Oral History

Oral history is the collecting of spoken reminiscences from men and women with special knowledge of the past. Oral history interviews are usually tape-recorded. The term oral history refers both to the methodology and to the material collected. Oral history documents do not supplant or replace the written or printed documentary record: they supplement and complement that record. Moreover, there are times when oral history documents may be the only primary source material for a particular event or historical phenomenon. Oral history evidence must be weighed with the same thoroughness which historians and other researchers employ in their critical analysis of other evidence. In addition, there are specific questions about the nature and validity of oral history evidence which must be considered with sensitivity and care. For example, how reliable is our memory about events and experiences that took place long ago? Do informants read into their recollections of the past their ideas and feelings in the present? Nevertheless, and in spite of its limitations, oral history contributes depth and richness to the historical record, sheds important light on the human dimension of history and on the lives of individual men and women, and provides valuable evidence for social, political and cultural history.

Historians since ancient times have utilized oral testimony in their accounts of the past. Herodotus is one example. The 19th century French historian Jules Michelet is another. Hundreds of oral interviews were conducted as part of the Federal Writers Project during the Depression years of the 1930s. Since the 19th century, however, most historians have relied on the evidence of the written and printed record as their primary source materials. The recent interest in oral history really dates from the late 1940s and the work of Professor Allan Nevins at Columbia University. Nevins was interested in exploring the history of New York City by interviewing the men and women who had played leading roles in New York’s political, economic and cultural life. He wanted to discover those aspects of the city’s history that were not fully documented or explained in the existing record. In this way, oral history interviews with men and women who had participated in or who had witnessed some of the major events and developments in the city’s history would supplement and complement the existing record. On occasion, the oral testimony might provide evidence that is otherwise completely lacking. At first, Nevins and his associates used long-hand notetaking in their interviews, and then a wire recorder. The invention of the portable tape-recorder made oral history interviewing much more efficient and practical. Today, oral history is recognized as an important tool of historical research.

Nevins and others at Columbia University interviewed prominent and influential men and women. This might be described as the oral history of an elite. Most of written history has been about elites because only a small minority in any society could read and write and it was usually that minority who ruled, left records, and wrote history. The history of elites is certainly important, but it is also important to study the history of the rest of humanity, that vast majority of toiling, tax paying men and women upon whose labor and suffering great civilizations have been built. This non-elite approach has sometimes been called “history from the bottom up.” We now have tools to study non-elites, the men and women usually left out of history books. One such tool is oral history. The tape recorder makes it possible to document the experience and feelings of ordinary men and women in a way that was not formerly possible. We can discover important facts and insights about the nature of our society and our communities and we can explore new ground by interviewing the non-elite, the men and women who work in shops and factories, who are school teachers or firemen, who live in modest homes or apartments or public housing, the old and the young. Black and white, the educated and the less educated, the immigrant and the sharecropper. Oral historians can explore labor history, the history of ethnic groups, the history of a local church or business, or the history of a neighborhood. They can use oral history to study the Civil Rights movement or a political campaign. Using the tape recorder almost as a microscope, the oral historian can focus on the smallest units in historical time and space.

Moreover, with the help of a portable tape-recorder and using the methodology of oral history, citizens can become their own historians. Creating the historical record need be confined no longer to the work of professional historians. Community or neighborhood history can become history by members of the community. Given the necessary training and support system, neighbors can use oral history to document the life and history of their neighborhood and of the institutions and groups and activities that are an integral part of community life.

Statistics or demographic studies may provide the broad outlines of macro-history of immigration or of population movement in an urban community, but these accounts do not describe the experience of individual families or of individual men and women. Oral history is a research tool that enables trained interviewers to elicit information about the experience and lives and attitudes of individuals. Individual informants or narrators may tell about pulling up stakes in Vietnam, Puerto Rico or Lebanon, or in West Virginia or the Sioux Reservation, and about moving to new worlds to live among strangers. They may tell about finding jobs and spouses, and raising families; about carrying on traditions, becoming part of a new community, joining a union, attending school, and about how they prospered or despaired. Narrators may tell about working in a suit factory or a packing house, about buying a home, losing a job, and about facing and fearing change.

Oral history is an especially effective instrument for carrying out research in local or neighborhood history, but an oral history project that is disorganized or haphazardly carried out is better not undertaken at all. A community based oral history project must be well planned and well organized. Citizens who decide to carry out a neighborhood oral history project should seek the advice and help of trained historians, librarians or other experienced professionals. Members of neighborhood oral history projects must identify research objectives, decide who will own the tape collection, and they must determine how and where the tapes and possibly transcripts will be housed so that tapes and transcripts are properly stored and catalogued and at the same time accessible to interested researchers and citizens. A local library would be an ideal place to serve as headquarters for a neighborhood oral history project. Project members would be able to consult books about oral history and they might be able to obtain professional advice from librarians. A local library would be a good place to house tapes and transcripts.

