Doing Oral History

Doing Oral History

Third Edition

DONALD A. RITCHIE

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ritchie, Donald A.

Doing oral history / Donald A. Ritchie. — Third edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–19–932933–5 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–939519–4 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Oral history. 2. Oral history—Methodology. 3. Historiography. I. Title.

D16.14.R57 2014

907.2—dc23

2014028835

To Anne Ritchie

Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgments

1. AN ORAL HISTORY OF OUR TIME

Memory and Oral History

Public History and Oral History

2. SETTING UP AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Funding and Staffing

Equipment

Processing

Legal Concerns

Archiving and the Internet

3. CONDUCTING INTERVIEWS

Preparation for the Interview

Setting up the Interview

Conducting the Interview

Concluding the Interview

4. USING ORAL HISTORY IN RESEARCH AND WRITING

Oral Evidence

Theory

Publishing Oral History

5. VIDEO ORAL HISTORY

Setting and Equipment

Processing and Preserving Video Recordings

Video Documentaries, Exhibits, and the Internet

6. PRESERVING ORAL HISTORY IN ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES

Managing Oral History Collections

Sound Recordings

Digital Oral Archives

Donated Interviews

Legal Considerations

Public Outreach

7. TEACHING ORAL HISTORY

Oral History in Elementary and Secondary Schools

Oral History in Undergraduate and Graduate Education

Institutional Review Boards

8. PRESENTING ORAL HISTORY

Oral History Websites

Community History

Family Interviewing

Therapeutic Uses of Oral History

Museums and Historic Sites

Radio and Television

Performance

Appendix 1: Principles and Best Practices for Oral History of the Oral History Association

Appendix 2: Sample Legal Release Forms

Notes

Bibliography

Internet Resources

About the Author

Index

Most human affairs happen without leaving vestiges or records of any kind behind them. The past, having happened, has perished with only occasional traces. To begin with, although the absolute number of historical writings is staggering, only a small part of what happened in the past was ever observed....And only a part of what was observed in the past was remembered by those who observed it; only a part of what was remembered was recorded; only a part of what was recorded has survived; only a part of what has survived has come to historians’ attention; only a part of what has come to their attention is credible; only a part of what is credible has been grasped; and only a part of what has been grasped can be expounded or narrated by the historian.

Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History (1950)

Introduction and Acknowledgments

“Think forward or get left behind” has become a catchphrase for grappling with fast-moving changes in digital technology. For oral historians, more compact and affordable digital audio and video recorders produce better quality recordings and offer new streams of possibilities for using their interviews and returning them to the communities where they were conducted. But technological advances have made older equipment obsolete, jeopardizing investments and complicating the long-term preservation of interview collections. Technology can even veer in a different direction between the beginning and end of a project, no matter how careful the advance planning. In such a technologically driven field as oral history, practitioners who are caught unprepared will fall behind.

All of these changes also complicate the task of writing an oral history manual. The first edition of Doing Oral History appeared in 1995, designed to fill the need for an up-to-date, user-friendly guide to collecting, preserving, and disseminating oral history. I had considered editing a volume with multiple contributors, but that opened the possibility of receiving conflicting advice. Since oral history is a dialogue, I sought to create a conversation with the reader. Having conducted many oral history workshops, I drew from the issues and problems people had raised, which this book replicates in a question-and-answer format that moves from the general to the specific.

By the time the second edition appeared in 2003, the digital revolution had arrived. In the 1990s, oral historians still talked about the “tape and transcript.” Tape began to disappear so quickly that references to “taping” had to be changed to “recording.” A new generation of interviewers had never used a reel-to-reel or cassette recorders and puzzled over terms such as “fast forward.” Technological changes made even recent equipment seem quaint. The minidisk recorder, initially touted by the experts, was speedily surpassed. The use of oral history for exhibits and heritage touring leaped from cassettes and compact disks to QR codes and smartphone apps. Project directors needed to think clearly about the long-term use of the equipment in which they were investing. Oral historians were just too small a segment of the consuming public to shape the market or to set standards for archival-quality recordings. Instead, it proved advisable to “follow the music,” on the reasonable assumption that whatever technology became most favored for music distribution would prevail on the market the longest.

As oral historians grew more comfortable with new equipment, they expanded into video recording of oral histories and discovered the endless possibilities of posting interviews, transcripts, and recordings on the Internet, for worldwide distribution. Having found a way to get oral history off the archival shelves and into the community, oral historians also had to consider the ethical and legal issues of exposing interviewees to greater public scrutiny. Practitioners began raising new concerns and sharing responses not only at conferences and workshops but also through the oral history listserv, H-OralHist, a part of the Humanities & Social Sciences Online initiative H-Net. I have been following those messages closely to determine what new questions were being asked, and how best to answer them.

The Internet has left us no excuses for parochialism. As the practice of oral history grew more international, manuals could neither address themselves to a single nation nor ignore the rest of the world. Every second year the International Oral History Association meets in a different location around the globe, drawing hundreds of practitioners from every continent. Wherever social, political, or economic turmoil has occurred, oral histories have recorded the change—because state archives tend to reflect the old regimes. The collapse of the Soviet Union spurred oral history projects across Russia and eastern Europe. The economic transformation of China, India, and other nations had a similar impact in Asia. The end of apartheid in South Africa unleashed new interview projects because oral historians realized that their George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons were still living. Challenges to undemocratic regimes in Latin America and the Middle East spurred efforts to record and preserve protestors’ memories and experiences. Internationally, oral history also gave greater voice to those who had been marginalized in historical narratives, ranging from Native, Aboriginal, and First Nation voices, to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community.

War, terrorism, hurricanes, floods, fires, pandemics, and other natural and human-made disasters spurred oral historians to interview those who endured trauma and tragedy, and required interviewers to adjust their approaches. Issues of empathy for those suffering emotional distress increasingly became part of the discourse among oral historians. At the same time, the use of interviewing grew more interdisciplinary, with historians examining the fieldwork techniques and needs of social scientists, and social scientists evaluating the benefits of qualitative research. New theoretical interests developed, particularly surrounding memory studies. Oral historians became more concerned about not only what people remembered but also what they forgot, and how they expressed these memories.

In addition to the expanded movement to collect oral histories, recent years have seen a burst of creative uses of interviews, in teaching strategies, performances, exhibits, and websites. It is now possible to listen to, view, or read interviews from around the world without the time and cost of traveling to distant archives. Video interviews have proved particularly compelling on the Internet, attracting more viewers and encouraging projects to shift from audio to video. Webcams permit face-to-face interviews to be conducted virtually by means of free Internet services. Presentations at oral history meetings have reflected an endless variety of new applications of oral history, while also raising some caveats. Video preservation consumes a great deal of storage space; Internet viewers tend to move on after a few minutes of watching clips and rarely show the same sustained interest that serious researchers have in scrutinizing the entire interview. The endless possibilities need to be balanced with practical realities.

An increasingly litigious culture has raised other concerns for oral historians. Lawsuits have alleged that some online interviews are defamatory. A court case with international implications arose when the United States supported British police efforts to subpoena closed interviews that might shed light on a murder case in Northern Ireland. Oral historians monitored the case carefully to see how it might affect their promises of confidentiality. Other challenges have arisen from the inconsistent behavior of university-based institutional review boards, which have caused headaches for academic projects.

All of these issues made the need for a third edition clear. In preparing this volume, it has been breathtaking to document the scope of change over the last two decades and sobering to see how dated it made much of the past information and even some of the language. A new edition provides a chance to step back and view the impressive new panorama, to jettison obsolete references, and to update the discussions of still-relevant concerns. Looking back over the past two decades has also provided some reassurance about continuity. While it sometimes seems that everything about the practice of oral history has changed, the personal dynamics of conducting an interview have remained very much intact. Whether sitting down face-to-face or using some means of electronic communication, the basic human interaction of the interview has stayed the same. So have the basic steps: the interviewer’s need for prior research; for knowing how to operate the equipment; for crafting thoughtful, open-ended questions; for establishing rapport; for listening carefully and following up with further questions; and for doing everything possible to elicit candid and substantive responses. The need for standards in doing oral history has also remained constant, encouraging the Oral History Association to update its recommendations for best practices.

I have tracked the ongoing discussions among oral historians in the publications of the Oral History Association, the British Oral History Society, and the International Oral History Association; and attended oral history conferences across the United States and in Great Britain, Sweden, Italy, the Czech Republic, Turkey, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. Although the subjects of the presentations in these diverse places were usually locally based, oral historians everywhere share common methods and techniques. I also edited The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (2011), which brought together the original writings of forty authors from five continents. I have learned much from each of them, and have tapped some of their insights for this edition.

Universally, we encounter the tendency of oral history to confound rather than to confirm our assumptions, confronting us with conflicting viewpoints and encouraging us to examine events from multiple perspectives. Oral history’s value derives not from resisting the unexpected but from relishing it. By adding an ever-wider range of voices to the story, oral history does not simplify the historical narrative but makes it more complex—and more interesting.

Trying to fathom oral history, a friend once said: “Oh, you do that vocal history.” That was half right. Oral history thrives on talking, largely by the interviewee. The interviewer’s job is to ask meaningful questions, listen carefully, and suppress the urge to talk. Having disciplined themselves to be silent during interviews, oral historians behave much more loquaciously when they gather at professional conferences. The truth is that oral historians love to talk. As the only historians who deal exclusively with the living, they have to be convivial enough to establish rapport with interviewees, to put them at ease, and encourage candor. Practitioners of the craft of posing questions, oral historians also find themselves constantly questioning their own concepts, methods, and applications of new technology. Those who collect the voices of history make their own voices heard on how to do and use oral history.

The real impact of the oral history movement may not be fully realized until well into the future. Seeking evidence from contemporary figures, researchers do not always need to wait for archival oral history collections to release interviews. Armed with their own recorders, they can question whoever is willing to answer. But as generations pass and participants in historic events are no longer living, future researchers will have to depend on what earlier interviews collected, processed, and deposited in archives. How will they judge our work? Will today’s oral history shape the writing of the history of our time or be dismissed as superficial and superfluous? How much of what we do will be preserved, and how much will be lost? Oral historians need to look beyond their own immediate needs to consider the corpus of work they will leave for the future.

There is no shortage of interviewing manuals and fieldwork guides. They reflect the many disciples that employ interviewing techniques and differ according to the standards, practices, and technology at the time they were written and the backgrounds and interests of their authors. Historians, archivists, librarians, folklorists, anthropologists, educators, journalists, linguists, and gerontologists have contributed to the burgeoning literature. This book draws from that body of scholarship as well as from my personal experience. As a historian, I use interviews as part of my own research, and conduct an archival oral history program for the U.S. Senate Historical Office.

Not every oral historian will agree with every point made here, since there is no uniform way of doing oral history, and unconventional approaches may sometimes work well. The best practices have been established for good reasons, but for every rule there has been an exception that worked. Oral historians welcome innovation and imagination. Rather than seek to make all interviewers march like soldiers in cadence, this book aims to help practitioners first think carefully about what they are doing and be aware of potential consequences. The questions and answers that follow deal with so many principles and potential pitfalls that they may intimidate some beginning oral historians. Do not let awareness of the issues paralyze the process. Oral history interviewing may not be easy, but it can be enormously satisfying and rewarding to meet and engage in dialogue with memorable individuals and to make sure that otherwise neglected aspects of the past will be preserved for the future.

Most oral historians learn by doing, and our understanding of the theories of interviewing and our interpretation have more often followed than preceded our interviewing. Doing Oral History seeks to provide practical advice and reasonable explanations for those planning to conduct and collect oral history interviews. Its emphasis is on doing. Planning is essential for the success of an oral history project, but I have seen project directors fret for years without actually conducting any interviews. They worried about raising money, about what types of questions would be legitimate, about whom to interview, and additional problems that other projects were capable of solving. My recommendation is always to stop worrying and actually do some interviews. Projects can begin small and grow as funds become available and personnel gain experience. Finishing just one interview gives a project something tangible to show for its efforts, something to present to funders and to use as a mode for volunteer interviewers. Even a poor interview offers mistakes from which a project can learn. Lengthy deliberations and delays run the risk that desired interviewees will die before they can be interviewed, for oral historians are in a perpetual contest with the actuarial realities.

Because the costs of doing oral history vary widely and the technology associated with it changes rapidly, this book does not give estimates for operating budgets, such as the cost per hour for interviewing or transcribing, nor does it endorse particular equipment. Anything so specific would become out-of-date almost upon publication. Readers planning to launch an oral history project would be better advised to contact other projects in their locality for cost estimates and equipment recommendations. There are also no mechanical descriptions here of how recorders and cameras work, since the author boasts no mechanical skill other than being able to turn on a recorder and check periodically to make sure it is functioning properly. Nor should this volume be taken for a cookbook of recipes that specify the precise measurements of ingredients and instructions to guarantee satisfying results. Instead, it offers a wide-ranging discussion of the methods of oral history, with notes, a bibliography, and web resources that can lead those with specific queries to more specialized sources.

Each chapter presents a different role related to oral history: starting a project, doing interviews, processing interviews, using interviews in independent research, videotaping, preserving interviews in libraries and archives, teaching, and presenting the material to the public. Few oral historians are involved in all of those phases, and most will specialize only in some aspects. Rather than confine themselves to a single niche, however, readers should examine the complexity of oral history. Interviewers need to understand thoroughly what archivists want from the process, and vice versa. Teachers and students should consider aspects of public presentation, and audio interviewers should have at least some curiosity about video. The various chapters offer glimpses of each area and suggest further reading and websites.

Aiming for clarity and conciseness, this book is intended as an introduction to oral history or a refresher that summarizes current issues and cites the many articles and books that delve into those issues in greater depth. Wherever possible, it includes those individual epiphanies, insights, mishaps, and learned lessons of different practitioners, from an array of projects, disciplines, and nations, that serve as examples of what we can do and what we should avoid. They remind us that there is no one single way of doing oral history, because our procedures and interpretations are constantly evolving.

More useful than any written sources have been the oral historians with whom I have talked and shared experiences over the years. So many have become great friends that oral history conferences around the world have come to resemble family reunions. My personal list is far too long to acknowledge individually, so I extend my heartfelt appreciation collectively. I especially want to thank Nancy Toff, my able editor at Oxford University Press (herself an oral historian); the editors of the Oxford Oral History Series, Todd Moye, Kathy Nasstrom, and Rob Perks; video specialist Brien Williams; and oral history’s ready legal advisor, John Neuenschwander. As always, this book is dedicated to my wife, Anne Ritchie, an archivist and oral historian for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, whose companionship, advice, and keen memory I rely upon more each day.

1

An Oral History of Our Time

What is oral history?

Memory is the core of oral history, from which meaning can be extracted and preserved. Simply put, oral history collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews. An oral history interview generally consists of a well-prepared interviewer questioning an interviewee and recording their exchange in audio or video format. Recordings of the interview are transcribed, summarized, or indexed and then placed in a library or archives. These interviews may be used for research or excerpted in a publication, radio or video documentary, museum exhibition, dramatization, or other form of public presentation. Recordings, transcripts, catalogs, photographs, and related documentary materials are often posted on websites. Oral history does not include random or surreptitious recordings, nor does it refer to recorded speeches, wiretapping, personal diaries on tape, or other sound recordings that lack the dialogue between interviewer and interviewee.[1]

To avoid repeating common mistakes, oral historians have created standards for doing interviews and established principles for dealing ethically with their interviewees. But oral history is too dynamic and creative a field to be entirely captured by any single definition. For every rule, an exception has worked. Imaginative interviewers are constantly developing and sharing new methods and uses of oral history. Any definition of the oral history process, or any method of interviewing, must reflect the goals of the specific project, the resources available, and other practical considerations.[2]

When did people begin collecting oral history?

