Tacoma Community History Project

Remarkably little Tacoma community has been written. Honey’s community history classes taught for more than 25 years produced more than 70 oral histories of people in the Tacoma and South Puget Sound community. It provides one of the community’s most important history primary research sources.

Since 1990, the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program has offered courses in oral history at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. In these classes, students learn the methodology of conducting oral history, interview community members, and compile projects that document the history of local individuals, organizations, and communities. The collection includes over sixty projects on churches, labor unions, military institutions, ethnic communities, neighborhoods, businesses, civic leaders, and prominent citizens in Tacoma and the South Puget Sound. Over fifty are now available digitally through the UW Libraries Digital Collections.