Oral history documents and preserves the memories of people who lived through significant events.
Oral historians prepare well-informed research questions that seek to provide future
researchers educators and the public with first-person accounts of the past.
Oral histories captured diverse perspectives, from presidents to working-class people.
Many scholars have used oral history as methodology to produce bottom-up histories or people's histories.
Social historians have conducted oral history projects that document the civil rights anti-war,
Disability rights movements, etc.
Oral history has also inspired efforts to record previously marginalized histories of communities such as freed slaves,
LGBTQ communities, and people with disabilities.
Whether novice oral historians want to understand more about their own family's history or to ask significant historical questions about nations.
When done with an appropriate degree of training oral history can produce new insights into the lived experiences of people and reveal a deeper understanding
into the human condition.
Journalism Versus Oral History
Journalists are more interested in the stories than the storytellers.
Journalists interviewed to capture sound bites or quotes rather than to preserve the voices of people.
Because the goals of journalists and oral historians customarily differ greatly, the interviews they produce are radically different too.
Journalists use interviews to report news.
Usually working on a strict deadline,
journalists rarely take the time to preserve their recordings much less make them accessible to others. Many journalists simply take notes.
When journalists do record audio and video the recordings are often edited for short clips to be used during a broadcast
These recordings are typically discarded afterwards.
Journalists asked highly focused questions to interviewees. They usually do not ask people to elaborate or respond to open-ended questions.
Because the ultimate goal of journalism is a story that sells the records that journalists provide are limited to their final product.
Journalism generally does not seek to deposit their recording for other investigators to examine.
A few notable journalists are our oral historians such as Studs Terkel and Wallace Terry,
both of whom have produced oral history inspired books that focus on the perspectives of historically underrepresented groups.
However, these authors did not originally provide access to their original recordings. Though Terkel has since provided access to recordings.
And usually the accounts are heavily edited to produce easily readable and enjoyable coherent narratives.
Oral histories on the other hand are ugly.
The transcripts can be long and sometimes tedious
because people speak in fragments, do not always complete their thoughts, and sometimes ramble.
Oral histories can be difficult to read.
However, the raw transcripts and recordings oral historians produce are much more valuable for analysis and critical interpretation.
Social scientists, sociologists, social workers,
all also use interview techniques in their research.
But again
interviews are not oral history until they become preserved, archived, and made accessible.
Because the goals of oral history are to provide verifiable historical documents from which future generations may learn about the past,
oral historians prefer not to record anonymous interviews.
Guaranteeing anonymity creates ethical and practical challenges.
One of the most distinguishable factors of oral history is what we call shared authority as developed by Michael Frisch.
Other episodes will discuss shared authority in more detail
but essentially
oral history allows narrators to shape the ways their stories are presented by editing transcripts or records and by asking them to sign
informed consent documents which gives permission for their testimonies to be archived and made available to others.
Shared authority means that an oral history interview is the product of a collaborative process between the interviewer and the narrator.
While an oral historian develops informed questions based from research, the responses to the questions are the memories, experiences,
and ideas of the narrator.
An experienced oral historian guides an interview with important research questions
while giving narrators space to answer the questions on their own terms, in their own time, and in their own ways.
This interview dynamic creates a shared authorship between the interviewer and the narrator.
Shared authority is central to the goals of oral history as it produces more inclusive history and values diverse experiences.
Michael Frisch defines shared authority as contributing to the interpretive aspect of doing oral history too.
Oral historians and narrators come together and provide a good advantage for understanding the meaning of experience
Informed consent is a legal document which states that a narrator voluntarily agrees to participate in an oral history project,
understands their interviews, recordings, documents, and photographs may be used for research, teaching ,or other scholarly uses, and
signs over the copyright either to the oral historian or the appropriate archive.
Pro tip:
always have narrators signed the informed consent document before beginning the interview.
Trying to obtain a signature later can lead to unforeseen problems.
Informed consent functions as both a copyright release and a participation agreement.
U.S. copyright law grants intellectual property rights to the narrator's of a recorded interview until at least 50 years after the person's death.
Archives require a legal release to make oral history collections available to others.
Similarly publishers will require a copyright release before publishing interviews.
Please note,
informed consent does not preclude narrators from using the oral histories in their own projects, such as any memoirs or documentaries.
Some narrators may become uncomfortable when explaining a copyright.
So explain to them before they sign that they are not signing away the rights to their life story.
Instead, they are allowing other people to learn from them.
Asking narrators to sign legal documents is probably the most necessary but least enjoyable part of the interview process.
Give the narrators space to read the document before they sign but explain the main parts of the document.
In addition to explaining the legal aspects of the document, ease any concerns by informing them that
1. They do not have to answer any questions that make them uncomfortable or incriminate them in any way,
Build rapport by suggesting that you do not typically ask questions intentionally making them uncomfortable
because oral history works on trust and mutual respect.
Be quick to take breaks.
As an oral historian
It is your responsibility to ensure that the narrator is comfortable.
Ask periodically if they would like to take a break or find a good moment to pause. Perhaps offer them water.