As distinct from oral traditions—stories that societies have passed along in spoken form from generation to generation—oral history interviewing has been occurring since history was first recorded. Three thousand years ago, scribes of the Zhou dynasty in China collected the sayings of the people for the use of court historians, and, several centuries later, the Greek historian Herodotus combined his own observations with what others told him, including those stories he regarded skeptically. “Such as think the tales told by the Egyptians credible are free to accept them for history,” he wrote; and “This is the account which some of the Persians gave...but there are others who relate the matter differently.” Thucydides similarly interviewed participants in the Peloponnesian Wars and complained that “different eyewitnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories.”[3]

During the European conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century, Spanish chroniclers relied on oral sources to reconstruct the history of the indigenous people, from the Aztecs to the Incas. To assist in both colonization and conversion, they collected the testimony of survivors of these once great civilizations, concentrating on their social, economic, and religious traditions. Although strongly colored by the colonizers’ cultural assumptions, these histories remain important sources for the new world’s pre-Columbian history.[4]

In 1773, when Samuel Johnson argued against the proposition that an impartial history could not be written in the lifetime of those who had experienced the events, he reasoned that “a man, by talking with those of different sides, who were actors in it and putting down all that he hears, may in time collect the materials of a good narrative.” Johnson admonished that “all history was at first oral” and noted that this was how Voltaire had prepared his histories of the French kings. Indeed, Voltaire wrote that he had questioned “old couriers, servants, great lords, and others” and recording only “those facts about which they agree.” Jules Michelet studied the French Revolution, a half century after it took place, by contrasting the official documents with the recollections of “peasants, townsfolk, old men, women, even children; which you can hear if you enter an evening into a village tavern.”[5]

Dr. Johnson’s companion and biographer, James Boswell, made himself notorious by writing down and publishing many of his conversations. Others in Johnson’s circle found this practice invasive, but Boswell defended his efforts: “How delightful should we have been if thus introduced in to the company of Shakespeare and Dryden, of whom we know scarcely anything but their admirable writings! What pleasure would it have given us to have known their petty habits, their characteristic manners, their modes of composition and their genuine opinion of preceding writers and their contemporaries! All these are now irrevocably lost.”[6]

Soon after the battles of Lexington and Concord launched the American Revolution in 1775, a Congregationalist minister named William Gordon interviewed the participants, among them Paul Revere. Gordon’s recounting of Revere’s elaborate preparations contradicted efforts to portray the battles as unprovoked attacks by the British, and revolutionary leaders managed to suppress the story. Two centuries later the historian David Hackett Fischer declared Gordon’s essay drawn from Revere’s interview “remarkably full and accurate.” In the 1870s the California publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft compiled his seven-volume History of California (1884–1890) by sending students out to collect the papers and the reminiscences of nineteenth-century Mexican military governors and alcaldes (civilian officials) and of the first American settlers.[7]

It seemed reasonable to consult oral as well as written sources until the late nineteenth century, when the German school of scientific history promoted documentary research to the exclusion of other, less “objective” sources. Leopold von Ranke asserted that documents created at the time historical events occurred are the most reliable form of historical evidence; Ranke’s followers helped turn history from a literary form into an academic discipline dependent on the rigorous use of evidence. They trained historians to scrutinize documents in their search for truth and dismissed oral sources as folklore and myth, prized only by well-meaning but naive amateurs and antiquarians. They deemed oral evidence too subjective—shoddy memories told a biased point of view.[8]

Ironically, historians turned away from oral sources just as other professions and disciplines were embracing the interview. Journalists made interviewing a mainstay of their craft around the time of the American Civil War. In 1859, when New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley went west to conduct a highly publicized interview of Mormon patriarch Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, he launched a trend in newspaper interviews. By 1868, President Andrew Johnson, facing impeachment by Congress, sought to present his side to the public by giving the first presidential interviews for attribution. “I want to give those fellows hell,” Johnson told the reporter who was interviewing him, as he gestured towards the Capitol, “and I think I can do it better through your paper than through a message, because the people read the papers more than they do messages.” Interviews quickly became so popular that clever politicians took to preparing their own question-and-answer dialogues, which obliging journalists published as news. Newspaper interviewing spread to Great Britain as part of a “new journalism” that sought to attract mass audiences.[9]

Groups that had not created extensive paper archives became the focus of the first organized scholarly interviewing. During the 1890s, the U.S. Bureau of Ethnography dispatched researchers to record on wax cylinders the songs and stories of various Native American tribes. At the same time, those historians trying to dispel the prevailing romantic images of the antebellum South were engaged in research to prove that slavery was not a benevolent institution. They realized that many former slaves and slave owners were still living and had something to say. The historian Frederic Bancroft traveled through the South, talking to freedmen and their former masters to gather recollections of the slave trade, and recorded their comments in his diaries. Harrison Trexler conducted similar field research in Missouri in 1912. He reported being thrilled to have gotten “a list of old settlers and newspapermen and have their statements. I also ran down many old slaves.” Historians at black colleges in the South also started interviewing former slaves, as did the Federal Writers Project, a division of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA), which hired unemployed writers to chronicle the lives of ordinary citizens, including those whom had once been enslaved. Ben Botkin, who directed the project, said the narratives had “the forthrightness, tang, and tone of people talking.” The interviewees “gave answers which only they can give, to questions we still ask: What does it mean to be a slave? What does it mean to be free?” Because of the limited nature of recording devices at that time, only a few of these interviews were recorded verbatim; most were recreated from notes. For many years, most historians dismissed these interviews with “aged survivors” as less reliable than the records kept by slave owners. Decades later, when historians finally accepted this testimony—comprising thousands of pages of interviews—it fundamentally altered the historical interpretation of American slavery.[10]

When the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all military branches and civilian agencies of the government to prepare records of their wartime experiences. Planning not only a postwar history, but also a series of morale-boosting “American Forces in Action” booklets, the U.S. Army dispatched historians into the battlefields, armed with heavy wire recorders. Directed by Lt. Col. S. L. A. Marshall, a World War I veteran and journalist turned army historian, they pioneered the postcombat interview, debriefing soldiers immediately after the battle to reconstruct the events of the day. Sgt. Forrest Pogue spent D-Day interviewing wounded soldiers who had been evacuated to a hospital ship anchored off Normandy Beach. Recalling concerns that his bulky wire recorder might attract sniper fire, Pogue noted that the army wanted live history—“and live historians.”[11]

Not all war-related interviews were with the military. The Chicago psychiatrist David Boder traveled to Europe in 1946 with a wire recorder and conducted 130 interviews with displaced persons (DPs), many of whom had survived the Holocaust. He intended to let them tell their stories while their memories were still fresh, “not only in their own language but in their own voice,” but he was unprepared for the horrific accounts they related. Other wartime and postwar interviews were conducted by the Jewish Historical Institute and the Central Historical Commission in Germany.[12]

What is the derivation of the term “oral history”?

Although the term had occasionally been applied to troubadours, not until the 1940s did “oral history” attach itself to interviewing. A Harvard-educated bohemian, Joseph Gould, otherwise known as “Professor Sea Gull,” wandered around Greenwich Village collecting what he called “An Oral History of Our Time.” The writer Joseph Mitchell’s profile of Gould that appeared in the New Yorker in 1942 drew attention to his crusade to record the stories of average people. “What people say is history,” Gould insisted. “What we used to think was history—kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan—is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.” This quest garnered many a free meal for Gould, but after his death no oral history notebooks were ever found. He left nothing behind but the name.[13]

Another journalist-turned-historian, Allan Nevins, created the first modern oral history archives at Columbia University in 1948. A decade earlier, in his book The Gateway to History, Nevins had proposed reinvigorating historical study by making “a systematic attempt to obtain from the lips and papers of living Americans who had led significant lives, a fuller record of their participation in the political, economic and cultural life of the last sixty years.” Recognizing that modern communication and transportation were making letter writing and diary keeping obsolete, Nevins conducted interviews that were recorded in shorthand. The results were disappointing, but when the first reel-to-reel tape recorders became commercially available, Nevins founded the Columbia Oral History Research Office. This new effort raised complaints from those who considered “Oral History” either too imprecise or too Freudian. But by the 1960s, Nevins’s successor, Louis Starr, could point out that the term had so worked its way into the language that newspapers were referring to it in the lower case. “Oral history, like it or not, is here to stay,” Starr declared. “It’s gone generic.”[14]

The University of California at Berkeley launched a similar oral history program in 1954, as did UCLA in 1958. The Harry S. Truman Library inaugurated the first presidential library oral history program in 1960. The John F. Kennedy Library began interviewing shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, even before the library was constructed. Oral history soon became standard practice for building presidential collections. In 1967 the Oral History Association was founded, gaining membership throughout the United States and abroad.[15]

In 1969 a conference at the British Institute of Recorded Sound created a committee that in time led to the founding of the Oral History Society four years later. By 1972 the Imperial War Museum in London had established a Department of Sound Records to collect and preserve oral testimony of those servicemen and women who “for lack of inclination, opportunity, or literary skill” would leave no other records for history. The History Workshop movement in Britain, which promoted labor and feminist history, saw oral history as a tool for incorporating the less powerful into the historical narrative. This impetus gave British oral history more of a grounding in social history than the U.S. projects, which had begun by focusing on eminent personalities in political, military, and business history. Oral history projects spread to every continent, and many national oral history organizations were formed. A 1987 meeting at Oxford University established the International Oral History Association, which meets biannually around the world.[16]

Worldwide political and social revolutions during the last decades of the twentieth century confronted historians with sweeping changes in society and an inadequacy of archival documentation, which often reflected a discredited former regime. Newly emerging nations in Asia and Africa found that the written documents reflected the views of former colonial masters and used oral history to revive buried national identities. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Russian and central and eastern European oral historians began to reexamine and rewrite their discredited official histories by collecting personal testimony suppressed under Communist regimes. In Brazil and Argentina, oral history projects focused on periods of military dictatorship to record the experiences of those brutalized by state terrorism. South Africans similarly turned to oral history in their search for truth and healing in the post-Apartheid era. Interviewers in many nations have found interviewing a critical tool when confronting issues of repression and reconciliation.[17]

Daniela Koleva, a historian in Bulgaria, began conducting oral history soon after the 1989 revolution when she and her colleagues realized that life was changing dramatically before their eyes. “We felt that there was a distinct culture, a whole way of life, that was disappearing already at that moment, and we wanted to capture it in the memories of our interviewees and preserve it for future generations just to know.”[18]

Who is being interviewed?

In the United States the first oral history archives studiously avoided Joe Gould’s “shirt-sleeved multitudes.” Allan Nevins was a political historian who interviewed the major players in government, business, and society. Long after Nevins’s retirement, Columbia continued to interview people of the stature of judges, cabinet members, senators, publishers, business executives, and civic leaders. By contrast, European oral history projects from the start were the domain of social historians who sought to record the everyday lives and experiences of working-class people. One practitioner called it “doubly radical, doubly democratic, in that it recovered the voices of ordinary people seen as left behind or forgotten by the forces of progress and in that it began outside the universities, pioneered by non-professional historians.”[19]

The first influential oral history study in Great Britain was Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield (1969), which he called a “quest for the voice” of a rural village that over the previous half century had seen “the swift destruction of the old pattern of life.” Another pathbreaking work, Paul Thompson’s account of early twentieth-century social change, The Edwardians (1975), was drawn from Britain’s first national oral history project. Ronald Fraser’s Blood of Spain (1979) retold the Spanish Civil War through interviews conducted in post-Franco Spain, when people were finally able to talk freely.[20]

As a young historian teaching at a black college in Atlanta, Georgia, Staughton Lynd one day encountered a colleague tape recording an interview with two civil rights activists recently released from jail. “It was a moment of enlightenment,” Lynd later recalled. He had been using the WPA’s ex-slave interviews in his classes. “Suddenly it seemed possible actually to do oral history oneself.” Lynd and his wife, Alice, began conducting interviews and published Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (1973). At the American Historical Association conference in 1971, Lynd ran a workshop on “Oral History and People’s Struggle,” which attracted favorable notice for its “methodological innovation.”[21]

A new generation of American historians began writing history “from the bottom up.” Many of these interviewers came out of the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. Eager to write the history of those groups left out of the standard history texts, they lacked the abundant manuscript resources and formal documentation available on the elites and turned instead to oral sources. Encouraging these efforts were the best-selling books of Studs Terkel, a Chicago radio talk-show host and former WPA interviewer whose books, such as Hard Times (1970), Working (1974), and The “Good War” (1984) captured the voices of everyday people in a compelling manner. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) similarly inspired people, especially African Americans, to collect their family histories through interviews. The availability of convenient and relatively inexpensive cassette tape recorders and video recorders further helped popularize oral history.[22]

For years oral historians argued the respective merits of “elite” versus “nonelite” interviewing. As the debate tapered off, oral history projects grew more all-inclusive. The more that interviewers studied their practice, the more they realized that no one group had an exclusive understanding of the past, and that the best projects were those that cast their nets wide, recording as many different participants in events or members of a community as possible. Once, a military oral historian was questioned about the possibility of using oral histories to reconstruct the social acculturation of barracks life. He responded coolly, “I only interview generals.” Since then, oral history has changed, even in the military, where historians now conduct interviews with all ranks of enlisted personnel and officers, in garrison and in combat, to build important research collections.

When journalists interview, are they doing oral history?

A journalist’s interviews are more targeted than those of an oral historian. Reporters usually interview subjects for specific purposes, whether to produce a newspaper story, magazine article, or news broadcast. Working on deadlines, reporters depend heavily on oral rather than written sources. They may corner someone in a corridor or phone to ask highly focused questions; often they have no time to elicit or listen to lengthy elaborations. Only a few short quotations may appear in their articles or as sound bites in their broadcasts. Journalists frequently interview without attribution, collecting off-the-record responses simply for background information with no intention of revealing these sources in their stories. Sometimes their interviews are recorded—especially if intended for broadcast—but after the story appears, journalists do not retain the original interviews and notes for long. The record that journalists leave for the future consists primarily of their published articles or tapes of their broadcasts. Journalists rarely expect to deposit their interview recordings or notes in a library of archives where other researchers might examine them.

In this regard, journalists are not unlike scholarly researchers who conduct interviews to provide documentation for their articles or books without planning to open the interviews for general research. Usually they only excerpt the interviews in their books, rather than reproduce their full notes or transcripts. After the book is published, these documents most often languish in the author’s files, packed away in a basement or attic.

An interview becomes an oral history only when it has been recorded, processed in some way, made available in an archive, library, or other repository, or reproduced in relatively verbatim form for publication. Availability for general research, reinterpretation, and verification defines oral history. By preserving the recordings and transcripts of their interviews, oral historians seek to leave a complete, candid, and reliable record as possible.[23]

Regarding daily news reporting as the “first rough draft of history,” journalists have regularly applied their talents to writing history, for which they instinctively turned to oral sources. Drawing on their skills as interviewers, they produced some notable works of oral history, such as Howell Raines’s My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (1977), and Wallace Terry’s Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1984). Two of Lyndon Johnson’s leading biographers are Robert Caro, an investigative journalist turned biographer, and Robert Dallek, a professional historian. When asked to explain the differences in their approaches to the same subject, Caro pointed to the extensive interviews he conducted with key participants, in comparison to Dallek, a university professor who relied more on manuscripts than interviews. To this, Dallek rebutted, “I’m not a journalist.”[24]

What does it take to become an oral historian?

