Narratives of Ooh-Rah! a Personal Narrative Survey of United States Marines in Recent Conflicts

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Jessica Stevens Folklore Genres November 2011 Narratives of Ooh-Rah! A Personal Narrative Survey of United States Marines in Recent Conflicts The Veterans Oral History Project is a federally sponsored program that was enacted by the United States Congress in October of 2000 for the explicit purpose of documenting the personal histories and testimonials of American war veterans. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress was recognized as having the necessary expertise to develop and establish an oral history program of this scale and nature. Though the collection consists primarily of audio and video recorded interviews of veterans, various accompanying items are accepted as long as they are considered to have a ‘narrative’ quality; such as memoirs, photographs, drawings, correspondence materials like letters, email, journals, and postcards. In addition to collecting personal accounts, the American Folklife Center is responsible for preserving the collection and making the collection accessible to the public. The National Digital Library of the Library of Congress presently holds over 10,500 digitized collections that are available to view. This survey of the collection focuses on a distinct type of material and group of veterans, the personal history interview of Marines who served during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, also known as the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. This research focuses on the personal narratives of United States Marines during wartime service in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a small subset of a much larger collection conceived, developed, and maintained by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The genre is not simply folklore because its supporting institute’s title exudes folklore relation. An issue of interest that arose during research for this survey is its assumed

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