TO: St. John’s University Public History Students

FROM: Hannah Lang

DATE: September 16th, 2015

SUBJECT: The Great Thanksgiving Listen Initiative

The Great Thanksgiving Listen by StoryCorps is an initiative designed to let students or

anyone who wants to participate interview their family members and easily publish these oral

histories in the Library of Congress, which will help collect a wealth of information on the

American public. This initiative is an excellent way to make high school students more active in

not just learning about history, but also about collecting research and primary source materials

about a past that may be personally significant to them. It seems to be very well supported by

the media, as news stations such as NPR and ABC are sponsors of the initiative. Also, the

program is also very user-friendly for teachers, as it gives very specific instructions on how to

use The Great Thanksgiving Listen as a class project and ways to make it effective for students.

As interesting as this project is, its possible flaws lie in how broad it is. While the

experience of interviewing a family member would be meaningful no matter what topic is

addressed in the interview, this project could be put to even greater historical use. The

interviews collected have a wide potential to provide a lot of research on direct experiences of

people’s daily lives in the past, leading to new understandings of social and personal history.

Therefore, public history students at St. John’s can be an invaluable resource in order to help

improve this project by making sure that information gathered is more accurate and historically

significant.

First of all, history students, with their knowledge of events and experience doing

research, could also be helpful in making sure interviews are accurate and provide a sort of

impartial view on any information given during the interview. More importantly, though, public

history students are helpful in making sure interviews ask the proper questions. High school

students will almost definitely not have experience conducting formal interviews or oral

histories, and teachers will also probably not have a good grasp on this skill either. Although the

toolkit for teachers provides a series of useful questions, it can be hard for people who have

never conducted interviews before to ask proper follow-up questions, ask questions that are

unbiased and not leading, and give the interview a more narrow sense of focus and clarity instead

of bouncing between topics. Public history students, having a background in conducting and

analyzing research, would be beneficial to those participating in this project by being able to

advise interviewers on the kinds of questions that are best to ask in order to get a result that is

both entertaining and significant to the greater public in their historical interests. For example,

instead of asking family members simply to tell personal anecdotes, they could be asked how

certain historical events that they lived through affected them, or how the roles or jobs they held

changed over time.

To conclude, while The Great Thanksgiving Listen is a great initiative to get students

thinking about history, public history students at St. John’s can also serve as a very beneficial

resource on this project. Because public history students have studied nearby histories and

methods of conducting research and analyzing sources, they could certainly help conduct

interviews and offer advice on how to make sure the questions being asked provide new insight

and perspectives into different areas of history.