StoryCorps celebrates 20 years of recording American tales

By Joe Earle

Outsiders may regularly describe StoryCorps as a giant oral history project capturing snapshots of American life in the 21st Century, but Daniel Horowitz Garcia doesn’t. He says what StoryCorps does is right there in its name. It collects stories.

“At its best,” said Horowitz, who heads the nonprofit’s Atlanta office, “StoryCorps is two people who know each other having a conversation about something that’s important to them.”

Horowitz believes that studying history requires something more than just recording memories. It’s something a historian does; it’s active, not passive. StoryCorps’ storytellers describe events as they recall them, not as a historian records them or interprets them. Doing history requires comparing memories to recorded facts. Sometimes what people forget can be as interesting as what they remember about an event, he said. At StoryCorps, “we talk to people with direct knowledge of the past,” he said. “We don’t critically engage with the past.