Introduction

Part II – The Real World History Collection: A Promise Kept

“[The collection] is a validation for everybody involved. It's a promise kept, maybe that's the most important thing. I talked about it, ‘You're gonna be able to live forever!’ That was one of my selling points in the dog-and-pony show. Your voice and the voice of your interviewee are gonna live forever, and so now, and that's a promise kept!” 26 Oral history interview with Cosby Hunt, March 17th, 2021

When we take a step back, what is the result of all the hard work of Real World History

students and their narrators? In Part II, I will shift focus from the class to the student work, the

growing collection of oral history interviews now publicly accessible at the People’s Archive of

DCPL. 27 Divided into two subsections, I will examine the collection from two different (though,

at times interconnected) perspectives. First, I will analyze the collection as a new archive for

study of the Great Migration. What does this collection of interviews have to offer historians of

the Migration? Second, I examine the collection as student-conducted oral history and explore

what student oral history has to offer the field. How is student oral history different, and how are

student oral history interviews valuable sources for historians?

Though students have produced more oral histories than the 40 interviews archived in the

Real World History Collection, this analysis is limited to the interviews accessible through the

People’s Archive. While I would love to involve the 28 interview recordings not included in the

collection, as discussed in Part I, these additional interviews have been excluded from the

collection for one of two reasons: 1) because Cosby and I weren’t able to reconnect with the

narrator, or 2) the narrator declined donation to the Library.

26 Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17th, 2021, People’s Archive, 32. 27 These interviews are fully accessible via DCPL’s digital gateway, Dig DC, and I encourage readers to listen to the primary source alongside the transcribed excerpts that will be featured in this section. Each excerpt has a stable link to the interview in the corresponding footnote, and all excerpts have been timecoded to assist the reader with navigation.