Gator Tales: An Oral History Of the University of Florida * I Was There: a Century of Alumni Stories about the University of Alberta, 1906-2006

Oral historians have begun to use interviews in significantways to supplement what may be described as the more traditionalinstitutional "bricks and mortar" histories of colleges anduniversities. Many large public universities in the Americaswere founded after 1850 and first published their historiesat the half-century mark following the beginning of the twentiethcentury. In many instances, these college histories focusedon firsts and founders and gave particular attention to thephysical development of the campus and especially the constructionof buildings. These two books, one from the University of Floridain Gainesville, and the other from the University of Albertain Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, present an interesting contrastin the use of oral history in tracing the histories of thesetwo universities from 1906 to 2006. In the