A narrator probably wouldn't engage in great storytelling if all they can think about is needing to use the restroom.
3
Narrators can end the interview at any time.
Giving absolute control to the narrator is necessary.
They may decide to no longer participate in the project. Honor their requests.
But do your best to ease any of their concerns and try to explain to them why their interview is so important.
These lessons will be discussed in greater detail and subsequent modules.
But narrators should be offered the opportunity to review any
materials and make any changes before the interviews are made accessible to others. This step is critical in the collaborative process.
Life Interviews Versus Research Focused Interviews
Oral history projects almost always must set limits on the scope of their topics and the number of interviews because oral history,
transcription, processing, and preservation can become very expensive.
Most oral historians operate on limited budgets, so they cannot afford to document a person's entire life story.
Most interviewers frame their questions to address a specific topic.
Nonetheless
because oral historians seek to provide future generations a useful record of the past and how people lived,
interviewers should attempt to expand the scope of questions to gain a fuller picture of a narrators life, their biographical details, and
important life events that shape people's views on the research topic
Why do Oral History?
Oral history operates from the underlying philosophy that researchers, professionals, and students can learn about their topic by listening to the perspectives and
documenting the experiences of people whose daily lives are shaped by their relationships to the topic.
Taking kind of a step back, I just want to ask a general question: Why do you oral history?
Well, you know
for me
the exciting thing about doing oral history is that in a very short period of time
I mean an hour or two, I have found time and again
perfect strangers are willing to share some of the most important
aspects of their personal history which often connects to a much larger
history. And to do it, you know, it really
in most cases, you know,
open and honest and direct way that, and I've always been interested in
the
history of
experience and the way ordinary people
have
responded to decisions made by the very powerful and how it's affected their lives. So if you're studying
war or economic disasters or immigration or almost any you know historical subject, the relationship between
the politics of
decision making and the
lived experience,
kind of sorting out the the consequences of those decisions. I don't know. There's not much that can do it better than oral history.
Into my next question, do you feel like your
approach to studying history using oral history, is
Defined or shaped your career, or the ways, or the questions you ask even, as a historian?
Yeah, there's no question that,
you know, when I
when I was an undergraduate in the 70s,
people talked about doing history from the bottom up. And that sort of quickly became a kind of cliche but it really was,
to me, a kind of an awakening. You know, it seemed that
any historical subject really was
possible and
potentially really important. And you know while there are other ways of getting at the history of
people who don't leave behind a lot of records,
if people are alive to bear witness to it,
that should be taken advantage of. Obviously, you can't do oral history if you're doing, you know, history that's
a hundred years in the past
So that's obviously a limit.
Do you,
can you think of any
insights into your academic research
fostered through oral history?
Well, one thing I would say in terms of the Vietnam War is
had I not
done oral history and relied more on the documentary record of the war,
I wouldn't have had nearly as profound an understanding of the ways in which the lived experience of
history can
so fundamentally
contradict the way the event is
described and explained and justified
by
you know, the people who are making the policy:
the policy makers in Washington, the generals that are enacting the policy. Now you could get some of that, of course, in
memoirs and
novels and journalism
Which many of them really deeply challenged these
sort of the official histories of the past.
But, you know, when you when you're doing a lot of interviews with a variety of people
you get in a much fuller, richer sense of the variety of perspectives.
So in other words, not just the way, you know, that experience contradicts official histories
but the variety of different ways in which people experience the past.
How is oral history unique?
Alessandro Portelli writes, "The first thing that makes oral history different, is that it tells us less about events than about their meaning.
This does not imply that oral history has no factual validity.
Interviews often reveal unknown events, or unknown aspects of known events.
They always cast new light on unexplored areas of the daily life of non hegemonic classes.
From this point of view, the only problem posed by oral sources, is that of verification.
What new insights do we gain from watching this oral history clip with the survivor of the Holocaust?
What can we learn?
Or all historians know that we can learn as much about the past by talking to people and trying to understand how events
impacted their lives.
Oral history can inform in more profound ways than simply reading about the past.
Oral history is both powerful and empowering
because it revolutionizes the way people understand the past by creating valuable primary source material and
reconsidering the experiences of diverse people throughout the past. Often working to create a more inclusive
understanding of history.
Don't look for the research gap in the literature. Look to the world and ask questions.
Then try to understand where those answers fit among the previous knowledge.
Learn to listen.
One of the greatest skills an oral historian can master is listening.
We are all inclined to respond to questions because that is the nature of human communication.
Oral historians must learn to silence their inner voice that wants to interject.
After all, narrators are the expert and you are there to learn from them.
Finally, this talent makes oral history artful and human.
Learn when and how to develop effective follow-up questions.
Follow-up questions are almost always improvised. It takes experience to learn when to ask a great follow-up question.
But this scale is developed by both preliminary research conducted before the interview paired with listening intently really listening to the narrator
Follow-up questions often foster Eureka moments.
For more infomation >> We asked people all around Europe: What is home? - Duration: 1:53. 
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