Oral history project preserves stories of frontline workers in University of Chicago Library archives
Essential workers have been lauded as heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic, but their individual stories the details that reveal the daily lived realities of nurses and janitors, grocery clerks and transit workers have often gone untold.
To help change that, University of Chicago undergraduate students are creating an oral history project to share and preserve the voices of these frontline workers.
As part of Assoc. Prof. Amy Dru Stanley’s autumn class on U.S. labor history, the students interviewed workers from hospitals, schools, stores and many other sectors that serve the public. The interviews (48 in total) formed the basis of their final class projects, and will be archived in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at Regenstein Library.