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Making the Most of Memories: The Empirical and Subjective Value of Oral History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Alistair Thomson
Alistair Thomson
Affiliation:
The University of Sussex
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Extract

Oral history, defined by Ronald Grele as ‘the interviewing of eyewitness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction’, is an invaluable and compelling research method for twentieth-century history. It provides access to undocumented experience, including the life of civic leaders who have not yet written their autobiographies and, more significantly, the ‘hidden histories’ of people on the margins: workers, women, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and members of other oppressed or marginalised groups. Oral history interviews also provide opportunities to explore particular aspects of historical experience that are rarely recorded, such as personal relationships, domestic life, and the nature of clandestine organisations. They offer rich evidence about the subjective or personal meanings of past events: what it felt like to get married, to be under fire, to face death in a concentration camp. Oral historians are unique in being able to question their informants, to ask the questions that might not have been imagined in the past and to evoke recollections and understandings that were previously silenced or ignored. We enjoy the pleasures – as well as the considerable challenges – of engaging in active, human relationships in the course of our research.

Type
Oral History, Memory and Written Tradition
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 9 , December 1999 , pp. 291 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1999

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References

1 Grele, R. K., ‘Directions for Oral History in the United States’, in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Dunaway, D. K. and Baum, W. K. (2nd edn, 1996), 63Google Scholar. For an overview of recent developments in oral history, see Thomson, A., ‘Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History’, Journal of American History, 82, 2 (1998)Google Scholar.

2 O'Farrell, P., ‘Oral History: Facts and Fiction’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal, no. 5 (1982–1983), 3–9Google Scholar.

3 See Thompson, P., The Voice of the Past: Oral History (1st edn, 1978)Google Scholar. The second, 1988, edition was expanded to outline the new approaches to memory developed in the intervening decade.

4 Passerini, L., ‘Work Ideology and Consensus Under Italian Fascism’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, R. and Thomson, A. (1998, article first published in 1979), 53–62Google Scholar. See also Passerini, L., Fascism in Popular Memory: the Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (1987)Google Scholar.

5 Portelli, A., ‘What Makes Oral History Different’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, and Thomson, , 69 (first published in 1979)Google Scholar. See also Portelli, A., The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (1991)Google Scholar.

6 Frisch, M., A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (1990), 188Google Scholar. See also Grele, R., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (2nd edn, 1985)Google Scholar.

7 Grele, R., ‘Memories of a Movement’, Words and Silences: Bulletin of the International Oral Histroy Association, 1,3 (1998)Google Scholar; Thompson, P., ‘I Piccoli e Il Grande’, Oral History, 23 (Autumn, 1995, 27–8Google Scholar.

8 For references to relevant literature in these fields, see The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks and Thomson, 5.

9 Frisch, M., ‘Oral History, Questions of Identity and the Representation of Culture’, Paper presented at the International Conference on Oral History, New York, 1994Google Scholar. See also Dunaway, D. K., ‘The Interdisciplinarity of Oral History’, in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Dunaway, and Baum, , 9Google Scholar.

10 Sangster, J., ‘Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, and Thomson, , 97 (first published in 1994)Google Scholar.

11 Kennedy, E. Lapovsky, ‘Telling Tales; Oral History and the Construction of PreStonewall Lesbian History’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks, and Thomson, , 344–56 (first published in 1995)Google Scholar.

12 For a more detailed account of my own oral history of Australian soldiers of the First World War, see Thomson, A., Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (1994)Google Scholar.

13 Frisch, , A Shared Authority, 188Google Scholar.