About the program:

Join App State’s Mark Coltrain for an exploration of the Appalachian Oral History Project, including audio excerpts of interviews. He will lead a lively discussion about why oral histories are an important way to document our families’ and community’s stories, and how we can all participate in this work. 

Oral history has a longstanding tradition at App State. A search of the University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center reveals thousands of interviews conducted over the last half century. Interviewees cover a wide array of individuals from university students, faculty, staff, and administrators to veterans, farmers, business owners, musicians, storytellers, and civic leaders in Watauga and the surrounding counties. When taken as a whole, these interviews tell the story of the campus, the local community, and the region over the 20th and 21st centuries and in some cases fill in gaps where written histories are scant. 

One significant project in App State's collections is the Appalachian Oral History Project. In 1973, representatives from App State began the process of collecting interviews from Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell county citizens to learn about their respective lives and gather stories. From the outset of the project, the interviewers knew that they were reaching out to the last generation of Appalachian residents to reach maturity before the advent of radio — the last generation to maintain an oral tradition. The goal was to create a wealth of data for historians, folklorists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in the Appalachian Region. The project was developed in a consortium with Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College (now Hazard County Community College) both in Kentucky, Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and App State. 

About Mark Coltrain

Coltrain is a campus oral historian in the Special Collections Research Center at App’s State University Libraries. He holds a Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a Master of Arts in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. His research interests include collecting, preserving, and amplifying historically excluded voices that are a part of both university and Appalachian regional history.