StoryCorps, the national oral history project that preserves and shares humanity’s stories through recorded interviews with diverse, everyday people across the nation, will roll into College Station in its retro Airstream trailer equipped with a recording studio on Tuesday, Feb. 20.
Through Saturday, Feb. 24, StoryCorps will record pre-selected students, faculty, staff and former students engaged in conversation on the campus of Texas A&M about their past or ongoing journeys, however inspirational, heartwarming or heart wrenching, and how those experiences permanently intertwine with their identities as Aggies.
As a companion project, Texas A&M is establishing two other recording studios on campus, Feb. 20-March 20, to allow the broader university community to preserve and share their personal Aggie accounts.
The StoryCorps “MobileBooths” have been on a 12-year road trip across the United States gathering the largest single collection of human voices ever recorded telling powerful stories of their shared humanity. The stories are preserved in the Library of Congress Archives and shared with listeners across numerous platforms, including National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and StoryCorps’ website.
“StoryCorps is an immensely important project because it brings Americans together through a shared understanding that our lives are much more similar than they are different,” said Amy B. Smith, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer at Texas A&M. “We are proud to help build a more connected and compassionate world by adding stories of Aggieland to StoryCorps’ narrative.”
A “MobileBooth” will be parked in Kyle Field Plaza near the 12th Man statue to record the unscripted conversations. StoryCorps will edit each recording into a meaningful story lasting between two and five minutes that will join the broader narrative being preserved and shared nationally.
Companion project invites Aggies to record stories for oral history project
As a companion project, two other recording studios will be established by Texas A&M, Feb. 20-March 20, to allow the broader university community, including students, faculty, staff and former students, to share their personal Aggie accounts.
Those studios will be open during business hours on the second floor of the Clayton W. Williams, Jr. Alumni Center on a walk-in basis and the Creation Rooms at The Studio in Evans Library Annex by appointment. Reservations are required through The Studio website.
To prepare for the conversations, Aggies can view a list of questions on the website, and for more ideas, they can listen to interviews posted on the StoryCorps website. The university will preserve the stories in a repository on campus and, potentially, share them with the campus community.
Since 2003, StoryCorps has given a quarter of a million Americans the chance to record interviews about their lives, to pass wisdom from one generation to the next, and to leave a legacy for the future.
The project began with a StoryBooth in Grand Central Terminal in New York City that led to other permanent booths in San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago, as well as two MobileBooths at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
StoryCorps has published five books, and its animated shorts have aired on public television. The unique storytelling platform earned a rare institutional Peabody Award in 2007, and another in 2012 for animations and audio commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The organization won a $1 million MacArthur Award, and later, founder Dave Isay won a $1 million Ted Prize that is being used to create the StoryCorps App, a new tool for collecting the wisdom of humanity.
Learn more about StoryCorps, listen to the recordings and watch the animations at StoryCorps.org.
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Media contact: Lesley Henton at 979-845-5591 or lshenton@tamu.edu; or Elena Watts at 979-458-8412 or elenaw@tamu.edu
