Introduction to Community Oral History

Mary Kay Quinlan, Nancy MacKay, Barbara W Sommer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315426037
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The first book of the five-volume Community Oral History Toolkit sets the stage for an oral history project by placing community projects into a larger context of related fields and laying a sound theoretical foundation. It introduces the field of oral history to newcomers, with discussions of the historical process, the evolution of oral history as a research methodology, the nature of community, and the nature of memory. It also elaborates on best practices for community history projects and presents a detailed overview of the remaining volumes of the Toolkit, which cover Planning, Management, Interviewing, and After-the-Interview processing and curation. Introduction to Community Oral History features a comprehensive glossary, index, bibliography, and references, as well as numerous sample forms that are needed throughout the process of conducting community oral history projects.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding the Study of History

Always there are stories. Hereditary griots in western Africa maintained their tribes’ oral traditions generation after generation, telling the stories, reciting the poems, singing the songs. Aboriginal peoples in Australia etched their stories on the walls of caves, the symbolic art serving, perhaps, as memory aids. North American Plains Indians painted their stories—their histories—on buffalo hides in the form of winter counts, with one picture or symbol representing an important event marking each year. Family Bibles passed from one generation to the next listed births and deaths and, often, other landmark events in a family. Nineteenth century pioneers on the overland trails sometimes wept when they had to abandon family heirlooms in an attempt to lighten their loads as they headed toward the Continental Divide. They wept, in part because attached to those treasured objects were stories.

Stories that mattered.

Whether recited from memory through generations, painted stylistically on rock walls or animal skins, or associated with keepsakes, stories from the past maintain traditions and often inform us how to live our lives.

But stories alone are not history. And collecting stories is not oral history. A critical component that sets oral history apart from merely collecting interesting, even compelling, stories is the reliance on a thoroughly researched, structured interview intended to elicit firsthand information about specific times, places, events, and ways of life. Oral historians seek to understand not only what happened, but also why things happened as they did. They ask follow-up questions to explore how people with firsthand knowledge of particular events made sense of them at the time and whether their understandings have changed in the intervening years. Those elements contribute to the historical context of an oral history interview, and they often are missing from the yarns told by even the most engaging storytellers.

What Historians Do

In an academic setting, historians strive to make sense of the past by reconstructing and interpreting past times and places by analyzing evidence that takes the form of official records, photographs, artifacts, and written documents of all sorts. We call those materials primary sources, because they were usually created by people who experienced the time, place, or event firsthand. Historians may then write books and scholarly articles presenting their analysis and interpretation of those primary sources. We call such writings secondary sources. Students and other historians customarily use these resources to pursue further research.

For the historian, finding primary sources can be like going on a treasure hunt, looking for clues in

■ letters

■ diaries, journals, and personal memoirs

■ calendars or date books

■ photographs, slides or movies

■ maps

■ statistics

■ survey results

■ physical artifacts of all sorts

■ recordings of speeches

■ land records

■ tax rolls

■ minutes of meetings

■ high school yearbooks, and

■ records kept by government agencies at the federal, state, or local level.

All such items, and a multitude of other examples, may be found in museums, libraries, universities, government agencies, and other public repositories. Together they constitute what we call the historical record.

Oral historians add to that historical record when they create oral history interviews. The interviews themselves are primary documents that become part of the storehouse of information available for academic historians, public historians, and anyone else to use. Indeed, people interested in many scholarly fields, not just history, use oral history research methods, from gerontologists seeking to learn more about elders’ experiences to public lands managers seeking information about traditional uses of protected wilderness areas. Whenever their interviews are archived in a public repository, that information, too, becomes part of the historical record for all.

Despite the enormous volume of primary and secondary documents available for historians—and communities, families, and individuals—to make sense of the past, the historical record is inevitably incomplete. Documents may be lost or damaged in a flood or fire or by hungry mice. Or they may be hidden in a musty attic or damp basement, long forgotten by those who created them and set them aside for safekeeping. Or they may simply fade with time so they are no longer legible, hiding the historical secrets once inscribed there. Or they may conceal more than they reveal, a phenomenon easily understood by anyone who has ever been a member or secretary of a civic organization. Rare are the minutes of such organizations’ meetings that don’t gloss over a bitter argument by saying something like, “A lively discussion ensued.”

One of the challenges in dealing with all such historical tidbits is trying to understand the context in which they were created. Doing so often requires digging into alternate primary sources to shed more light on situations or events, as in the case of meeting minutes designed to mask controversy. Contemporary newspaper accounts, correspondence among the various players, and municipal records such as property ownership, tax records, and zoning permits all can add details. And oral history interviews can be one more tool for piecing together a fuller understanding of past times and places.

But sometimes, the context of historical documents remains elusive. Diaries of women who crossed the North American continent in the nineteenth^th century, for example, can offer tantalizing clues to life on the overland trails.¹ But modern readers cannot help but wonder about the women who jotted down their observations, sometimes at length, in the diaries and letters that have survived. Were they writing to deal with their own emotions? To create a record for their children? To gild their experiences so as to induce family members back East to join them? Did those women write more when the day had been particularly strenuous? Or write less? Or not at all? Historians who have studied such writings have pieced together, collectively, some sense of what the overland trail experience was like, but the historical context of the documents themselves is often inadequate.

Moreover, the artifacts and documents that comprise the historical record reflect the biases and the world view of those who created them, making absolute objectivity impossible. Even something as apparently straightforward as mapmaking involves human decisions: How large does a village or settlement or cluster of dwellings have to be to appear on the map? If a creek or stream is known by more than one name, what will it be called on the map? And who gets to decide?

