Resource Library
A curated selection of resources for family historians, community archivists, documentarians, memoir writers and more.
How to use:
Click on a category to see all resources related to the category; or
Search by keyword; or
Check out Featured Resources; or
Browse all sources below.
Categories
Thickening the Narrative: Resources to learn, deepen, and teach untold stories, from nonwhite narrative histories, to trauma-informed research and more.
Documentary Practices: Examples of documentary writing (including memoir, personal essay, journalism) fictions based on truth (historical, autofiction), photography and film, as well as tips and prompts.
Archives: Examples of public archives of specific communities and resources for archiving your own collections.
Classes: These resources offer classes to enhance your archiving and documentary practice skills. For workshops with Amanda, please check out the Workshops page.
Oral History: Resources to help you strengthen your skills and practices in oral history collection, as well as examples for how to present your interviews.
Featured Resources:
The Body Keeps the Score
A foundational text for how trauma is embodied, and an important work to help you write and elicit difficult stories.
Joyful Recollections of Trauma
Though any memoir could be considered documentary practice, this particular one was inspired by Scheer diving into his own archives (or collections). It's also hilarious and heartbreaking.
Twilight: Los Angeles 1992
A tour-de-force play and film by Anna Deveare Smith, born out of interviews with people who were involved with or part of the fabric of Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots.
Considering the Space-History of your Archive
A list of inspirations that consider space and land as a crucial part of the history and story that we tell.
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
A fascinating look at jobs and what great documentation and oral history can convey.
Southern Foodways Alliance
The Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Oral History Association
The Oral History Association is a membership and professional association with incredible articles and toolkits for those who want to conduct ethical and effective oral history interview.
Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage
The Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage has collected and preserved the stories of Mississippians from all walks of life. Housed at the University of Southern Mississippi.
American Folklife Center
American Folklife Center, a branch of the Library of Congress, is a respository of everyday folk life in America.
An Ethical Community-Embedded Artistic Practice
This article, Toolkit for Community-Embedded Artistic Practice by Lane Michael Stanley, offers a toolkit of questions to consider for those who seek to have a community-embedded artistic practice, based on his own experience in recovery housing and his time developing plays with unhoused people.
Archival Supplies Vendors
A list of trusted vendors for archival supplies such as photo boxes, negative sleeves, and folders.
Writing Alone and with Others
This book has a wealth of memoir writing exercises that can easily be adapted to writing about family and community histories. If your family/community responds better to writing prompts than an oral history interview, this book is an excellent resource to jog memories.
Pictures from Home, Larry Sultan
First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan’s pendant to his parents. We often think about archives as something that gets saved, memorialized, put away to be discovered for other generations.
Institute for Oral History, Baylor University
The Institute for Oral History creates oral history memoirs by preserving a sound recording and transcript of interviews with individuals who are eyewitnesses to history. Excellent workshops and resources on the site.
Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University
Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) is dedicated to documentary expression and its role in creating a more just society. CDS teaches, produces and presents the documentary arts across a full range of media — photography, audio, film, writing, experimental and emerging media.
ReVisioning History Series
This series from Penguin Random House is an excellent addition into telling untold stories, revisioning the history that gets told in classrooms and to the general public.
Zinn Education Project
Based on the approach to history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, Zinn Education Project’s teaching materials emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history. The teaching materials are a valuable and great start to understanding what stories in our history are untold, or under-told.
Vermont Folklife
Founded in 1984, Vermont Folklife is a nationally-known education and cultural research nonprofit that uses ethnography—the study of cultural experience through interviewing, participation and observation—to strengthen the understanding of the cultural and social fabric of Vermont's diverse communities.
TLA Network
Transformative Language Arts (TLA) is a field for practitioners who change the world with words. TLA-ers are activists, teachers, storytellers, coaches, mental health professionals, writers, poets, librarians, facilitators, performers and more.
Lives Well Lived
This is a lovely documentary by Sky Bergman, featuring active elderly adults with incredible stories.