I wish I could have witnessed the end of the WW II in any country. I wonder how people felt once that war was over (“happy” most likely does not cover it). I keep forgetting to ask my mother when I see once a year. I wish we were documenting people’s memories of that particular day (the very first day of thoughts would also be valuable) in the form of oral history. Having said that, I explored and found out the following piece of news:
November 8, 2007
House Passes Bipartisan Resolution to Establish "National Veterans History Project Week"
U.S. Representative Jon Porter (R-NV) has announced that the U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 770, a bipartisan resolution designating the week of November 11 through November 17, 2007 as "National Veterans History Project Week." The special observance mobilizes America to record the oral history of its wartime veterans. Co-sponsors of the resolution include U. S. Representative Ron Kind (D-WI), original sponsor of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, and 23 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The resolution calls upon the people of the United States to interview at least one veteran from their family or community, following guidelines provided by the Veterans History Project. Local, state and national organizations along with federal, state and local governmental institutions are encouraged to document preserve and honor the service of American wartime
veterans.
More on: http://www.loc.gov/vets/
I still wish people were documenting ordinary people’s lives, not only vets. For example, there is a great digitized collection of interviews with former slaves (2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves
ON: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
This collection truly brings history to life.
Svjetlana Curcic