The ancient Greek historian Thucydides recognized this inherent subjectivity of historical sources. Thucydides is widely considered the father of modern historical methods, because he gathered firsthand testimony in writing his accounts of the Peloponnesian wars between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century B.C. He observed that eye witnesses gave different accounts of the same events and suggested that was because they favored one side or the other or, perhaps, because memory isn’t perfect. More than two millennia later, contemporary oral historians are wise to remember Thucydides’ observations.

How Oral History Has Evolved

Long before Thucydides’ day, and continuing to modern times, communities have transmitted their culture through word of mouth in the form of stories, songs, myths, epic poems and the like entrusted from one generation to the next. In this sense, history has always been oral.

More recently, beginning in the late nineteenth^th and early twentieth^th centuries, the practice of conducting interviews with participants in historically important events began to catch on in the United States as a method of conducting historical research. Scholar Hubert Howe Bancroft based his seven-volume History of California, published between 1884 and 1890, largely on interviews. In the 1930s, the Depression-era Federal Writer’s Project conducted interviews with former slaves. On June 6, 1944, a young Army sergeant named Forrest Pogue, stationed on a hospital ship off Normandy Beach, used a then-new technology called a wire recorder to interview wounded soldiers evacuated from Normandy on D-Day. He went ashore two days later and continued recording interviews in what was the beginning of a process that ultimately led to the establishment of structured oral history programs in the armed forces and in major academic research centers.

In 1948, Columbia University launched its Oral History Research Office, later renamed the Columbia Center for Oral History. Similar scholarly research centers followed at the University of California, Berkeley in 1954 and at the University of California Los Angeles in 1958, thus securing a respected place for oral history in academia.

The early focus of many oral history programs was on documenting the lives and times of leading political and other public figures. A 50^th anniversary compact disc containing excerpts from Columbia University’s collection of thousands of interviews includes Thurgood Marshall, Fred Astaire, Dorothy Parker and Orvil Faubus as interviewees, among more than a dozen others.² Many of the presidential libraries contain extensive collections of oral history interviews with presidential advisers, contemporary office holders, and behind-the-scenes personnel who played roles in the presidents’ administrations.

By the 1970s, growing interest in social history and rapid changes in recording technology that made cassette tape recorders widely available took oral history back to its early roots, as reflected in Pogue’s interviews with ordinary soldiers, not just generals. The run-up to the U.S. Bicentennial celebration in 1976 sparked interest by families and communities in exploring their pasts and further solidified the role of oral history methods in documenting the lives of everyday people, a practice that became known as “history from the ground up,” in contrast with a “top down” view of understanding the past. From that perspective, oral history became an important research technique in emerging scholarly fields of women’s studies and ethnic studies and found a place in many college classrooms. Even elementary and secondary school teachers began to employ oral history activities, as their classes studied family and community history.

In recent years, the digital revolution has continued to bring simple recording equipment—both audio and video—well within the reach of many. And it has also vastly enlarged the options for sharing recorded interviews through publication on the World Wide Web. That, in turn, has raised new questions about interview transcription, preservation, and copyright protection, among other management issues. But it also has contributed to vast stores of oral history interviews in video, audio, and transcripts being available online.

Oral History and Memory

Just as the evolution of recording technology has changed the practice of oral history and made it readily accessible to grass roots organizations, so also have the theoretical underpinnings of the field evolved, particularly in exploring the nature of memory.³

Human variability makes the study of memory a complex scientific field, attracting the attention of neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, psycholinguists, gerontologists, human development experts and others. They study everything from slugs and fruit flies to human infants and adults to tease out greater knowledge about how memory works. To cite one example, for more than a century researchers in the field of psychology and the law have explored aspects of eyewitness memory.⁴ Their work has established that memories are malleable, influenced by what happens to a person after an event as well as by receiving new information that can cause people to reconstruct their memories. Moreover, the advent of neuroimaging devices that make it possible for scientists to observe electrical activity in different parts of the brain during psychological experiments has demonstrated that memory is a much more complex phenomenon than was once believed. The human brain is not like a computer that stores bits of information, keeping them available for recall in the same way a Google search coughs up facts. Indeed, for oral historians, what often matters more than an interviewee’s ability to recall specific, discrete facts is how interviewees use memories of the past to make sense of their worlds. It is, in fact, the human ability to be retrospective and reinterpret previous experiences that makes oral history a living window into the past.⁵

While memory research focuses on many different aspects of the subject, oral historians may be most interested in conclusions historian Valerie Raleigh Yow has drawn from extensive review of the literature reported in her Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. According to Yow, memory researchers have found that, in general:

■ People’s memories of the basic information about an event will persist, even if they forget some of the details.

■ People recall firsthand information about events that they were part of better than they can remember secondhand information.

■ People tend to remember events that involved a high le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Preface
• Series Introduction
• 1 Understanding the Study of History
• 2 Defining Oral History, Defining Community
• 3 Special Considerations for Community Oral History
• 4 Community Oral History Tools and Technology
• 5 Preserving and Using Oral History Materials
• 6 Ethical Considerations for Oral Historians
• 7 Exploring Best Practices for Community Oral History Projects
• 8 Overview of the Community Oral History Toolkit
• Appendix Sample Forms for Managing Oral History Projects
• Notes
• Glossary
• Resources
• Toolkit Index
• About the Authors