Oral history has always been multidisciplinary. While many professional historians conduct oral history, a degree in history has never been a prerequisite for entering the field. Well-established scholars sometimes make poor interviewers, and those who are part of the community or profession being interviewed, if properly trained in conducting oral history, have advantages in establishing rapport and in prior knowledge. Law students have interviewed judges, women coal miners have successfully interviewed other women coal miners, and members of a community have conducted oral histories with their neighbors. In Alaska, a portrait artist conducted interviews with the people she was painting to gain a deeper understanding of the personalities she was trying to capture on canvas. In Japan, a physician interviewed his elderly patients in a fishing community that was rapidly disappearing. He wrote the resulting book from his office overlooking a new expressway built on the riverbed. “That vanished river, that water’s edge, once rang out with the shouts of men hauling in their net as couples on houseboats waited among the reeds for night to fall. It wasn’t so very long ago, and yet that era, that scenery, and the life-breath of those people have all vanished liked phantoms,” the doctor wrote. The oral histories he collected stood as a tribute “to the too-swift passing of time.”[25]

Saying that a PhD in history is no requirement for doing oral history does not mean that anything anyone records is oral history. The Oral History Association has developed best practice guidelines to raise the consciousness and professional standards of all oral historians. There are interviewing skills to be learned. There are right and wrong ways to conduct an oral history. There are great differences between useable oral history and useless ones, and there are far too many of the latter.

Oral history has room for both the academic and the layperson. With reasonable training, through oral history courses, workshops, or manuals, anyone can conduct a useable oral history. Oral history conferences are notable for the variety of participants, among them radio and video documentary makers, museum curators, archivists, journalists, gerontologists, anthropologists, and folklorists. Unlike historians, who seek the past, other disciplines are often more concerned with the present. Regardless of their diverse objectives, however, they share many common methods of interviewing. “If an interview goes well, then we say it’s magic,” the Canadian investigative reporter John Sawatsky commented. “But it’s not magic. It happens for an understandable reason. It’s rational. It’s a skill. It’s easy to teach someone skills.”[26]

How reliable is the information gathered by oral history?

“The most naive policeman knows that a witness should not always be taken at his word,” wrote the French historian Marc Bloch. “Similarly, it has been many a day since men first took it into their heads not to accept all historical evidence blindly.” Oral history is as reliable or unreliable as other research sources. No single piece of data of any sort should be trusted completely, and all sources need to be tested against other evidence. The historian James MacGregor Burns, who was trained under S. L. A. Marshall to interview American soldiers during World War II, found that the interviews generated some spurious information (about how frequently infantrymen fired their rifles in combat) and also some startling insights (about how many troops were killed by friendly fire). Burns concluded that “such interviews were a most valuable contribution to military history, but only if used in careful conjunction with more conventional sources, like documents and enemy records.”[27]

Although archival documents have the advantage of not being influenced by later events or otherwise changing over time, as an interviewee might, documents are sometimes incomplete, inaccurate, and deceiving. Researchers have found more than one occasion of a local newspaper ignoring an entire event, such as a strike against one of its major advertisers. Until the 1960s, most general circulation newspapers ignored news from black communities. As a result of such blind spots, oral history can develop information that might not have appeared in print. As the novelist Gore Vidal commented: “Since I have been written about perhaps a bit more than most historians, I am not as impressed as they are by what I see in print, no matter how old and yellow the cutting.”[28]

Scholars have accepted correspondence, diaries, and autobiographies as legitimate documentation, although their authors may be biased or incorrect. Public figures have kept diaries with publication in mind, designing them to present themselves in the best possible light. Oral history interviews are often conducted years after the event, when memories have grown imprecise, but they have the advantage of being conducted by a trained interviewer who can raise questions and challenge dubious answers. As any researcher can attest, letter writers and diary keepers do not always address all the issues that scholars are researching. Autobiographers are often unaware of all the issues that interest researchers. Well-trained interviewers can coax interviewees into areas of concern to researchers that the interviewees might never have thought of discussing otherwise.

Why are some historians still skeptical about oral history?

The historian A. J. P. Taylor once dismissed oral history as “old men drooling about their youth.”[29] Such skeptics regard oral testimony as nostalgic and unreliable, and distrust eyewitness accounts as too subjective. They seek objectivity—moving beyond personal biases and prejudices to see things as they are. When historians describe evidence as “objective,” they mean not only unbiased but also unchanging, such as documents that remain the same over time even if interpretations of them shift. “Subjective” suggests a partial and a partisan point of view, less reliable because it is subject to alteration over time. When the oral historian Alessandro Portelli wrote of the need for broadly based interviewing that would “tell us not what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, what they now think they did,” he was criticized for passivity and “unsystematic” reasoning. Some social historians have accused oral historians of swallowing whole the stories that informants tell them. They argue that a truer “people’s history” must be based on statistical analysis and other objective data rather than on subjective individual testimony.

The correlated assumption is that the historian, with hindsight and thorough research, perceives past events more clearly than those who lived through them. Or, as David Lodge asserted in his autobiographical novel Out of the Shelter (1989), history is the verdict “of those who weren’t there on those who were.”[30]

Others express skepticism of the accuracy of human memory—a view sometimes shared by researchers who were themselves part of the history they study. After Abraham Lincoln’s death, two of his private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, collaborated on writing his biography. They naturally anticipated a great advantage in having access to Lincoln’s closest confidants, but as Hay commented: “We ascertained after a very short experience that no confidence whatever could be placed in the memories of even the most intelligent and most honorable men when it came to narrating their relations with Lincoln.” Nicolay likewise regarded most reminiscences of Lincoln as “worthless to history,” and so the pair relied almost exclusively on written documents. Ironically, their preserved interviews have appeared more convincing to later scholars. Nicolay and Hay had rejected testimony that reflected poorly on Lincoln, especially those personal observations of Lincoln’s bouts with depression and his troubled marriage. Other sources subsequently corroborated the stories that the protective secretaries chose to suppress.[31]

At the Russian and Eastern European Institute at Indiana University, scholars engaged in a dispute over the validity of oral sources. Two members of the faculty had been mining statistics and documentary evidence to determine why Russian women continued to have fewer children even after Stalin outlawed abortion. One day they looked at each other with a common thought: “Why don’t we just ask them?” After conducting a hundred interviews, they came to the conclusion that peasant women, whose mothers often borne ten to twelve children, many of whom had died in infancy, simply ignored official orders and had illegal abortions. Another member of the same institute dissented from this conclusion on the grounds that Russian peasants “tended to rely on rumor, so the reliability of their stories is not as interesting as their meaning.” Yet even the dissenter agreed that the oral sources “may not tell you much about what Stalin was doing, but they are terribly useful in telling you about people’s minds.”[32]

Should the interviewer be an objective—or neutral—observer?

People often seem surprised that an interviewer might have a point of view. The social critic Edward Rothstein insisted that an oral historian should do little more “than hold up a mirror, just making sure the glass is clean.” He offered that definition in order to warn readers “who presume they are being presented history without perspective, just a series of oral histories” that the interviews may be shaped by the interviewer’s ideological perspectives. Rothstein was specifically targeting the legendary interviewer Studs Terkel, an unabashed “man of the political left,” but his assessment raised questions about all interviewers.[33]

Oral historians have debated how much an interviewer should intervene in the interview. Initially, some argued that independent researchers—those doing interviews for their own research—were too biased to conduct oral histories, and that archival oral historians would be better interviewers because they had no vested interest in any interpretation. In the type of oral history Allan Nevins pioneered at Columbia, the interviewer was envisioned as a neutral, objective collector of other people’s reminiscences; this concept was carried to such extremes that the questions were eliminated entirely in Columbia’s first transcripts. The interviewee’s responses appeared as an uninterrupted narrative. Although Columbia soon adopted the question-and-answer format for its transcripts, many books featuring oral history testimony continue to expunge the interviewer. Studs Terkel, for example, disclosed only a few of the questions that elicited such compelling replies from his interviewees.[34]

Other oral historians rejected the image of the neutral questioner and saw their role as that of an active agent in the process. The founder of the Duke University’s Oral History Program, Lawrence Goodwyn, insisted that interviewers who remained passive surrendered too much of their professional capacity. Goodwyn acknowledged, however, that more active interviewers risk distorting their interviews by introducing their cultural assumptions and political perspectives. Accepting subjectivity as inherent in the process and impossible to avoid, advocates of a more active, scholarly interviewer believed that the interviewer’s questioning actually involved “a first interpretation” of the interviewee’s narrative. Influenced by trends in anthropology, literary criticism, and social history, they examined not only what was said but also what was left unsaid, and they speculated about lapses in historical memory. The more methodologically oriented oral historians criticized the uncritical acceptance of oral testimony, called for more thorough research and higher standards in conducting interviews, and lamented that the lack of scholarly analysis, by both interviewers and interview users, had turned oral history into “movement without aim.”[35]

Over time, a proliferation of methodological studies has added not only “aim” but also increasing depth and sophistication to oral history. Still, a difference remains between analyzing oral evidence after it has been collected and suggesting that theorizing precedes the interview. An interviewer must always be prepared to abandon carefully prepared questions and follow the interviewee down unexpected paths, always helping the interviewee by questioning, guiding, coaxing, and challenging. Michael Frisch offered a middle ground in his book, A Shared Authority (1990), whose clever title promotes the notion that both participants in an interview are responsible for its creation and share its authorship. Interviewers may believe they are more than an equal partner in this shared authority, since their questions shape the responses, and they are extracting the raw material of memory for use in scholarship. But interviewers are actually less than an equal partner in the sense that the ultimate value of oral history lies in the substance of the interviewee’s story. Nor does the interpretation of the interview rest exclusively on the interviewer’s side of the microphone, for interviewees are constantly reinterpreting and analyzing their own motives and actions as they recall and describe them. On both sides there is much more to interviewing than holding up a mirror.[36]

Is it appropriate for interviewers to interpret the oral histories they collect?

Oral historians are often concerned with more than simply collecting information. Ronald Grele, who headed the oral history archives at UCLA and Columbia, has pointed to the shift in interest from data to text. The first generation of interviewers spent much of their time pondering the accuracy of human memory and how they could test for it. The next generation got more interested in how people organized their memories of the past—they were less concerned with the accuracy of memory than its reconstruction. They wanted to know more about how to analyze a narrative and understand the person who was telling it.[37]

Just as historians who uncover archival evidence must interpret it and put it in historical context, oral historians recognize that the words they record are not “unvarnished history.” They are interpretations of what happened, filtered through interviewees’ memories and their efforts to answer our questions.[38] Linguistic theory also influenced oral history. When deconstructionists argued that there is nothing outside of text, historians grappled with the idea that texts were simply constructions of reality. Seen this way, oral sources are no less reliable than printed sources. An interview is what people said happened, and what they remember and say is open to analysis.[39]

As historians sort through the information they gather, it is only human for them to choose what to pay attention to, what to play down, and what to disregard entirely. The historian William McNeill argued that this process takes place even when historians “seek to hide the way they shape the history they write, ‘proving’ their organizing ideas by appealing to what always has to be a small selection from the noisy confusion of ‘all available sources.’” Despite their best efforts at scholarly detachment, historians work with only partial information and must interpret what they collected in order to make sense of it, hoping to “winnow out the less plausible versions of the past and retain those that more adequately explain what happened.”[40]

Discussions of oral history practices have been enriched by new applications of communications theory, feminist interviewing, and psychological studies of memory. Beginning oral historians should not be discouraged by the complexity of hermeneutics (the principles of interpretation), discourse analysis (language in use), or deconstruction (hidden and unspoken information in a narrative). Rather than start by trying to put any particular theory into practice, a new oral historian would be better advised to adopt the more pragmatic approach of “putting practice into theory.” First gain some experience in conducting interviews before plunging too deeply into theoretical issues. Doing interviews actually raises curiosity about methodological debates, since it soon becomes apparent that the interviewer is more than collecting “just the facts.”[41]

These debates over theory and methodology date back to the first oral history colloquium in 1966. In a review of the proceedings of that meeting, Herman Kahn noted that the participants spent much time worrying about the nature and validity of oral history. All their self-questioning reminded him of an adolescent peering into a mirror and wondering, “What am I?” and, “Why am I not better known and more popular?” Introspection will and should continue, but Kahn urged oral historians to get on with their job of interviewing: “They will need to cultivate patience, acquire self-assurance, and be content to leave the proof of their pudding to the scholars who are its ultimate consumers.”[42]

If doing an oral history is a shared responsibility between the interviewer and the interviewee, which one is the oral historian?

Both interviewer and interviewee participate in the oral history, and neither one’s role should be minimized, but, for all practical purposes, the oral historian is the one who schedules, prepares for, conducts, processes, and interprets the interview. The interviewer participates in the give-and-take of an interview by questioning and following up on the interviewee’s responses and by providing names, dates, and other commonly forgotten information. But interviewers—especially when doing life histories—should never forget whose story is being told.

What’s in a name? Some oral historians reject “interviewee” for its passive sound and have embraced more active designations like “informant,” “respondent,” “witness,” and “narrator,” the latter term often used by folklorists and social scientists. The weight assigned to the two terms is reflected in the index to a collection of essays on oral history, whose various authors used both “interviewee” and “narrator.” The index listing for “interviewee” is divided into “abandonment of,” “apparent contradiction of,” “deception of,” “manipulation of,” and “misinformation by.” The index terms for “narrator” included “free expression,” “power of,” and “in negotiation with researcher.” The role of both is the same; only the nomenclature differs. Such vocabulary concerns aim to make oral historians more aware of how inequalities in the interviewer-interviewee relationship can influence the interview. Whatever terms employed, keep in mind that an oral history is a joint product, shaped by both parties.[43]

Memory and Oral History

Isn’t oral history limited by the fallibility of human memory?

The human brain can store the equivalent of three terabytes of information, according to the statistician Nate Silver. “And yet that is only about one-millionth of the information that IBM says is now produced in the world each day. So we have to be terribly selective about the information we choose to remember.”[44]

Dealing with memory is risky business, but it is inescapably the interviewer’s business. Every interviewer has a story about someone interviewed too late, when memory had lost its sharpness, begun to dim, or faded almost entirely. Such disappointments are balanced by experiences with interviewees who possess remarkable recall, who remember individuals and incidents clearly, and whose accounts can be corroborated in other evidence. As one of the interviewers who collected oral histories with immigrants for the Ellis Island museum noted, elderly interviewees “might not remember their daughter’s phone number. But they do remember what it was like when they got off the boat.”[45]

Motivated by the death of baseball legend Ty Cobb in 1961, Lawrence Ritter set out to interview as many of the surviving pre–World War I baseball players as he could find. Traveling thousands of miles, he tracked down a group of elderly men who shared a remarkable storehouse of memories and an ability to articulate them vividly. “Many of the people I talked to had to think longer to get the names of all their great-grandchildren straight than they did to run down the batting order of the 1906 Chicago Cubs,” he observed. But they were not garrulous old men chewing over oft-repeated stories. “Well, this is more than I’ve talked about in years, and it’s good,” said “Wahoo Sam” Crawford, who had played for the Detroit Tigers at the turn of the century. “I don’t see many people, and even when I do I don’t talk about baseball too much.” As a skeptical researcher, Ritter went back to the old newspapers to verify the stories he heard, and almost without exception found that the events had occurred just as the old-time players had described them, embellished only occasionally “to dramatize a point, to emphasize a contrast, or to reveal a truth.”[46]

The study of memory by psychologists often concentrates on short-term memory rather than on the long-term recall of a life span. Short-term memory studies that evaluate the accuracy of an individual’s perception of events are of little help in explaining the uncanny preciseness with which some interviewees recall events that took place decades ago or in understanding how interviewees who had reached obvious senility—forgetful even that they had scheduled the interview—can still speak authentically about events far in the past. Long-term memory has been less thoroughly explored, although the phenomenon has often been commented upon. The Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, for instance, on his deathbed began recalling scenes from his youth as a West Point cadet. “I seem to remember more every day,” Davis marveled.[47]

The gerontologist Robert Butler postulated that all people, as they grow older and perceive that they are approaching death, undergo a mental process of life review—accounting for depression and despair in some, and for candor, serenity, and wisdom in others. The past “marches in review,” permitting the elderly to survey and reflect especially on moments of unresolved conflict. Older people will review their lives whether anyone asks them about their memories or not, either mulling over their thoughts silently, or regaling family, neighbors, and visitors. In this process, the elderly may reveal details of their lives, and characteristics about themselves, previously unknown to their families and friends. Butler concluded that memory “serves the sense of self and its continuity; it entertains us; it shames us; it pains us. Memory can tell our origins; it can be explanatory; and it can deceive.”[48]

Oral history is an active process in which interviewers seek out, record, and preserve such memories. Knowing that with age most people find it difficult to recall names and dates, oral historians conduct preparatory research to assist interviewees, give some context and structure to the dialogue through their questions, and mutually address any seeming misstatements and contradictions in the testimony.[49]

What should interviewers take into consideration about memory?