The most difficult and important task for any oral history project is the recruiting and training of interviewers. Almost any person of moderate intelligence has the ability to become an interviewer, but no one can be an effective interviewer without proper training. An oral history project will succeed or fail depending on the skill and effectiveness of the interviewers. Interviewers must be trained in the techniques and methodology of oral history interviewing. The training should be provided by an experienced oral historian. Not only must interviewers be trained, they must engage in continuing self-evaluation and their work should be monitored by a professional oral historian. In fact, all oral history projects require continuing critical evaluation to make sure that the highest standards for oral history research are being maintained. Maintaining such standards is well within the capabilities of a community based oral history project. To obtain information about oral history and the names of resource persons or consultants, neighborhood groups should contact area universities or historical societies, the national Oral History Association, or the newly organized Oral History in Ohio (OHIO) group.

Examples of possible neighborhood oral history projects would include the oral history of a neighborhood school, a local landmark, an ethnic group, a local business, a neighborhood organization or institution, or the oral history of a single individual, a long time community resident whose life and work have been intimately linked with the history and life of the neighborhood. There is, for example, a factory building at west 28th and Detroit on Cleveland’s near west side. A number of offices and business concerns now occupy portions of the structure. Except for a faded wall sign, there is nothing to indicate that the building once housed an important garment manufacturer, part of Cleveland’s once thriving apparel industry. Records of the Gottfried Company are fragmentary at best. But there are still men and women who worked for the Gottfried Company and who remember the days when the building on Detroit was a bustling manufacturing center in the midst of a busy community. To study the oral history of the Gottfried Company and of the factory building which housed it would require the searching out and interviewing of as many men and women as possible who worked at the site or who were connected with the Gottfried Company or who lived and worked in the immediate area. The resulting oral history interviews would bring life to a significant aspect of a neighborhood’s past and of the history of Cleveland. Informants will tell about the people who worked in the building and where they came from, about transportation facilities, about local hangouts or eating places. They would tell about the activities of an important garment manufacturing firm and thus contribute to the history of a Cleveland industry. They would discuss labor and management relations and the organizing of a union, about the specific nature of their work as cutters, sewers, pressers or designers. One of the most precious kinds of information that an oral history narrator can provide is a detailed description of work and of the machinery or tools utilized in handcraft or manufacturing.

It is imperative that interviewers become familiar with their subject matter, in this case, the factory building at Detroit and West 28th and the Gottfried Company and other businesses which have occupied that site. Interviewers may wish to examine records at the building department, newspaper files, or search out documents at the Western Reserve Historical Society. They may want to interview individuals who worked at other garment manufacturing concerns. In short, the interviewer should master the documents and background of his subject before the first interview.

An oral history interview is the joint product of the person being interviewed and the interviewer. The interviewer will do much more than ask a series of questions. The interviewer will shape the interview. He or she will ask follow up questions, will probe beneath the surface and will pursue unexpected leads. When confronting a written document, the historian cannot engage the author of the document in discussion or raise additional questions prompted by the text. The oral historian can do just that. The oral historian can ask a narrator to explain, to expand and to comment. The oral history interviewer can respond to a suggestive remark or promising lead and can develop an appropriate line of questioning. Interviewers will also cross check information and will corroborate dates and other data elicited from the narrator. In addition, the interviewer will be a patient, willing and always interested listener.

The pitfalls and limitations of oral history are many. The actual receipts of a tax payment are better evidence than the recollections of having paid the taxes. Narrators may have a faulty or selective memory. It is difficult if not impossible to recall the past on a day to day basis with the same specificity or clarity or vividness or accuracy which a diarist can provide by writing in his or her journal about the day’s events on a daily basis. The experience and interests and feelings of the present may color our recollections of the past. We want to present ourselves in the best light and make the best of our work and achievements. Present interest and unconscious prejudice may also affect our recollections and reconstruction of the past.

Yet oral history and neighborhood oral history projects can make a great contribution to a community’s history in particular and to social history in general. By tapping the memories of a neighborhood’s older men and women, oral historians will collect and preserve unique primary source materials that would otherwise disappear. A neighborhood will develop a greater sense of its own worth and identity by discovering its past in the voices and words of neighbors and friends. Citizens will gain greater understanding and control in the shaping of their own history. A neighborhood oral history project will need the resources of the entire community. Young and old will work together. Ordinary citizens will become historians and historians will work in the community with ordinary citizens. What a rich and rewarding enterprise it would be to carry out an oral history of the Antioch Baptist Church or of the Hungarian community in the Buckeye-Woodland area. Oral history makes possible a history by the people, of the people, and for the people. In giving people a past, it helps them towards a future of their own making.

Bibliography

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