This collection contains cassettes and reels from various oral history projects and events likely connected to USU’s Community Improvement Through Local History Project. The tapes were almost exclusively created in the 1970s or earlier, and many of the interviewees who talk about their early life experiences growing up in the West were born between the 1880s and 1920s. It is grouped into two series, one for each type of media. Within each series, the materials are sometimes further grouped into projects.

Series 1 of this collection contains cassette copies of oral histories on a wide variety of topics related to the American West, grouped by theme when possible. The first, “Kellogg Community Improvement Local History Project,” consists of the tapes originally processed into Media Collection 6. Tapes for which a specific theme could be identified were filed under “Charles Redd Project,” “Bicentennial Project,” “Historical Survey of Myton, Roosevelt, Ouray, and Randlett,” “Carbon County Project,” and “Providence Project.” Oral histories that were not conducted under a specific theme are categorized under the heading “Interviews.”

Additional categories contain tapes documenting events. These were categorized into the following sections: “Barre Toelken Writers’ Seminar,” “Oral History Meeting in Salt Lake City,” and “Séance with the Sundance Kid.” The “Miscellaneous Tapes” section contains taped events that do not fit into any of the previous categories. Finally, “Church of the Firstborn,” contains recorded religious services of the Church of the Firstborn, a sect of the Latter-day Saint movement that officially disbanded in the 1960s.

The section titled “Charles Dowd Tapes” includes dictated letters to Kerry Ross Boren from Charles Dowd in which Dowd talks about his early life living on a ranch in Utah. On tapes 372 and 374 Dowd recounts stories concerning the clash between Native Americans and white settlers in Heber City, Utah, and on tape 375 he describes a murder that took place and the subsequent confession by the perpetrator. The tapes were not organized when originally found, but an effort was made during processing to group them by topic.

Series 2 contains reel to reel recordings of additional oral histories. A few of the reels were copied onto cassettes in Series 1.

Many of these tapes have been transcribed, though these transcriptions were found filed away in several different places throughout Special Collections. To make locating these transcripts easier, a column was added in the finding aid which indicates where a transcript is filed, if one exists.