People remember what they think is important, not necessarily what the interviewer thinks is most consequential. When an artist approached Abraham Lincoln with a proposal to paint the scene of the president’s first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet, a year after that memorable event, Lincoln had forgotten the exact date and conflated that cabinet meeting with another. It was the significance of the event that remained foremost in the president’s mind, not the specifics of the setting.[50]

An oral historian studying Texas teachers who made the transition from the one-room schoolhouse to modern consolidated schools found that white teachers said almost nothing about racial segregation or the details of the integration process. Blacks, Hispanic Americans, and disabled students remained largely “invisible” in their memories. African American teachers by contrast recalled the days of integration vividly because it affected their lives so personally.[51]

Regardless of the project’s worthy objectives, a good oral history will always leave room for interviewees to speak their minds, and will not try to shoehorn their responses into a prepared questionnaire or mindset. Since people remember best what was most exciting and important to them; their most vivid memories are often of the earliest days of their careers, when events were fresh and invigorating, even if their status at the time was relatively insignificant. By the time they had risen in stature and assumed more important positions, daily events had actually become more routine, making details of later life harder to isolate and identify during an interview. One interviewee summed up her three decades on the U.S. Senate staff by observing that when she began work, she was young and the senators were old; when she retired, she was old and the senators were young. As is often the pattern, her descriptions of her youthful experiences were lengthier and richer in detail than her recollections of more recent events.[52]

After the Second World War, when Congress investigated the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the chief of naval operations, Adm. Harold Stark, could not recall where he had been the night before the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941. By contrast, Stark’s flag lieutenant, H. D. Kirk, remembered precisely that they and their wives had gone to see a performance of The Student Prince, and then returned to the admiral’s home, where Stark received a telephone call from President Roosevelt. One of the investigating senators asked Kirk how he could remember the occasion so well, considering that Stark could recall nothing. “Because I was a small fish, and great things were transpiring” Kirk replied, “and you don’t forget that sort of thing.”[53]

People regularly reevaluate and reexplain their past decisions and actions. Just as historians rewrite history to incorporate new evidence and fit different theories, individuals use the insights gained from current events to help reshape them and make new sense out of past experiences. There is nothing invalidating about this reflectivity, so long as interviewers and researchers understand what is occurring and take it into account.[54]

Memories start with the initial perception. Interviewees speak from their own points of view, and no two will tell a story exactly alike. Not everyone had a clear picture of what happened, understood what it meant, or felt self-assured enough to accept responsibility. The contradictory tales told in the classic film Rashomon (1951) represented the tellers’ differing impressions, self-images, and self-delusions, but not poor memories. In combat, generals in the rear may see the broad sweep of the battle, and battlefield troops will have a more microscopic view of the action. As Lieutenant John F. Kennedy wrote from the Solomon Islands during World War II: “Frankly I don’t know a god-damned thing, as my copy of the Washington Times-Herald arrives two months late, due to logistical difficulties, and it is pretty hard to get the total picture of a global war unless you are sitting in New York or Washington, or even Casablanca. I understand we are winning it, which is cheering, albeit hard to see, but I guess the view improves with distance. I know mine would.”[55]

Those at the center of events can well recount their own accomplishments, but those on the periphery are often better able to make comparisons between the principal actors. Perceptions that were originally flawed will produce distorted memories. Distant and secondhand information is more susceptible to distortion. By contrast, direct, dramatic, and emotional situations tend to produce more fixed and lasting memories. For these reasons, oral history projects attempt to collect a wide range of interviews to piece the puzzle together from various points of view.[56]

Not every perceived event is retained in memory. When the radio and television newscaster David Brinkley wrote Washington Goes to War (1988), about the years when he first came to the capital as a young broadcaster during the Second World War, he was surprised to find so much in the old newspaper files that had faded from his memory. “I’ve always thought I had a good memory. Now I know I don’t,” Brinkley commented. “Things I knew very well and in fact stood and watched and interviewed people about, I’d totally forgotten. That was the startling thing—how much I’d forgotten.” Once-meaningful information can become irrelevant or insignificant by comparison to later events. Since Brinkley continued to absorb current news as a journalist, the more events grew distant from the latest headlines, the less he would think about or retain them.[57]

The passage of time enables people to make sense out of earlier events in their lives. Actions take on new significance depending on their later consequences. Certain players grow more important in the story, and others diminish over time. People’s memories may take on a more mature, mellow, or disillusioned cast according to their mood and condition at the time of the interview. Community members who share a common experience, such as the trauma of a flood or tornado, will talk about it among themselves for years, reinforcing the memories. By the necessity of availability, oral historians interview “survivors,” those who lived through it, stuck to it, stayed behind, or otherwise succeeded—all factors that shape how and what they remember.[58]

Memory sometimes depends on the questions being asked. Robert Gildea described his first interview as a disaster: “I asked an old lady in Angers if she had any memories of the man who had been mayor in 1942. She looked confused. Of course she didn’t. I panicked.” He took a deep breath and asked, “OK, tell me about your life under the German occupation.” That question triggered numerous memories of the war, the bombings, and the neighbors who had died, none of which she had forgotten. Oral historians realize that for most people historical and personal experiences rarely intersect and that memories of the past reflect the individual ways people lived rather than the broad panoply of history.[59]

Interviewers have to consider how credible their interviewees are as witnesses. Were they in a position to experience events firsthand or are they simply passing along secondhand information? What biases might have shaped their original perceptions? Have interviewees forgotten much of their past because it was no longer important to them or because the events were so routine that they were simply not memorable? Do interviewees feel differently now about the events they are recalling? What subsequent incidents might have caused them to rethink and reinterpret their past? How closely does their testimony agree with other documentary evidence from the period, and how do they explain the discrepancies? None of these considerations would disqualify an interviewee from giving testimony, but answering these questions as completely as possible helps the interviewer and future researchers to assess the value of the information recorded.[60]

The memories of direct participants are sources far too rich for historical researchers to ignore. Interviewers must be aware of the peculiarities of memory, adept in their methods of dealing with it, conscious of its limitations, and open to its treasures.

Don’t people’s memories tend to become nostalgic?

In his typically tart manner, President Calvin Coolidge once reflected that the folks of his hometown of Plymouth, Vermont, “remember some of the most interesting things that never happened.” Coolidge was referring to how history can be inflated by retrospective associations. It is common to encounter rosy reminiscences about “the good old days,” considering that oral historians interview older people about their youth, when even disappointments can be remembered as adventurous incidents. Dissatisfaction with present conditions makes the past look far better, and people’s very survival can convince them that the hard times were not so bad after all.[61]

What might appear to be nostalgia can be a reflection on what has been lost. Oral histories of African American women who lived through the Jim Crow era in the American South revealed them looking fondly on the past—not on the humiliations of segregation but on the benefits of a more tightly knit community with its vigilant concern for each other, especially when it came to disciplining the neighborhood children. Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, who traveled the South conducting the interviews, concluded that their narrators’ positive memories of strict discipline was a longing for a community that had nurtured, supported, and protected its own.[62]

Many interviewees will talk about the pain and suffering in their lives, about humiliation, harassment, and discrimination, about disappointments and losses, but others will block out the most negative aspects of the past or rewritten their own histories, consciously or subconsciously. It is the oral historian’s task to move the interview away from nostalgia to confront the past candidly and critically. If things were different in the past, what were they like? When did they change? How did they change? Why did they change?

In the reaction against the elitist practice of interviewing only famous people, oral historians expanded their focus to community-based “people’s history.” But after letting the people speak, historians examining community history projects soon realized “that ‘the people’ weren’t speaking unadulterated truth.” Linda Shopes, who interviewed for the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, has argued: “So many people want to do oral histories in well-intentioned but extremely naive ways: to get interesting stories, to get the anecdotes, to get the colorful stories, to get the cute things. People don’t want to confront the fact that history is...not a happy little story of days gone by.” Quite often people do not want to talk about difficult issues, such as the changing ethnic and racial composition of a community or one generation’s rejection of another generation’s values. Interviewers must be prepared to ask questions about painful and embarrassing subjects—although they must also respect people’s right not to answer such questions, if they so choose.[63] But being positive about the past can be more than simply a sense of nostalgia, it can be a sense of self-worth, of having overcome obstacles and made the best of a situation—something that interviewers who did not live through that era might not expect to hear.[64]

Nostalgia is hardly limited to social history. Political historians have observed that the longer politicians are out of office, the more highly people rate them, a phenomenon that has been characterized as the “law of rising recollections.”[65] Presidents still in office are compared to their predecessors; out of office they are measured against their successors. The uncertainty of today’s headlines sometimes turns past anxiety and turbulence into images of happy days. It becomes more of a challenge for interviewers recording the reminiscences among members of a presidential administration, or associates of some other retired or deceased high-ranking official, to keep them from mentioning only the most positive aspects of their former leader—the side they too often assume is all that the interviewer wants to hear about.

Whole groups may blank out unpleasant memories. When the Southern Oral History Project interviewed the men and women who worked in southern cotton mills during the 1930s, they encountered mostly silence about the General Strike of 1934, “a kind of social amnesia, born of defeat and of the failure of trade unionism to take root in a living tradition.” One mill worker explained: “You see, after we come back and got out of the union and got back to work, why that was a thing of the past....You forget about things in the past, ‘cause you don’t think about them, you don’t talk about them, and that leaves your mind.” The lack of oral testimony sent the researchers back to the documentary evidence of these events, even if current memories suppressed them.[66]

Oral historians documenting traumatic events of the past have found that many survivors will refrain from talking about those events, even to their own children. Researchers point out that the first stage of grief is shock, and the second stage is denial. People can stay in denial for a very long time. But as they grow older, and as others who shared the experience die, the survivors will grant interviews as a way of reconciling a haunting record and also of ensuring that future generations do not forget. J. Robert Slaughter was part of the first regiment of American troops sent ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day, which suffered appalling casualties. He and other survivors had great difficulty in readjusting to civilian life. In the 1970s, a British television crew tried to interview him for a documentary, but he could remember nothing, having blocked out the painful memories. Not until the 1990s was he able to confront them. “For a long time nobody wanted to think or talk about all that and what it cost,” he commented. “For a long time nobody cared. I began to have nightmares that we’d have to do it again someday.” An oral history project of Vietnamese refugees found that parents often kept stories from their American-born children. “They have survived extreme types of experiences—war displacement, the death of half their family, the immigration process, refugee camps—the experiences have left a silence in the community,” said the project director, Thuy Vo Dang. “When it comes to the home space, it is very difficult to share these stories.” Researchers of the Holocaust hear a similar refrain from victims: “I kept quiet for many years, but soon I will be gone and now I must tell my children.”[67]

What is “public memory?”

By contrast to individual memories of personal experiences, public memory represents a society’s collective conceptions about the past. Public memory involves symbols and stories that help a community define and explain present conditions according to how it remembers (or wants to remember) the past. These can take the form of parades, reunions, reenactments and celebrations, or via monuments and landmarks that often represent reconciliation and healing after a war or tragic event. Such commemorations often have a political connotation, the historian John Bodnar observed, designed to “stress the desirability of maintaining the social order and existing institutions.”[68]

Since individuals experience events differently and maintain different social objectives, they will hotly contest issues of public memory. Arguments predictably erupt over the design and location of monuments and the inscriptions placed upon them. The dispute over an appropriate Vietnam veterans memorial, for instance, invoked earlier controversies as groups who had differed over fighting the war now disagreed over how to portray it. Politics lies behind every public monument and also explains the absence of monuments and memorials to people and events that communities would prefer to forget. Public memory can also influence personal memory, since people within a community absorb the public debates and internalize particular positions. Interviewers need to be conscious of a community’s collective beliefs and try to move beyond public memory to the personal experiences of those they interview.[69]

Recognizing that what people remember can be shaped by their social environment, scholars have analyzed the ways in which communities construct and use their collective memory, and what they pass along to succeeding generations. Alessandro Portelli conducted interviews in the Italian town of Terni, where he gathered several versions of the death of Luigi Trastulli. A twenty-one-year-old steel worker, Trastulli had died in a clash with police. Contemporary newspaper accounts placed the date of his death in 1949, when steelworkers walked out of their factory to attend a communist-sponsored rally against the Italian government’s joining the North American Treaty Organization (NATO). But as time passed, the townspeople collectively altered the story to give it epic form. One interviewee after another shifted the date and context of the Trastulli’s death from the anti-NATO rally to the street fighting that followed a massive layoff of steelworkers four years later. Wondering why so many people got it “wrong,” Portelli concluded the community had been unable to accept Trastulli’s death as an accidental shooting in a minor scuffle over a fleeting political issue. Instead, people had relocated the event to a far bigger dispute that involved their basic livelihood. As transfigured, Trastulli’s death helped heal the community’s wounds and to instruct the next generation: “He died for you.”[70]

Is public memory the same as “collective memory”?

Sociologists began discussing “collective memory” a century ago, but the term did not catch on among historians until the 1970s, when they began paying more attention to how popular and folk cultures constructed the past. “Collective memory” became an all-encompassing category that covered “folk history,” “popular history,” and even “myth.” It included the shared stories that individuals within the same group remembered.[71]

Alessandro Portelli has avoided using the term “collective memory” on the grounds that “no two persons’ memories, like fingerprints—indeed, like voices—are exactly alike.” Memory may be shaped by peoples’ social environment, but the act of remembering is deeply personal. His experience as an interviewer taught him that memory is not “a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings.” The changes in people’s memories over time reveal their efforts to make sense of the past and to place their stories into some historical context.[72]

While oral historians have found value in the expanding scholarship on collective memory, and have learned much about interviewing within a community, they also regularly encounter ways that individual memories do not fit collective patterns. The historian Anna Green argued that “contemporary theorizing around collective memory has paid too little attention to the capacity of individuals to reflect critically upon both their own experience and practice, and those of others.” Oral historians, by contrast, want “to keep space for the resilient, curious, rebellious, thoughtful, purposeful human subject.”[73]

Don’t movies, television, and novels distort the way people remember their own experiences?

Film and fictional portrayals of historic events can filter into people’s memories, confusing images with real events. Interviewers need to take popular culture into account and scrutinize the collective evidence. But skepticism does not justify a blanket dismissal of the memories and opinions of the bulk of participants in the actual events.

