“The Textile Workers Union of America: An Oral History Project” was financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities through a grant (RC-255574-76-1143) to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The project had a two-fold purpose: to supplement and enhance the research value of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin's Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) archival collection and to refine the Wisconsin TAPE system, a technique of processing oral history interviews that is useful to researchers but less expensive than verbatim transcribing.
During the course of the project, James A. Cavanaugh of the Society staff conducted sixteen interviews with former and current leaders of the union. These interviews, totaling eighty-two and a half hours, were then processed using the State Historical Society of Wisconsin TAPE system. This consists of creating an abstract of the contents of a taped interview and keying that abstract to a permanent, audible time-track on the same tape. To this abstract is added the interviewer's introduction containing biographical information about the interviewee, a description of the circumstances surrounding the interview, and an assessment of the research strengths and weaknesses of the interview. An index to this abstract, keyed to the same audible time-track, is also prepared. The TWUA interviews were conducted in 1977 and 1978, and this processing was completed in 1979.
Subsequent to the project's completion, three additional “interviews” were added to the collection: an interview with Emanuel “Slim” Boggs in 1981, recordings from a 1984 reunion of retired TWUA staff and activists, and an interview with Scott Hoyman in 1985.
