog to find the call number for the oral history you are looking for.  

Oral history is a method of conducting historical research through recorded interviews between a narrator with personal experience of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of adding to the historical record. Because it is a primary source, an oral history is not intended to present a final, verified, or "objective" narrative of events, or a comprehensive history of a place, such as the UCSC campus. It is a spoken account, reflects personal opinion offered by the narrator, and as such it is subjective. Oral histories may be used together with other primary sources as well as secondary sources to gain understanding and insight into history.