The Vietnam War became such a staple in movies that sociologist Jerry Lembcke recommended that students stop interviewing Vietnam veterans altogether. He dismissed the veterans’ memories as collectively unreliable. Lembcke reasoned that Vietnam veterans felt pressure “to conform to the conventional images of what a veteran is suppose to be” and told “easily digestible war stories,” particularly about their coming-home experiences. In particular, he objected to the frequently told stories of veterans being spat on when they came home from the war because he found no contemporary news reports to support those claims. In The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), he concluded that if accounts of veterans being verbally and physically assaulted could not be documented, they must have been conjured up.[74]

By contrast, when Bob Greene surveyed veterans for his book Homecoming (1989), the responses he collected divided roughly between those who had stories of abuse, including spitting, and those who doubted that anyone was spat on. Although he could not prove their authenticity, Greene concluded that “there were simply too many letters, going into too fine a detail, to deny the fact.”[75] The absence of news accounts neither disproves memory nor proves the absence of actions.

Since writers will disagree in their interpretations, no book can offer a definitive version of the past. The mass of interviews conducted with Vietnam veterans will similarly produce conflicting accounts. Lembcke conceded that image of the spat-on veteran was, “of course, only the grounding image for a larger narrative of betrayal.” Being “spit on” might be verbal shorthand for a variety of forms of disparagement and disappointment they felt returning from an unpopular war. Lembcke recommends that students’ education “might be better served by reading a good history book about the war than interviewing the veteran.” But reading and interviewing are not exclusive actions; good interviews depend on prior research. It would be better to listen to the veterans’ complaints than to write them off as mass delusion.[76]

What’s the difference between oral history and folklore?

Oral historians and folklorists both use interviews to collect information, but not necessarily the same type of information. The two practices have been described as opposite ends of a continuum: oral historians concentrate on recording the personal experiences of the interviewee, and folklorists collect the traditional stories, songs, and other expressions of the community—fact or fiction. An oral historian would most likely interview a husband and wife separately, seeking to identify the unique perspective of each spouse. A folklorist, being as interested in the way a story is told as in its substance, would interview the couple together to observe the interplay as one begins a story and the other finishes it. The folklorist Barbara Allen has observed that historians “tend to see oral historical sources as mines of raw data from which historical evidence can be extracted,” while folklorists are more concerned with “recognizing identifiable patterns” in the way people shape their narrative.[77]

For years, historians were suspicious of folklore as little more than folktales and hearsay. Social and cultural history finally helped bring the disciplines together, facilitated by oral history because of the shared interest in oral testimony. Oral historians, folklorists, ethnographers, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists, all interview but have different objectives that influence their methodologies. “Field-oriented” disciplines rely on participant observation and may not even take notes in the presence of those they are studying, waiting to write their notes later from memory. Unlike historians, who seek concrete evidence of what actually happened and to document it as fully as possible, folklorists, ethnographers, and anthropologists are often less interested in verification of facts and see folktales and folklore as no less legitimate than other stories. Linguists will often be more concerned with the manner of telling a story than its substance. Despite the distinctive way that these assorted disciplines analyze and use interviews, the intersection of their methodological techniques has permitted collaborative, cross-disciplinary oral history projects on a range of community, racial, ethnic, and immigration issues.[78]

Oral history has helped bring the disciplines of history and folklore closer together out of a shared interest in the oral transmission of knowledge. Folklorists watched with some bemusement as oral historians gradually came to grips with stereotype and myth in the oral testimonies they were collecting, “learning to detect versions of folktales and to listen to testimonies as oral literature. In so doing they were, of course, re-entering a field long worked by folklorists.”[79]

In the 1930s and ’40s, when the folklorist Alan Lomax began recording American folk music, he also recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with such legendary performers as Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, and Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie. Lomax interviewed Guthrie over a three-day period and recorded—for scholarly research rather than commercial release—to show how folk culture captured American working-class life. Lomax asked Guthrie to introduce his songs and also posed questions to draw Guthrie out on the songs’ origins and themes. Lomax also recorded countless folk musicians who never made names for themselves. “It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,” he said. “I’ve devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence.”[80]

Can storytelling be considered oral history?

Diverse cultures depend on storytelling to pass along knowledge and understanding. The storyteller might be a parent teaching a child, a tribal elder recalling communal traditions, a preacher illustrating a point in a sermon, an Old Salt spinning a yarn, or anyone else able to recount past experiences in a manner entertaining enough to hold a crowd. Folklorists find that tales passed down, family lore, and community legends have value as much for their form—how they are told—as for their content. Such stories are often communal in nature, transcending the individual experiences they describe. Recurring stories within a community that emerge in oral history collections also reveal what people consider to be the key aspects of their historical experience.[81]

In those cases where storytelling takes place without an interviewer who can pursue issues raised in the stories by questioning the narrator, it does not fit the standard definition of oral history, but its study illuminates some significant issues facing oral historians. Most storytellers aim not so much to preserve a permanent record as to inform and influence their immediate audience. Although the storyteller usually controls the performance, the particular setting and audience can affect the story’s presentation. Telling a story in a new setting, to a new audience creates new meanings. Storytelling reminds us that all oral presentations involve a degree of performance, and that the audience (even an audience of one, as in the interviewer) can affect that performance. Stories told in an interview often involve a retelling of something the interviewee heard from someone else or has previously told to others. As the “audience,” the interviewer can affect in subtle or even striking ways the content of the story. The process continues after the interview is completed. The oral historian William Schneider has pointed out that “once the narrator stops talking and the recorder leaves with the tape, the teller no longer knows who will hear it and how they will understand what he or she said.” Some sensitivity to the nature of storytelling is therefore essential to the management of oral history collections. To be fair to participants, Schneider advises, “We have to be mindful of a wide range of considerations, not the least of which is the oral tradition from which the narrator may have built the telling and from which the audience derives its background for understanding what has been shared.”[82]

What is StoryCorps?

Since 2003, a not-for-profit organization called StoryCorps has collected thousands of brief interviews that highlight dramatic and emotional moments in people’s lives. The project provides recording booths where friends and family can bring someone whose story they want to record and allots them forty minutes to talk to each other. StoryCorps’s founder, Dave Isay, notes that most people tend to ask “the big life questions,” about what they have learned or how they want to be remembered. Many of their stories revolve around the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee, as parents and children, siblings and friends. They are ordinary people who recount small acts of kindness or courage. Doing a StoryCorps interview reassures them that they matter and that their stories will not be forgotten. At the end of the session, they receive a copy of the recording. A second copy is sent to the Library of Congress to become part of “an oral history of America.” Edited excerpts of selected interviews are then broadcast weekly on National Public Radio and posted on the StoryCorps website. The project inspired the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to launch a similar Memory Share program.[83]

StoryCorps broadcasts are often characterized by tearful moments—a box of tissues being standard equipment for the recording booth. Oral history interviews may also contain poignant interludes but not as their focus or their intent. StoryCorps interviews lack the advance research and the sustained examination involved in a full life interview, making the typical StoryCorps interview what critics have called “a highly ritualized performance.” Although StoryCorps deviates from standard oral history practices, it has helped popularize the idea of oral history. It has given many who might not have been interviewed otherwise a chance to tell their stories, in abridged format, helping them see their personal experiences as history.[84]

Is it better to interview immediately after an event or wait until years later?

There are advantages and disadvantages to each course of action. The military pioneered debriefing interviews with soldiers immediately after a battle or after returning from a combat tour of duty. Memories of details will be sharper the closer to the actual events that the interview occurs. But interviews conducted long after the events benefit from the interviewee’s reflections that better enable them to weigh the events and sort the significant from the trivial. Debriefings tend to be shorter and more focused interviews. Later oral histories, especially life review interviews, tend to be more extensive.

The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Alan Lomax contacted other folklorists around the country to collect “man on the street” reactions. Recordings of interviews that ranged from janitors to physicians, cab drivers, housewives, students, and soldiers were then sent to the Library of Congress and used to create a radio documentary program for national broadcast and distribution to schools. Sixty years later, within a week of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, oral historians began interviewing witnesses and survivors. The Columbia Oral History Research Office, together with the New-York Historical Society and other New York museums, quickly launched a project to interview those who had escaped the World Trade Towers, families of victims, police and fire fighters, rescue and relief workers, and members of nearby Muslim communities. Underwritten by the National Science Foundation, the project not only conducted initial debriefings but also planned additional interviews in later years to examine the durability of memories of traumatic events. At the Library of Congress, the American Folklife Center initiated the “September 11, 2001, Documentary Project” to record the thoughts and feelings of citizens across the country. Historians for the National Park Service and the Red Cross taped interviews with eyewitnesses to the tragedies, while historians for the military services interviewed those who experienced the plane crash at the Pentagon. The Senate Historical Office conducted interviews concerning the evacuation of the Capitol Building on September 11 and the anthrax contamination that closed the Hart Senate Office Building for three months. “Down the road, researchers also will use newspaper accounts, videos and film, government documents and mementos culled from the destruction to study that day. There will be intelligence reports, declassified years from now, to add to the record,” the Wall Street Journal noted. “But it is the oral histories that are most likely to help researchers understand what it felt like to be under attack on that late summer morning.”[85]

What distinguishes a “life history” from other interviews?

Gerontologists refer to the “life review” process of the elderly, and oral historians speak of conducting “life histories,” by which they mean full-scale autobiographical accounts that allow interviewees to relate their entire life, from childhood to the present. Social scientists may concentrate on a series of shorter interviews with members of a group in a particular community or environment, such as workers on a shop floor. Oral historians call these “episodic” interviews. Shorter interviews conducted with members of a group soon after they shared a mutual experience are referred to as “debriefings.” Conducting life histories usually means selecting fewer interviewees and devoting more time, and multiple interview sessions, to each one. Life histories give the interviewee enough time to relate what both the interviewer seeks and the interviewee wants to tell. The oral historian conducting even a subject-oriented project should seriously consider expanding the scope of its questions to record as much as possible about each interviewee’s life. Broader questioning establishes links that neither the interviewer nor the interviewee may have considered in a more narrowly focused interview session.[86]

When the Oregon Historical Society launched an oral history of the federal court system in its state, it focused on the people who conducted the court rather than the institution of the court itself. Following a full biographical approach proved especially useful when dealing with the appointment of judges. An institutional approach might also have included questions about a judge’s appointment, but interviewers found that the meaning and significance of the responses were enhanced when told within the context of the judge’s full life history.[87]

The first presidential library oral history projects concentrated almost exclusively on the interviewees’ relationships with the president or roles in the administration. This produced a large number of relatively short interviews. In later years, some of the libraries returned to reinterview the key players in more depth. In this second round of interviewing, the oral historian at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library conducted thirty-six hours of interviews with Lawrence O’Brien (who served as congressional liaison and postmaster general), and sixty-four interview sessions with Joseph Califano (who was special assistant to the president for domestic affairs). Although this level of in-depth interviewing lies beyond the budget of most oral historians, other projects should aim, at least on a selective basis, to do fuller life histories. Even individual researchers need to look beyond their immediate interests when interviewing. The American Historical Association has advised that “to the extent practicable, interviewers should extend the inquiry beyond their immediate needs to make each interview as complete as possible for the benefit of others.”[88]

When women at the Washington Press Club Foundation launched the Women in Journalism oral history project, the journalists debated why they, professional interviewers, needed to hire oral historians. After several sessions, in which an interviewer asked open-ended questions, listened intently, and encouraged the interviewee to speak at length about her life and career, the journalist being interviewed observed, “Now I understand why we hired oral historians.”[89]

Public History and Oral History

What is the role of oral history in “public history”?

Public history was once defined exclusively in terms of historians’ activities in public agencies and as private consultants outside the university. But the definition has expanded beyond place of employment to include the audiences that historians try to reach. Public historians aim for an out-of-school public audience, which might be officials in a government agency, corporation, union, philanthropic organization, or professional association that employs the historian or which might be the library-using, documentary-viewing, museum-going general public. Other professional historians, for whom the bulk of historical literature is intended, account for only a small portion of the public historian’s audience.[90]

Public history is an organized effort to bring accurate, meaningful history to a public audience, and oral history is a natural tool for reaching that goal. The oral history and public history movements share a natural affinity, both having attracted practitioners and audiences different from those of more traditional history writing. Both oral and public history have experimented with the use of audio and video, and interactive videos, in museum exhibits, dramatic performances, and other applications outside the classroom and in publications and websites.[91]

How pervasive is oral history within government?

Governments at all levels have come to appreciate the utilitarian aspects of oral history. Government agencies hire historians on staff or on contract to use oral history as a tool for collecting and presenting information relating to that agency’s operations. When the Washington-based Society for History in the Federal Government conducted a survey, it found oral history projects in all branches of the military, the intelligence agencies, many cabinet departments, Congress, the federal courts, the Smithsonian museums, and independent agencies from NASA to the National Institutes of Health. The National Park Service has the most ongoing oral history projects, with historians and rangers across the country collecting interviews for use in documenting the sites and producing visitor-orientation materials. In addition to documenting wilderness environments, Park Service interviews explore social history topics from ethnicity to civil rights, at locations ranging from the Statue of Liberty National Monument to the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. The U.S. Forest Service has partnered with local universities to collect interviews with the “rough and ready” rangers who built trails, bridges, and ranger stations; acted as fire guards; and strung the first telephone wires through the national forests in the 1920s and ’30s; and those who followed them.[92]

Perhaps the most common programs interview the staff of the sponsoring agency, who discuss their careers and evaluate the political appointees, policymaking, and institutional changes they have witnessed. Retired staff members, whose obscurity and anonymity mask the often significant roles they played in their agencies, offer recollections that can explain and unravel the voluminous, impersonal, and unrevealing written records of the modern bureaucracy. Public historians possess several advantages in conducting these staff interviews. As employees of the same agency, they have a better chance of obtaining access to agency files, whether open or classified. They share a familiarity with arcane agency procedure that helps not only in preparing questions but also in establishing rapport and obtaining candid responses.

Most often, oral history is a component part of a government historical office rather than its primary mission. Periodically, however, Congress has appropriated funds specifically for an oral history. In 1998, when Congress directed the National Park Service to establish a historic site in Tuskegee, Alabama, that would memorialize the World War II African American pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen, it earmarked funds for an oral history with the survivors. Their experiences dated to the era when both training and combat assignments had been racially segregated. Two years later, Congress authorized the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to establish a nationwide Veterans History Project. Citizens responded by donating tens of thousands of audio and video oral histories with war veterans from World War I to the war in Afghanistan.[93]

The British Library has conducted more than 2,500 in-depth interviews in its National Life Stories on every aspect of British life, including the oil and steel industries, the food sector, utilities, science and technology, computing, aerospace, the crafts, art and photography, architecture and design, horticulture, charitable activities, banking and finance, publishing and authorship, theater and fashion design, and the media. Historians in the British Parliament, more accustomed to dealing with parchments as they wrote biographies of former MPs, have begun to create a sound archives for the modern era. Although often dealing with already very well-documented lives, their oral histories have gone beyond the boundaries of institutional history to record the members’ personal and emotional experiences, how they felt about events as well as what they did.[94]

Local governments everywhere have also delved into oral history to promote a community anniversary or some other significant event, or to document the workings of the government. Projects have ranged from a metropolitan transit authority’s collection of interviews with subway workers to a state department of natural resources sponsoring a video history of the state’s park, forest, and wildlife management. On a worldwide basis, local councils from Sidney to Southampton have funded oral history to record events of significance to their communities.

How have oral historians marketed their services?

