The
Regulatory Oral History Hub at Duke University is now up and running. The website, created by
Edward Balleisen with the help of Elizabeth Brake and Will Goldsmith, is
an online gateway to oral histories that illuminate various aspects of regulatory governance. Most commonly, this means interviews with regulators, the regulated, or political actors who were instrumental in creating or changing regulatory agencies or frameworks—usually lawyers, judges, and legislators, but also grassroots activists, industry lobbyists, and interested academics. . . . This project helps make relevant oral histories accessible to scholars, students, and policymakers in an effort to break open that regulatory black box. We are working to catalog and tag the most relevant oral history collections to sort through what interviews have been conducted and draw out the oral history work that remains to be done.
The site offers various ways of searching for materials: by regulated industry or issue; by project name; by repository; and by regulatory body. Several listings, though primarily descriptive, contain segments of digitized materials; in addition, sites that provide large amounts of digitized content are highlighted in their own section.
