Veteran's History Project wants your story

The Veteran’s History Project (VHP) was created by the United States Congress in 2000 with the objective to gather and preserve the personal accounts of American war veterans and to make them available to students and researchers.

A free information session will be held from 2 to 3 p.m., Oct. 26, in the Student Union Cooley Ballrooms B and C at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic campus in Mesa. This session will discuss ways veterans and non-veterans alike can contribute to the project.

The School of Letters and Sciences at ASU’s Polytechnic campus is a founding partner with the Library of Congress of the VHP. Larry Edmonds, faculty lecturer in communications, is the Central/Northern Arizona workshop facilitator. Edmonds has been involved with the project for more than 10 years and works to bring workshops and information sessions to the community.

The VHP collects firsthand accounts of U.S. veterans from both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War. It also collects accounts from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We need to have these stories for future generations, so they know and can better understand what happens in wars, why people enlist and what their experiences were,” says Edmonds.

The experiences of veterans are told in many ways. Narratives can be written, recorded or videotaped. Visual materials such as photographs, drawings and scrapbooks are another way. The correspondence of veterans, from letters and postcards to personal diaries, are invaluable in getting a glimpse into war-time life.

The VHP collections are housed in the Library of Congress. At this time, only 5 percent of the collections are digitized and can be viewed online.

For more information on the VHP, visit http://www.loc.gov/vets/.

To reserve free seats for the information session on Oct. 26, send a note to ArizonaVHP@gmail.com.

Media Contact:
Christine Lambrakis, lambrakis@asu.edu
480-727-1173
Office of Public Affairs