The public presentation of oral history has generated a number of independent enterprises. Oral historians have set up businesses to conduct family interviews, and they work as freelance interviewers for corporations, charitable trusts, scientific organizations, and various other government and private agencies. Charles Morrissey, who made a career as a freelance oral historian in fields ranging from politics to biomedical research, commented, “To my total amazement, once my availability evidenced itself to others, the number of clients seeking help from me as an oral historian became formidable.”[95]

Some interviewers operate independently, while others have formed business organizations. Bruce Weindruch created the History Factory to conduct oral histories and build and preserve corporate archives. His clients have included corporations that had merged or otherwise transformed over the years and were concerned about losing their character or wanted to commemorate an anniversary. Philip Cantelon founded History Associates, which has done oral histories for government agencies and various corporations. University-based oral history projects have similarly partnered with corporations. The Amfac Land Company contracted with the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii to interview longtime laborers and managers at the company’s former sugar mills and plantations in the islands, a century-old way of life that is ending. Such projects have been remarkably successful, but as one independent interviewer noted, “When your funding depends on grants, as mine does, I spend more time writing reports and applying for grants than I do interviewing.”[96]

Business executives began to appreciate the need to capture history “before it walks out the door.” They saw the value of interviewing during changes in management and corporate cohesion, and before veteran employees’ retirements; they used interviews for long-time employee recognition as well as for the introduction of new staff to the business. They have applied it to learning lessons from disasters, for health and safety training, and for brand building. When the president of Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) concluded that the corporation was losing knowledge of its “epochal events” because employees and manager with firsthand knowledge of those events were dying, he commissioned an oral historian to conduct interviews that would produce both an oral history archival collection and a written history of the company. The book was intended to make the company “more human and real” to the public, as well as to help ARCO employees better understand and thereby identify with the company so that they would become “more loyal and dedicated employees.” Management used the oral histories to develop case studies on decision-making processes and for workshops to train potential corporate executives.[97]

Oral historians studied the change in leadership at Royal Philips Electronics that underwent a reorganization eliminating 55,000 employees, which created a deeply emotional time for the corporation. Using a three-tiered approach, the first phase of interviews involved general questions, the second round was more specific, and the third round became almost a debate. As a group, the interviewees were asked to reflect on the history of the organization. Through this approach, the interviews reconstructed how corporate decisions were made, and they were then used in the application of organizational studies.[98]

In contrast to such corporate activities, oral history has also been used for public-interest projects. In the Southwest, anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, lawyers, folklorists, and oral historians worked together to assist citizens in fighting for land and water rights. The New Mexico-based Center for Land Grant Studies was particularly concerned with protecting the rights of Native Americans and Mexican Americans who lacked the traditional types of ownership documentation to their lands. Representatives of the center used oral history as part of their courtroom testimony—a use that required proper techniques for gathering oral evidence and a greater need to assess the reliability of the oral testimony.[99]

What are the potential drawbacks of doing corporate oral history?

Doing corporate oral histories may involve some unique challenges. Business executives may schedule interviews for fifteen minutes before lunch, keep the interviewer waiting, or bring a public relations officer to the interview. These circumstances will require some negotiating to set more favorable interviewing conditions. An even trickier challenge is dealing with interviewees’ criticisms of the company that is paying for the project. Corporate interviewers who have been commissioned to record a company history “warts and all” sometimes find that their clients had not bargained for so many warts.[100]

In Great Britain, the economic turmoil that led to the failure of Barclays Bank and the merger with the Royal Bank of Scotland led both institutions to launch oral history projects when they determined that their written archives inadequately told their story. Similar projects developed within the British Broadcasting Company, the Guardian newspaper, and the Sainsbury grocery store chain. Corporations used these interviews for diagnostic purposes, for development planning, and to boost employee morale. But criticism has been leveled at corporate oral history, Rob Perks has noted, for being “a cozy and comfortable public relations exercise” rather than a serious academic study, and that “such projects are fatally flawed through being commissioned and funded by corporate bodies.”[101]

Oral historians sometimes have trouble explaining their purposes and translating their work to corporate executives. Those hired to do corporate projects report that many corporate executives and policymakers do not understand how historians work or how they use oral histories and that they need to be educated about the methods of historical research. Managers and other corporate executives often do not value or use their corporate archives and fear the consequences of allowing outsiders to see their records. They will not open records even for the historians they hire. They assume that oral historians, like journalists, can interview anyone, anytime, without extensive research. Oral historians have to explain their needs to see records to prepare adequately for their interviews. Sometimes, however, these records will not be forthcoming. In the 1960s, for instance, interviewers for the John F. Kennedy Library were initially denied access to Kennedy’s records.

Charles Morrissey has observed that corporate managers tend to select prospective interviewees depending on their rank in the corporate hierarchy, whereas oral historians want to interview those who actually shaped the issues being studied, “even if they are obscure figures in the structured bureaucracies and do not command power or deference within their institutions.” In fact, these seemingly anonymous members of the institution may have drafted the letters and speeches of higher executives and may have proposed the policies that the hierarchy adopted. They often have the least biased perspective on the institution. Lower level staff members may actually have a clearer view of how policies evolved, be better able to evaluate people and programs, and have not only more detailed memories but also a greater “willingness to impart what they remember.”

Interviewers should try to align with one of the senior members of an organization, such as the chairman of the board, the chief executive officer, or the director of a public agency, who can open doors for the project and get access to records. The interviewer should brief top policymakers about the project as it evolves, giving them an idea of what methods are being employed and what information is being collected. Public historians are not public relations specialists and should not be required to tailor their work to reaffirm the picture an institution may promote to the public. To be useful to clients, a historical study has to be honestly critical. The public historian’s need to maintain professional standards works both ways: not only must historians be honestly critical, but they must also be willing to keep information confidential according to the policies of the organization that hired them.[102]

Can exit interviews be considered oral histories?

Corporations, associations, and government agencies may conduct exit interviews with employees as they leave the organization to collect feedback on what they did and why they are leaving. These interviews may then used to assess a position and determine whether it should be revamped. The U.S. Army mandates “end-of-tour” interviews with division commanders and makes them available to their successors to better understand the issues that they faced and how they dealt with them. Exit interviews tend to be brief and conducted from a questionnaire. Usually they are conducted face-to-face, but they may also be done by mail or electronically.[103]

Exit interviews resemble oral histories, except that by nature they are briefer and less detailed. They may be a requirement of the job, which can make the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee more formal. Yet, such short interviews can serve as a preliminary guide to selecting the best candidates for longer life review oral histories, providing an outline of what they did and determining who are the most forthcoming narrators. Participants will often cooperate because they see the interview as their final contribution to the company where they spent their careers.

What will future historians want from our oral histories?

Researchers will want to hear the first-person observations of events great and small, and to learn what sense those people made of the events in their lives. Motivations and objectives are especially important. Other sources can usually provide the who, what, when, and where of history; interviews can offer better insights into the how and why. The historian’s job is to pull together a multitude of evidence from documents, objects, interviews, and other resources, weaving them together to create a narrative that makes sense of all the, often conflicting, evidence.

Not all human activity is coherent and purposeful, the historian Elie Kedourie pointed out; it is more often a complex of choices producing unpredictable effects. Kedourie defined history as an account of people “in the peculiarity, idiosyncracy, and specificity of their personalities, outlooks, capacities, and positions, confronting or dealing with other [people] differently placed in respect to these things, and confronting or dealing with them in situations different from one another at least in respect of time and place, initiating, originating, taking measures, parrying, responding, reacting; the vocabulary we use to describe all this amply indicating that here are present and involved purpose and choice, mind and will.” Or, as Ecclesiastes 9:11 instructs, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong...but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Oral history records both the purposeful and the accidental. Interviewers who allow people a chance to assess why they did what they did will most likely capture the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of the history of our time.[104]

Historians writing a dissertation or a book, planning an exhibit or scripting a documentary, will have their own set of questions they want to ask but may not have the opportunity to ask those questions personally. I first used oral history while writing a biography of a man who had died ten years earlier. Fortunately, he had given a lengthy oral history to Columbia University just months before he died. It was a thoroughly detailed, in-depth life history, amounting to 700 pages of transcripts. Since I could no longer question the man, Columbia’s interviewer served as my surrogate. Today’s oral historians are doing the preliminary work of tomorrow’s biographers and researchers, hoping they will not have to agonize too often over the questions we failed to ask.[105]

Oral history is about asking questions. While researching the history of Methodist camp meetings in Southern Mississippi, Charles Sullivan sought to visit every campground still operating. One day he mentioned to a student each of the camps that he had identified. “Yes, and M[ount] Pleasant, too,” the student responded, explaining that it was a black Methodist campground established after emancipation from slavery. Astonished, Sullivan wondered why no one had mentioned this camp before. “Probably because you never asked,” was the reply. That is the reason for doing oral history: to ask the questions that have not been asked and to collect the reminiscences that otherwise would be lost.[106]

2

Setting Up an Oral History Project

How do you begin an oral history project?

Before beginning any journey, it’s wise to have some idea of where you are going. Start by determining your objectives. Not all goals need to be attempted at once, but they can be reached incrementally. For instance, having identified the likely pool of interviewees, oral historians will usually interview the oldest and most significant individuals first, while planning to move to younger or secondary figures later, depending on financial resources, available interviewers, and processing capabilities after the interviews are conducted.

After organizing a project, plan to start with a few well-conducted, in-depth interviews and then process them fully. The result will be something tangible to show when seeking additional funding. By concentrating on a few interviews, project organizers can establish a pattern of management and paperwork—from preparing and conducting the interviews to processing and transcribing them—that can expand along with the project. Similarly, projects may begin with only a few interviewers, paid or volunteer, who later can help train new recruits.

Always balance your objectives with your resources. Limited resources can frustrate ambitious objectives, and too many projects have ended with little to show for their efforts except boxes of recordings, unidentified, unprocessed, and unusable. Other well-intentioned projects have been stretched too thin; trying to interview too many people can produced superficial interviews that will not satisfy research needs.

What kind of goals should an oral history project set?

Decide what kind of a record you want to create and for what purpose. Oral history should be collecting not what is already known but information, observations, and opinions unavailable elsewhere. Oral history projects are often designed to supplement existing archival material, filling in gaps in paper sources with the contributions of people who did their business instead in person or on the phone. An oral history project may record a piece of community history that the local newspaper ignored or inadequately covered. Oral history projects have been designed to determine the contributions that individuals made to a movement—such as the civil rights movement—or to trace the impact of a movement on individuals and communities. Projects have focused on various professions, ranging from journalism to architecture, medicine, and the law, recording recollections of pioneers and other practitioners and tracing professional trends. Above all, oral history projects, by recording history in the words of those who lived it, can tell future researchers how people lived and how they perceived the events of their time.

A project may aim to record the history of a church, a school, a business or a philanthropic foundation, interviewing a cross-section of people associated with that institution. Project interviewers might follow members of a state legislature from session to session, capturing their versions of how legislation was enacted or defeated. An oral history project might be concentrated on a neighborhood or a particular ethnic group within the community. Oral history is appropriate not only for looking at the broad sweep of a community’s history but also for examining it at a specific time, say during the Vietnam War. An event (an election, a strike, the construction of a monumental building) or catastrophe (a hurricane, a flood, a major accident) can be its organizing theme. Or the subject can be the history of a group, such as women, African Americans, or Hispanic Americans, or a subgroup such as immigrant women, African American teachers, or Hispanic American military veterans. Some oral history archives focus their collections on the city, state, or region where they are located; others have broad national and even international collections.

During the course of conducting interviews, it may be desirable to change or reevaluate the project’s goals. Interviewers may find that some of the original objectives are impractical or that new avenues open up as additional interviewees are identified. Goals are often time-determined. Some oral history projects are ongoing, but others may work on a year-to-year, grant-to-grant basis and must regularly do a certain amount of interviewing to ensure continued funding.

An oral history project will be judged on the significance of the goals its organizers set and the substance of the information they collected. Researchers will measure projects according to whom they interviewed, what questions they asked, how they processed the recordings and transcripts, and how accessible the interviews were made. Users will also scrutinize oral history projects for new and different—or at least colorfully quotable—information on the subjects they are studying.

Should a project set a goal of how many people it intends to interview?

Trying to calculate in advance an exact number of individuals to interview puts unnecessary pressure on an oral history project. Rushing to meet numerical objectives causes both the depth of interviewing and a reasonable pace of processing to be sacrificed. Once interviewing begins, it will be discovered that some interviewees have much more to say than others, are more perceptive and cooperative, and have sharper memories. These are the interviewees to whom it is worth devoting more time. For reasons of age, health, or general disposition, other interviewees will have little to say of enduring value. Often not until an interview begins can the interviewer determine whether the interviewee is able to make much of a contribution. Sometimes a very old interviewee has a surprisingly sharp recall, and even more stamina than the interviewer; sometimes not. Preliminary contact can help the interviewer get a better sense of the abilities of the interviewee to gauge how much time to budget for a session or a series of interviews. One oral historian went to considerable effort and expense to bring a crew to film an interview only to discover too late that the interviewee was distressingly senile.

Oral history projects invariably receive recommendations to interview the local raconteur, whom everyone says has a story about everything. Although more than willing to talk, this person may be unable to move beyond a store of set stories. Correspondingly, the most famous individual identified with an event may offer only a garbled, self-centered account. The most forthcoming interviewee may turn out to be a lesser known, secondary figure who keenly observed what was going on and remembers it vividly. To do interviews of equal length with these varying individuals makes little sense. Remain flexible enough that interviewers can spend less time with those who have little to say and more time with those whose contributions are substantial.

In designing a project and in seeking funding, set the number of hours of interviews or sessions you intend to conduct rather than the number of individuals to be interviewed. A project that budgets for one hundred hours may spend one hour with one interviewee and ten hours with the next, giving each of them sufficient time to exhaust the subject to the best of their abilities.

Is there an optimal number of hours for interviewing each person?

An interview session is usually best limited to an hour-and-a-half to two hours—to avoid exhausting both the interviewee and interviewer—but there is no ideal length for an entire interview. Each interview depends on how much of value to the project that the interviewee has to say, and whether the project is conducting a life history or concentrating on a smaller segment of a person’s experiences. Whenever interviewers have to travel any great distance they will have to estimate the number of hours of interviews in advance without knowing if that time will be sufficient. A second trip may be necessary, budget permitting.[1]

Be careful not to overschedule interviewing trips, forcing the interviewer to rush from one appointment to the next, and cutting interviewees short regardless of what they have to say. Interviewees still actively engaged in their careers may set rigid limits on the amount of time for an interview, while retired people tend to be more tolerant about giving longer, open-ended interviews that may or may not include lunch or other time diversions. Interviewers need to use their judgment in deciding when an interviewee has become fatigued and is no longer thinking clearly. Good interviewers frequently find the interview situation more stressful for themselves than for their interviewees, and their own ability to pay attention and interact diminishes the longer an interview lasts.

Funding and Staffing

How much does it cost to do an oral history?

How much can you afford to spend? Oral history can be expensive, but its costs are containable. The price tag may include research preparation and interview time, equipment, travel to and from the interview, lodging and meals if the interview is conducted out of town, transcription, indexing, cataloging, photocopying, postage for correspondence, and other overhead costs.

Some projects pay their interviewers, others rely on unpaid volunteers. Some purchase or rent their equipment, others make use of equipment, services, and personnel of their parent organization, whether a church, library, corporation, university, or government agency. A project can include the work of transcribing, or recordings can be sent out to professional transcribers, who are paid by the page, by the number of hours of recording, or by the number of hours worked. Some choose to abstract and index rather than transcribe. Using volunteer typists can reduce costs, but volunteers have to be trained and their work needs to be reviewed and edited. Rates for rental equipment, transcribing services, salaries, and overhead will also vary according to the geographic location of the project and the available labor pool.

If experienced oral historians are used, the budget will have to include pay for their services as interviewers and cover their research, travel, and processing expenses. While doing family interviews, Patricia Pilling had clients question why her oral histories cost as much as they do when anyone can turn on a recorder and ask questions. She asked whether they can cook; if they said yes, she replied, “But can you make a gourmet meal?” Her analogy made most clients see the value of professional expertise.[2]

How do oral history projects get funded?

