Oral history
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information from
people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by oral history is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
The term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to the study of information about past events that witnesses told anybody else, but professional historians usually consider this to be the study of oral tradition or traditional oral history due to the source receiving the information aurally.
Overview
It is believed that the term oral history originates with Joe Gould, a homeless man living in New York City who solicited donations by claiming that he was working on a massive manuscript called "An Oral History of Our Time", which he said consisted of thousands of recorded conversations on various topics. Although he was known to have a history of mental illness and violence, Gould was beloved by some writers in Greenwich Village, including Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. His writing, supposedly excerpts from this "Oral History", was published in elite literary magazines, and he was eventually profiled in The New Yorker.One of the earliest academic oral history projects was Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, which was established in 1948 by Professor Allan Nevins. It consists of almost 8,000 taped memoirs and nearly 1,000,000 pages of transcript; it is the oldest and still largest organized oral history programs in the world.
Oral history has become an international movement in historical research. This is partly attributed to the development of information technology, which allowed a method rooted in orality to contribute to research, particularly the use of personal testimonies made in a wide variety of public settings. For instance, oral historians have discovered the endless possibilities of posting data and information on the Internet, making them readily available to scholars, teachers, and ordinary people. This reinforced the viability of oral history since the new modes of transmission allowed history to get off archival shelves and reach the larger community.
Oral historians in different countries have approached the collection, analysis, and dissemination of oral history in different modes. There are many ways of creating and studying oral histories even within individual national contexts.
According to the Columbia Encyclopedia:, the accessibility of tape recorders in the 1960s and 1970s led to oral documentation of the era's movements and protests. Following this, oral history has increasingly become a respected record type. Some oral historians now also account for the subjective memories of interviewees due to the research of Italian historian Alessandro Portelli and his associates.
Oral histories are also used in many communities to document the experiences of survivors of tragedies. Following the Holocaust, there has emerged a rich tradition of oral history, particularly of Jewish survivors. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an extensive archive of over 70,000 oral history interviews. There are also several organizations dedicated specifically to collecting and preserving oral histories of survivors. Oral history as a discipline has fairly low barriers to entry, so it is an act in which laypeople can readily participate. In his book , Donald Ritchie wrote that "oral history has room for both the academic and the layperson. With reasonable training... anyone can conduct a useable oral history." This is especially meaningful in cases like the Holocaust, where survivors may be less comfortable telling their story to a journalist than they would be to a historian or family member.
In the United States, there are several organizations dedicated to doing oral history which are not affiliated with universities or specific locations. StoryCorps is one of the most well-known of these: following the model of the Federal Writers’ Project created as part of the Works Progress Administration, StoryCorps’ mission is to record the stories of Americans from all walks of life. On contrast to the scholarly tradition of oral history, StoryCorps subjects are interviewed by people they know. There are a number of StoryCorps initiatives that have targeted specific populations or problems, following in the tradition of using oral history as a method to amplify voices that might otherwise be marginalized.
The development of digital databases with their text-search tools is one of the important aspects to the technology-based oral historiography. These made it easier to collect and disseminate oral history since access to millions of documents on national and international levels can be instantaneous.
Growth and development
In Europe
Great Britain and Ireland
Since the early 1970s, oral history in Britain has grown from being a method in folklore studies to becoming a key component in community histories. Oral history continues to be an important means by which non-academics can actively participate in the compilation and study of history. Practitioners in a wide range of academic disciplines have also developed the method into a way of recording, understanding, and archiving narrated memories. Influences have included women's history and labour history.In Britain, the Oral History Society has played a key role in facilitating and developing the use of oral history.
A more complete account of the history of oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland can be found at "Making Oral History" on the Institute of Historical Research's website.
The Bureau of Military History conducted over 1700 interviews with veterans of the First World War and Irish revolutionary period in Ireland. The documentation was released for research in 2003.
During 1998 and 1999, 40 BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for The Century Speaks series. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, the Millennium Memory Bank. The interview-based recordings are held by the British Library Sound Archive in the oral history collection.
In one of the largest memory projects anywhere, the BBC in 2003-06 invited its audiences to send in recollections of the home front in the Second World War. It put 47,000 of the recollections online, along with 15,000 photographs.
In Italy
is an Italian oral historian. He is known for his work which compared workers' experiences in Harlan County, Kentucky and Terni, Italy. Other oral historians have drawn on Portelli's analysis of memory, identity, and the construction of history.In post-Soviet/Eastern bloc states
Belarus
, since the government-run historiography in modern Belarus almost fully excludes repression during the epoch when Belarus was part of the Soviet Union, only private initiatives cover the oral memories of the Belarusians. Citizens' groups in Belarus use the methods of oral history and record narrative interviews on video; the Virtual Museum of Soviet Repression in Belarus presents a full virtual museum with intense use of oral history.Czech Republic
Czech oral history began to develop beginning in the 1980s with a focus on social movements and political activism. The practice of oral history and any attempts to document stories prior to this is fairly unknown. The practice of oral history began to take shape in the 1990s. In 2000, The Oral History Center at the Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic was established with the aim of "systematically support the development of oral history methodology and its application in historical research".In 2001, Post Bellum, a nonprofit organization, was established to "documents the memories of witnesses of the important historical phenomenons of the 20th century" within the Czech Republic and surrounding European countries. Post Bellum works in partnership with Czech Radio and Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Their oral history project Memory of Nation was created in 2008 and interviews are archived online for user access. As of January 2015, the project has more than 2100 published witness accounts in several languages, with more than 24,000 pictures.
Other projects, including articles and books have been funded by the Czech Science Foundation including:
- "Students in the Period of the Fall of Communism – Life Stories" published as the book One Hundred Student Revolutions by M. Vaněk and M. Otáhal;
- "Political Elites and Dissidents during the Period of So-called Normalization – Historical Interviews" which resulted in Victors? Vanquished, a two-volume collection of 50 interviews;
- A compilation of original interpretive essays entitled The Powerful?! or Helpless?!
- "An Investigation into Czech Society during the 'Normalization' Era: Biographic Narratives of Workers and the Intelligentsia" and
- A book of interpretations called Ordinary People...?!.
Oral history centers in the Czech Republic emphasize educational activities, archiving and maintaining interview collections, and providing consultations to those interested in the method.