Historical Laboratory Projects
Oral History- Williams
Before writing became the primary way of exchanging information, people told stories orally. As time progressed and written archives became the primary way of preserving information, oral history, as it has become known, went out of vogue in certain circles. Contrarily, it thrived in other marginalized groups that did not have access to literary skills because of discrimination. They had no choice but to continue to try and preserve their pasts using oral history. At present, oral history is regarded for the same reasons it was overlooked: it can provide us an insight into marginalized peoples histories that were not previously recorded and focuses on personal and communal experiences rather than a specific historical narrative. It regained popularity in 1948 when historian Allan Nevins founded the first oral history archive. Nevins conceived that modern writing techniques were making oral history practices “obsolete,” and set out to correct this. [1]
Oral history is interesting because it deals primarily with living people. This requires oral historians to develop certain skills that a different kind of historian would not. They must be charismatic to get people to agree to being interviewed, and to make them feel comfortable being honest during the interview process. Historians put effort into selecting appropriate questions to ask to receive a well-rounded answer. Asking someone to recall an extremely specific detail may stump them and limit the way they go about formulating a response; asking them to discuss a certain broader time in their life allows them to construct a more detailed response at their own discretion. It could possibly dredge up some memories that had been forgotten. It can help groups of people establish a collective identity: communities, universities, and even bringing families closer together. Helping people to learn the history of something important to them helps build a connection. There are emotional benefits to the interview process as well, especially among the elderly. Being able to go into depth about a particular topic can allow for some fond recollections of “better times.” On the contrary, it can allow for a purgative experience of negative emotion, relieving some buried trauma that might be decades old.
Memories form from our personal perceptions of events. No matter how clear a recollection of an event is, it is still marked by the person’s personal bias. A flawed perception can produce a flawed memory, which is the argument that dissenters against oral history use. It is largely inaccurate to claim that a less accurate memory equals less important. [2] It must be left up to the historian conducting the interview as to the credibility of the interviewee. Certain aspects must be considered: was it a firsthand experience, or the experience of a loved one? Are they biased in any way? Has something happened afterwards that could have changed their feelings about the event that occurred? These are all things that a historian will ponder before attempting to relay an interview. Even so, these experiences might not dissuade an interviewer from considering a testimony. It in fact could provide a different kind of clarity to events. [3]
As our methods of sharing information have grown exponentially, there has been some ethical controversy among groups of oral historians. With the new practice of sharing interviews online, there have been many privacy concerns about the revelation of individual’s identities who preferred to remain anonymous. While monikers could be used, an in-depth interview can still reveal a lot of personal information that can be traced back to someone. Although staying fully anonymous is an option, some interviewees do not wish to. They want their words and their stories to be attached to themselves, which is understandable. In discussing current events, there is the likely possibility that not everything will be portrayed in a positive light. Concerns surrounding defamation arose when considering interviewing people about events that surrounded others who were still alive. Historical experiences rarely coincide with an individual’s personal experience. When reading over a summary of events, such as in a history book, we are given a general overview. When you are laying out facts, it is easy to distinguish thought from emotion when it is an event that we are not involved in; there is a degree of separation. People involved will have a vastly unfamiliar perspective than ours. We may know the general facts of what occurred on the day, but we will never know how they feel unless we ask them.
Many oral historians have revolutionized the house of oral history, but none so much as Svetlana Alexievich, the first person to win a Nobel prize for literature working with only living people. She was born in Soviet Ukraine and grew up in Belarus, witnessing the devastation the Soviet Union had inflicted on where she lived. Her career started with trying to dispel the propaganda being put out by the Soviet Union, which eventually led her to writing “The Boys of Zinc,” which featured stories from Soviet soldiers and their loved ones. She was considered a dissident of the Soviet Union, which was dangerous then. Her writings were banned or censored. Several of her fellow journalists had been killed or “disappeared under mysterious circumstances,” for their less-than positive views of the Soviet Union. Because of harsh public opinion, she traveled abroad, but quickly found that she needed to be back in Belarus to successfully continue her writings. While recounting history in an accurate sense is important, that was never her focus. “I work to create an image of time and the person who lived through it,” she stated, focusing more on the feelings of what someone was experiencing at the time rather than the event itself, which is the epitome of oral history. [4]
Oral history is a principal form of research that was almost lost, but persevered thanks to minds such as Allan Nevins and Svetlana Alexievich. Despite shortfalls in preservation, dissenters, and ethical controversies surrounding, oral history is an important and required field of history that provides critical insight into the human experience.
- Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. Third. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ↵
- Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in History and Theory, Second Edition. Manchester University Press, 2016. ↵
- Ritchie, Donald A. “Memory and Oral History.” Essay. In Doing Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. ↵
- Alter, Alexandra. “Svetlana Alexievich, Belarussian Voice of Survivors, Wins Nobel Prize in Literature.” The New York Times. The New York Times, October 8, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/books/svetlana-alexievich-nobel-prize-literature.html. ↵