Funding comes from an array of sources. More fortunate projects are based within institutions that provide them with office space, equipment, salaries, and travel expenses. Some institutions will meet part of those needs, such as office space and equipment, but expect the oral history project to raise the rest of its funds for salaries and expenses. Private granting agencies and state humanities councils have supported oral history projects. These grants often cover the conducting and processing of all or part of the planned oral histories, including interviewing, processing, and overhead. Some projects do their interviewing and then turn to state humanities councils or other agencies for grants to transcribe the best of the interviews. Local governments, municipal libraries, and state legislatures have funded various components of oral history as a public service. The Mississippi legislature, for instance, funded the University of Southern Mississippi’s effort to post its civil rights interviews on the Internet.

Seeking funds for an oral history project needs to be a creative effort. Volunteer groups have successfully sponsored receptions and other exhibits of their material as fundraising events. If direct funds are unavailable, projects also seek such “in-kind” support as the loan of equipment, and secretarial, printing, photocopying, and transcription-binding services. Social media’s “crowd funding” has provided new avenues for fundraising, with oral historians advertising worthy prospective projects and soliciting funds from like-minded people. Donors should be kept informed of the project’s progress and how their contributions are being used. Responding to inquiries and keeping donors informed will require time and attention.[3]

Projects focused on a specific issue, such as women’s rights or environmental policies, have often received support from individuals and organizations that support or promote the issue. The Washington Press Club Foundation’s oral history project on women journalists, for instance, received funding from an array of media sources that included the Gannett Foundation, the Sulzberger Foundation, and Time Warner, Inc. For a project centered on the career of a specific individual, such as a prominent politician retired from office, approach contributors to the politician’s campaigns. A dinner in that person’s honor could well serve as a fundraiser for the oral history project. In addition, businesses, trade associations, and labor unions have funded oral history projects related to their field. Families have underwritten interviews and whole oral history projects about an illustrious member.

Funding may determine who is interviewed. Corporate funding and support by wealthy individuals has accounted for much of the “elite” interviewing done by oral history projects in the past. Public and private funding agencies have supported community-based oral history projects, but these funds have fluctuated widely, depending on the financial or political climate. Although interviewee selection should be conducted separately from fundraising, some project organizers have identified interviewees based on the likelihood of their financial contribution to the project or to the parent institution, slighting others whose interviews would have made a more significant contribution. Economic realities may be inescapable, but oral history projects should include as wide a range of interviews as possible and not be limited to those who can pay for it. Care must be taken not to allow funding sources to inhibit the choice of topics or interviewees.

How does an oral history project apply for a grant?

Granting agencies range from government agencies to private foundations and a plethora of family-based and issue-oriented foundations. In the United States, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), through its research, education, and preservation and access divisions, has funded oral history, although an enormous investment in time and effort is required to prepare NEH proposals, the competition is intense, and only a small percent of all proposals receive funding. The larger foundations require more information (a sixty-page application to the NEH is not unusual), while the grant process is less onerous at smaller foundations, whose fewer staff may limit grant proposals to a few pages. If a foundation asks for only four pages, submit four pages, since it may not read larger proposals. Some smaller foundations do not accept unsolicited applications, in which case a project might tap one of its advisory board members or seek an introduction from a well-regarded member of the community to help arrange for an invitation to submit a proposal.

Great Britain’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), derived from a national lottery, has awarded grants to thousands of museums, libraries, and community projects, many of them incorporating oral history, which fit its aim of helping people “learn about their own and other people’s heritages.” Funds have supported training volunteers, conducting interviews, and producing events and exhibits for the community. The HLF also influenced the oral history projects it funded, which sometimes tailored their objectives to improve their chances of getting a grant. Initially, the HLF tended to measure the value of proposals in terms of quantity, which sometimes inflated the number of proposed interviewees beyond a project’s capabilities. With experience, however, attention shifted to the quality of output and created more realistic expectations of what could be accomplished within the proposed timetables.[4]

Most granting agencies post their requirements and guidelines online, which you will need to review and follow carefully. Before approaching a foundation, a project should have a clear notion of what it wants to accomplish and what public benefit will result from its work. Granting agencies will want to know about the capacity of the project’s organization and staff, and about the public accessibility of the finished product. What is the value of the project? Who will care about it? Will there be public outreach in the form of a publication, a website, or performances in schools, nursing homes, and other public places? Will students working on the project acquire skills and return something to the community? A good method of determining what a foundation wants is to review the lists of projects it funded in the past. Funding agencies will also be interested in any additional institutional support a project has gotten, including in-kind contributions, loans of equipment, and volunteers who will donate time and effort.

Carefully note the funding agencies’ timelines and deadlines, and always allow some extra time to cope with unexpected delays. If a foundation rejects your proposal, ask to see the readers’ comments and consider resubmitting a revised version. It may take several proposals to narrow in on what a particular foundation wants. If possible, visit the foundation and make contact with its project officers. Although grants are usually made by an agency’s board, the project officers prepare the paperwork and have good ideas about what boards will accept. Seek the project officer’s opinion and then try to follow it. Grant organizations often appreciate collaborative projects, in which several organizations pool their efforts, and where others will match the funds they are giving. Some institutions will provide in-kind support, such as teaching reductions and office space. The first grant application usually takes a great deal of time and effort, but once a project has received one grant, it usually becomes easier to convince other foundations. Even a small grant from a prestigious foundation serves as a form of accreditation for a project that gives increased confidence to other potential funders.

How large a staff does an oral history project need?

There is no set number. Some projects are one-person operations, while others rely on a crew of volunteers or paid staff. Each project needs a manager or coordinator, who may also double as an interviewer or transcriber. The project managers prepare grant proposals, set up an advisory committee, recruit interviewers, identify likely interviewees, acquire equipment, handle correspondence, create the necessary filing system and other documentation (including legal release forms), arrange for transcriptions or abstracts to be made, organize workshops or training sessions for interviewers, and ensure that the interviews are deposited in a library or other institution where researchers can use them. The project manager may also handle publicity for the project or supervise the use of the interviews in publications, exhibits, and other forms of public presentation.

The pool of interviewers available to a project will influence the number of interviews that can be conducted. More interviewers can do more interviews but require more equipment and more processing time. Volunteers especially enjoy interviewing but are not as eager to do the less glamorous job of processing the interviews. Avoid doing more interviews than can reasonably be processed to prevent large backlogs and delays in producing transcripts. Once processing begins to fall behind, it becomes increasingly more arduous to catch up. If promises have been made to give copies of the recording or transcript to interviewees, long backlogs create embarrassing delays.

In most projects, the interviewer is responsible for researching, conducting, and editing the interview. Sometimes a project can offer research assistance, but the interviewer has to be thoroughly versed in the subject matter and cannot rely solely on prepared questions. An interviewer must be prepared to deviate from the outline at any moment and follow up on unexpected information from the interviewee. In some larger projects, interviews are contracted out for a set fee, which includes the interviewer’s preparation of a finished transcript.

Depending on funding, trained interviewers are paid a salary or a fee per interview. Fees may be set for the entire interview or by the hour, with reimbursement for any costs incurred in traveling to the interview. If using inexperienced volunteers, project organizers should ensure that interviews are properly conducted and processed by arranging for an oral history consultant to run workshop-training sessions for interviewers and transcribers and to review their work periodically. The project manager may double as the oral history consultant. Consultants usually charge fees, but university oral history archivists will sometimes provide advice to smaller projects in their vicinity as a pro bono service.

Should a project appoint an advisory committee?

An advisory committee can help a project determine its goals, review proposals, suggest potential interviewees, assist in fundraising, and offer general support to the interviewers. If the project is part of a larger institution, such as a library, archives, or university, whose administrators may not fully recognize all the project’s requirements, a wisely selected advisory committee can offer a strong network of support.

Choose advisory committee members who are likely to be respected by the host institution or by the chief funding agency and who have the time and the interest to attend occasional committee meetings. Keep the committee small enough to facilitate communication and meetings, but diverse enough to provide different areas of assistance. Potential members are scholars in the particular subject area (who can advise on the interviewing process), prominent members of the community being studied (who can help make contact with potential interviewees), and perhaps fundraising experts (who can help keep the project going).

Many funding agencies prefer some form of advisory committee, and grant proposals usually include funds to pay honoraria and sometimes travel expenses for advisory committee meetings. Some projects have blue-ribbon advisory panels that were created as showcases to appease funding agencies and whose members rarely convene meetings or are kept informed. This is a self-defeating practice. Any project can benefit from the experienced advice of advisory committee members, especially during the initial stages of design and development.

How should potential interviewees be identified?

The advisory committee can often suggest the most likely interviewees. If a project is part of a larger organization, then its leaders and members may have their own recommendations. Researching the subject will also identify those who were involved in the events at the time. Online people searches, social media, professional directories, pension lists, and other references will help locate those still living. It also makes sense to ask interviewees to recommend other people to be interviewed—a practice known as “snowball sampling” for its ability to expand the pool of participants.[5]

Interviewees from particular groups or communities can be found through advertising in local newspapers; on radio or television stations; in the newsletters and websites of companies, unions, churches, and civic organizations; in alumni magazines; and on the Internet. But mass appeals run the risk of stimulating massive responses, overwhelming the project with volunteer interviewees. Rather than disappoint people by not interviewing them, projects can limit their initial appeals to informal networks before going public through the media.

How should a project select interviewers?

Look first for those with previous interviewing experience; those who have already done interviews or taken an oral history course or workshop. Ideally, interviewers should have some competence or experience in the project’s subject matter. Occasionally, interviewers who fit both categories can be found, but usually the project organizers settle for one or the other qualification. Experienced interviewers coming into a new field need to extensively research the subject matter. Those already familiar with the subject material, but who have not yet done any interviewing, need training in interview techniques.

Inexperienced interviewers should attend training sessions conducted by an experienced oral historian, who can be located through regional and national oral history associations or through nearby universities and historical societies. It is essential that all interviewers be fully informed of the project’s objectives, as well as the ethical and legal considerations, before they begin interviewing.

Volunteers often come from the community or group being interviewed. Being part of the community gives them an advantage in researching the subject matter and in establishing rapport with interviewees. The disadvantage of using “intimates” lies in their reluctance to probe unpleasant topics and in interviewees’ hesitation to disclose candid information to another member of the community. The “clinical” interviewer from outside the community may be seen as more neutral and discreet. Outside interviewers will take less for granted and encourage interviewees to talk about subjects that may be well-known within the community but less recognized and understood beyond its boundaries. Be aware also that interviewers who share similar experiences will usually have their own stories to tell and may not be able to stop themselves from interrupting and injecting themselves (“Oh, yeah? Let me tell you what happened to me!”) into the interviews. To forestall these temptations, it may be advisable to interview the interviewers. Let them record their own stories first. Being interviewed will serve to further familiarize volunteer interviewers with the process.

Regardless of whether they are paid or volunteer, all interviewers should prepare written records of their preparation and methods, and the circumstances of the interview. Interviewers should write a brief biographical statement about themselves to include with the recordings and transcripts. Future researchers will find this information valuable in understanding the dynamics of the interview and will want to consider how the background of the interviewer might have affected the interview. Biographers will consider how the oral history itself became an incident in the interviewee’s life, a time when he or she had the opportunity to reflect on past successes and defeats. They will want to know where and under what conditions the interview took place. Interviewers as well as interviewees deserve appropriate acknowledgment for their work in the recording and transcript and in all subsequent forms of citation or usage.[6]

How can the work of a variety of different interviewers be coordinated?

Maintaining consistency in the quality and standards of the oral history project is an issue when a number of interviewers, whether volunteers or paid, are used. Once again, a workshop for interviewers can be helpful, particularly at the beginning of a project—to help them not only get some training but also to appreciate the scope of the project and have a chance to compare experiences and concerns. A core of common questions may emerge from these workshops or group meetings. Interviewers should be encouraged to read each other’s transcripts to measure their own work against the group’s and to offer some peer review. When many interviewers are employed over a protracted period of time, it is advisable to prepare a project handbook, with both general oral history procedures and information specific to the project. There are now scores of project guidelines available online.[7]

Better funded, institutional projects have sponsored “memory-jogging” conferences to bring together a field’s key people to discuss the topic and to fill in the gaps that scholars have found in the record. At these conferences, interviewers conduct preliminary interviews—with both individuals and groups—to determine how the attendees participated in the events being studied and to plan priorities for full-scale interviews. Memory-jogging conferences have been held, for example, to examine NATO’s nuclear strategies during the cold war and the Cuban Missile Crisis.[8]

What credit should interviewers get for the work they have done?

Interviewers deserve full credit for their work. Display the name of the interviewer on the recording and the transcript. Whenever possible, cite the interviewer in any references to the interview in publications, exhibits, and other public presentations. Although the point of doing the interview is to collect the interviewee’s story, it would not exist without the interviewer and might have emerged very differently if conducted by someone else. Increasingly, books heavily drawn from oral history interviews have cited the interviewer on the title page through phrases such as “with the assistance of...,” “as told to...,” and “based on an oral history with...”[9]

Equipment

What basic equipment is needed for an oral history project?

Necessarily dependent on technology, oral historians have adjusted constantly to introductions of new equipment. Fortunately, technological progress has resulted in lighter, easier to operate, and more-affordable recorders. Dean Albertson, Allan Nevins’s assistant at the Columbia Oral History Research Office, recalled purchasing Columbia’s first wire recorders: “Instead of a reel of tape, they had a magnetic recording head through which passed a spool of fire wire. A more devilish machine was never invented. Quite apart from the fact that they weighed about 40 pounds was their propensity for jamming and spewing immense coils of wire all over the floor.”[10]

Reel-to-reel tape recorders became commercially available in 1948, and cassette tape recorders in 1963, followed by an array of digital audio and video recorders since the 1990s. Transcribing equipment similarly advanced from typewriters to computers. As a small segment of the market, oral historians cannot expect to influence the recording industry. Instead, they must adjust to new technology as it comes on the market. The longest-lasting devices are those associated with music sales. When investing in new equipment, therefore, projects should “follow the music.” Keep current with the latest equipment and purchase or rent those that best record and preserve high-quality sound.[11]

Students, especially those involved in projects with low funding, have used iPhones with external mikes to record interviews. Those projects report that sound quality has been good enough for listening and transcribing, and in some cases recorded better than other equipment. But some types of smartphones have created trouble with formatting and access to the finished files, and they may lack sufficient space to record an extensive interview.[12]

Whatever recorders are used, electric power is more reliable than batteries, even though it may require some extra time or furniture rearranging to use the nearest outlet. Bear in mind, however, that the physical setting of the interview cannot always be determined in advance, and that you occasionally may need some mobility, say, to follow a craft worker through various stages of production in different locations. Always bring extra batteries to meet such contingencies (and remember that some batteries last longer than others).

Good microphones are critical, since built-in microphones may pick up the machine’s operating noises, and the recorder may not sit close enough to capture a soft and indistinct speaker. Many interviewers prefer to use lavalier mikes, which attach to a lapel or other item of clothing and assure clear recording, especially if both the interviewer and interviewee have mikes. Lavaliers are a great advantage when interviewing soft-spoken people, the types who swallow their words, mumble, or unconsciously cover their mouths when they talk. If only one lavalier mike is available, it should be used by the interviewee.

Table microphones should be placed close to the interviewee. Always test microphones in advance to make sure that the interviewee and interviewer can be heard clearly. Remember that microphones may have their own batteries that need testing and replacement periodically.

When oral historians employed cassette tapes, they used separate transcribing machines, usually with a foot pedal that allowed the operator to stop, reverse, and play back portions of the recording while typing to listen over and over again to ascertain the exact wording. For digital recordings, transcribing software programs are available. These programs allow the typist to use the keyboard for forward and reverse commands and to slow the speed to match the operator’s typing speed or help decipher muffled or slurred words. The same programs can assist in audit-editing the transcripts. There is not yet any voice-recognition software sufficiently accurate and sensitive to do the actual transcribing, however.

Digital technology has immensely advanced oral history transcription. Before the advent of the word processor, typists prepared a rough draft of the interview, on which the interviewee would make editorial changes, and then a clean copy was typed. The principal transcript in some projects was the rough copy with handwritten corrections, a practice that had the advantage of showing researchers where changes had been made, but it had the disadvantage of sometimes difficult-to-read handwriting that reproduced poorly on microfilm and photocopies. Computers sped typing time and allowed editorial changes to be made more efficiently. Copies can be preserved on hard drives or on disk for instant retrieval and reprinting. Word-processing programs correct spelling and make indexing faster and more comprehensive. Text-searching software also offers greater control and access for extensive oral history collections.

For any equipment, bargains can often be found. But the economy can be a false one if the equipment cannot be repaired nearby and must be shipped at additional expense and for protracted periods of time. Work with reputable dealers, and keep files on all warranties and guarantees.

What type of recording lasts the longest?

No sound or video recording will last forever. The National Archives used to recommend one-quarter-inch open-reel audiotape as the best medium for preservation, but then begrudgingly accepted the cassettes that oral historians were using. Analog tape recordings now need to be digitized, and archivists are grappling with the long-term preservation of digital data. It is advisable to keep multiple copies of digital recordings in different locations, on hard drives, CDs, and flash drives; and to migrate those recordings to new technology as it develops.

Among the advantages of digital recording is the ability to enhance the sound by eliminating background noises. Over time, many analog tapes became so muddy that both the questions and the answers grew indistinct. Documentary makers found many oral history tapes unusable and had to use actors to re-create the interviewees’ voices. Digitizing tapes can bring the original recordings back to life.

What should be done with older equipment that needs to be replaced?

The cost of investing in equipment, and the comfort and security of using familiar technology, tends to encourage some oral history projects to hang onto recorders and transcribers long after they have become obsolete or commercially unavailable. Among the first generation of interviewers, there were some who stockpiled old reel-to-reel recorders to cannibalize them for parts. Their successors kept using cassette recorders as analog tape became harder to find. There comes a time when projects need to move on and embrace the latest technology. The switch from analog to digital left many projects with shelves of no-longer-used equipment. Some have successfully sold older recorders on eBay. Others have donated them to local schools and charities.

What sort of documentation should be kept on each interview?

The more interviews there are, the more control will be needed over the paperwork. The processing of each interview should move forward at a reasonable pace, and a “history” of each should be retained. The project manager should keep a log or spreadsheet for all the interviews, noting who was interviewed, by whom, for how many hours, on what dates, whether the interview has been transcribed, whether it is open for research, what restrictions may have been placed upon its use, and whether it has been posted online.

Files for each interview should include whatever biographical information has been collected, letters arranging the interviews, and an abstract of the interview that briefly summarizes (in not necessarily more than a single paragraph) the subjects covered and the names of the people most frequently discussed. This file should contain a copy of the deed of gift (the legal release form from the interviewee) and explanations of any restrictions on the interview. For ease of referral, it should note the libraries or other repositories where interested researchers can see copies of the interview.

Files should also be maintained on each interviewer, with such basic information as home and work addresses, phone numbers, areas of expertise, interviews completed, and interviews scheduled. Keeping lists of potential interviewers and interviewees for later stages of the project is also helpful.

Interviewers who came to oral history via fieldwork may keep fieldwork notes on their interviews. These notes will review the interview; outline its situation and themes; contain the spelling of difficult names and places; and include observations about where the interview took place, who was present, and what kind of interaction occurred before and after the session. Sometimes they note the health of the interviewee, body language, dress, and other visible characteristics. Interviewers may share this information with others on their team to discuss common issues and gather advice about dealing with them, but such personal reviews are not intended for the public record. Projects should keep fieldwork notes only as internal files and neither provide them to researchers nor catalog them.[13]

Where should interviews take place?

The location usually depends on the interviewee. Some people are so busy they will grant interviews only at their own office. This locale presents the problem of shutting out distractions and interruptions: a ringing phone, a colleague at the door, and all the reminders of the next item on the day’s agenda will divert the interviewee’s attention. Similarly, at an interviewee’s home the phone, a partner, children, the family dog, even noisy appliances can interrupt the flow of the interview and create unacceptable levels of background noise. Too much commotion makes transcribing difficult and limits the eventual use of the recording for media or exhibits.

Try to conduct the interview in a quiet place away from everyday distractions. If not at the project office or the interviewer’s office, then choose a room, or even a portion of a room, that the interviewee does not normally use. Get the interviewee away from behind a desk and sit in chairs at the other side of the office or in a conference room down the hall. Or conduct the interview at the dining room table. Politely request others in the home or office not to interrupt while you are recording. Shut the door if there is one.

Having the interviewee come to the interviewer allows for better control of the equipment and placement of the audio or video recorder and microphones. When going to the interviewee, allow enough time to set up the equipment. Not knowing where electrical outlets may be located, the interviewer should carry batteries or an extension cord. Test the equipment just before the interview. The farther interviewers must travel to an interview, the less they can afford a malfunctioning piece of equipment. Murphy’s Law applies to oral history: if it can break down, it will—precisely when needed.

What happens if the equipment fails?

Without any backup equipment, the interviewer will have to apologize and schedule another interview. Even worse is to conduct the interview and only later realize that the equipment failed. In addition to testing equipment before the interview, an interviewer must keep watch on it throughout the interview. I once had to call an interviewee to report that nothing could be heard on the tape but static. “Maybe that’s all I gave you,” he quipped. That interviewee graciously agreed to do another interview, but repeat sessions are rarely as spontaneous and detailed as the original interview.

Failed equipment is the bane of the interviewer. The Oral History Association once invited veteran interviewers to testify at a session to describe their “worst moments” in doing oral history. Tales of disaster included the absence of electrical outlets, recorders that picked up radio transmissions from passing police cars, a tape that unraveled to fill the interviewer’s car, and a list of other calamities. It is reassuring to know that one is not alone, but such horror stories from experienced interviewers should encourage every project manager to test equipment regularly and be prepared to help interviewers meet any eventuality.

Is it ever appropriate to interview a group of people together?

The best oral history interview is generally done one-on-one. That way, the interviewer can focus exclusively on one person, whose stories will not be interrupted. Yet sometimes it is impossible to avoid having another person in the room, perhaps the interviewee’s spouse or grown child, who may interrupt to contradict, correct, or supplement the testimony. Such interruptions can derail the interview, but they can also help by providing forgotten information and otherwise supporting an uncertain interviewee.[14]

Group interviews increase the potential for trouble. Facing a group, the interviewer becomes a moderator, trying to give everyone a chance to respond and ensuring that no one monopolizes the discussion. Transcribers have great difficulty identifying who the speaker is in group situations, since all voices begin to sound alike. This problem is alleviated only if during the interview someone other than the interviewer (who has enough to do) keeps a sequential list of each speaker. Making a video of the group session can also facilitate identification.

Although more difficult, group interviews can gather fruitful information. Interviewees remember common incidents when sitting in a group that they might not have thought of by themselves. Self-exaggeration may also be tempered in a peer group situation. The John F. Kennedy Library conducted several successful group interviews with journalists who covered the president and with the chairmen that Kennedy appointed to head the independent regulatory commissions. The Women in Journalism project similarly gathered the shared experiences of reporters who had covered Eleanor Roosevelt. For the most part, group interviews should be considered supplements to individual interviews, not replacements.

Can a team of interviewers conduct an interview together?

Using more than one interviewer distorts the one-on-one relationship that tends to work best for oral history. The anthropologist Michael Kenny warned that a group of interviewers, though it can sometimes works, holds a potential for disaster: “Illuminating as this technique can be, it can also turn into the worst type of press conference, wherein the informant is either thoroughly cowed or offended, and rightly so.”[15]

But there can be advantages to using more than one interviewer. Younger students, nervous about the experience, often interview in pairs or are accompanied by a parent or teacher. Novice interviewers may similarly take along a partner for moral support. Some research projects have been done entirely by teams. For one project on racial violence in the South, a black interviewer conducted most of the interviews with white southerners but took the precaution of going as part of a team with a white interviewer. One team member may be better versed in a particular subject and can take the lead in questioning about that area. But in team situations, one interviewer usually serves as the principal interviewer, asking most of the questions and gaining the interviewee’s primary attention. Accompanying interviewers should try not to interrupt, except perhaps to interject a follow-up question that the primary interviewer might have missed.

The Miller Center of Public Affairs, a nonpartisan institute at the University of Virginia, has successfully conducted team interviews for American presidential libraries and other politically oriented projects. The project examines groups of former high-ranking government officials involved in specific issues and events. Teams of three or four scholars with expertise in a specific subject conduct the interviews over several days. They compare these interview sessions to seminars in which the former officials become the teachers and the interviewers the students. The interviewers work from briefing books containing research material and suggested topics of inquiry. For high-level political interviewing, the team system works well because those being interviewed are experienced in facing multiple inquisitors.

What are the differences between recording events that are still taking place and recording those that are long past?

Most oral history projects look back, but some have conducted “history while it’s hot,” in the words of Forrest Pogue, the World War II combat interviewer. Military historians since then have carried recorders to questions troops from Vietnam to Afghanistan. During Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, an oral history project recorded interviews with the candidate and many of his staff. Interviews have been conducted immediately after major disasters, events on the scale of September 11 or Hurricane Katrina—operating in the middle of a history that has yet to be written. Oral historians at corporations and university archives have conducted ongoing interviews with their presidents and other high-level administrators to review the past year’s events and debrief the players in recent major events.

Scheduling is perhaps the biggest problem with interviewing as the events are occurring. The key players are too often too busy or too likely to feel interrupted. They make and break appointments at a frustrating pace. Interviewers have to be patient and ready to take advantage of whatever opportunity comes along. Finally, when the subject matter is a current event, much will need to be kept closed for some period. For the interview to be anything more revealing than a radio talk show, the interviewer must guarantee confidentiality and allow the interviewee to seal the recordings and transcript for a safe period, until the events have passed into history.

Processing

Must all our interviews be transcribed?

Recordings may be heard and interpreted in different ways by different listeners, but oral history transcripts are the final text agreed upon by the interviewee and interviewer. The precariousness of audio and video recordings over time is one of many incentives for transcribing oral history interviews. Even with the best recording devices, listeners will find it hard at times to understand interviewees, especially older people whose voices have grown faint or those who speak with a strong accent or dialect. Some mutter and stumble over words. Background noises may obliterate the speaker’s words. If the interviewer, who was present, has a hard time understanding and transcribing what was said, imagine the problem future researchers will have interpreting that recording. Transcribing enables both the interviewer and interviewee to participate in reviewing the interview, and it ensures that the transcript reflects what each intended to say.

Given a choice, researchers usually prefer transcripts over recordings. Eyes can read faster than ears can hear. Transcripts can be scanned and photocopied. Information can be retrieved even more easily if the transcripts are indexed or if text-searching computer software is used. The recording will provide sound for video documentaries, radio programs, and exhibits; or for biographers, folklorists, and others curious about the speaking voice, dialect, hesitations, and other verbal mannerisms. But few researchers ask to listen to the recordings if transcripts are available.

Besides ease of use, researchers prefer transcripts because they stay the same, while different researchers listening to the same recording might hear them differently. Those who are using the audio or video recording in a broadcast or a museum exhibit can let the interview speak for itself, but those who are citing the interview in print want a reliable transcription so that quotations are consistent.

A front-page story in the New York Times in 2009 recounted accusations by a government archivist against a scholar who prepared and publishing transcripts of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, pointing to omissions, misrepresentations, and two conversations conflated as one. Similar charges were raised by another archivist against a volume in which historians had transcribed and published some of John F. Kennedy’s presidential meetings. In neither case had the library holding the recordings prepared its own transcripts. Although these recordings were not oral histories, the situations remind us that if we relinquish the burden of transcription to others, we have to expect that they are going to hear things their own way.[16]

If a project cannot afford transcripts, what are the alternatives?

The Internet has provided opportunities to reunite spoken words with their transcription and helped preserve the “orality” of oral history. Believing it vital for researchers to hear as well as to read interviews, some archives have posted sound recordings, along with transcripts, photographs, and other documentation, on their websites. In the case of non-English-speaking interviewees, such as Native Americans using tribal languages, the transcripts can also provide translations. Since sound files are large, and consume much time and space for downloading, some projects provide only brief excerpts from the sound recordings online. They also seek to keep the transcript verbatim to match the sound recordings—if their interviewees agree to refrain from editing their remarks.

If transcribing is not possible, a project should abstract and index the recordings. Summaries of the main individuals and subjects discussed, with notations of where they can be found chronologically in the recording, help researchers find the material they seek and facilitate web-based browsing of online collections. Digitization has permitted abstracting and indexing recordings in real time that will be consistent from one piece of equipment to the next. In addition to aiding researchers, detailed indexes help project managers maintain control over their collections as they grow. Whether you transcribe or abstract, it remains essential to process as you go to avoid creating overwhelming backlogs that can paralyze a project.

Commercial services can assist clients with multidimensional indexing of oral history recordings and other audio-video documentation, whether individual interviews or across a collection. The indexers will work with the project to create customized vocabularies based on the specific content of the interviews. In doing this, they consider the anticipated users of the collection and the familiarity of certain terms and expressions. The process goes more easily if all the interviews have been completed and becomes more challenging when dealing with ongoing projects. Once the vocabulary has been determined, the indexing will commence.[17]

In New Zealand, oral historians have placed less emphasis on transcription in favor of time-coded abstracts. Providing an abstract along with the original recordings makes the recording itself the primary source of information, and the abstract its index. Abstracting has the advantage of being less expensive than transcribing, but this approach still requires researchers to do their own transcribing in order to quote an interview in print.[18]

Voice recognition software holds the promise that someday computers will transcribe recordings automatically. Despite great advances, a high level of inaccuracy makes voice recognition inadequate for oral history transcription. (Some projects have used the technology to create outlines, since it creates a text that is somewhat searchable, even if unreadable.) Existing voice recognition software can be trained to understand a single voice, but interviews are multivoice dialogues. Users must speak clearly, which is not always the case in an interview. Multiple voices, accents, mumbling, and all the other obstacles that even human transcribers must surmount complicate the process.[19]

Oral historians who worry about both hardware and software becoming obsolete appreciate having written transcripts—and so do researchers short on time trolling for information. Some archives will not accept oral history recordings without transcripts. Interviewers have also encountered administrators who feel that “if we have a transcript for audio, then original tapes won’t be a priority for transfer. If no transcript exists, then it will become a priority for transfer.”[20]

Should you transcribe your own recordings or contract them out?

Transcription is by far the most expensive and time-consuming part of an oral history project, requiring an estimated six to eight hours to transcribe each hour of interview as well as more time to audit-edit the transcripts—a form of audio proofreading in which you to play back the recording while reviewing the transcript, making sure the two are consistent. Some project staffs transcribe their own recordings; for another project, professional transcribing services are hired. When selecting transcribers, look for someone with previous oral history experience. Typing speed is less critical for transcription than typing for comprehension. The estimated cost of transcribing should also include making corrections on the first draft of the interview. Request the transcript on computer disk as well as a hard-copy version. It is advisable to continue with the same transcription service for all of your interviews to ensure consistent stylistic treatment of idiosyncratic vocabulary, acronyms, geographic place names, regional dialects, and any number of other factors that might hinder speedy and accurate transcriptions if the interviews pass through too many hands.

In some projects, interviews are transcribed after additional funds have been raised. Funding agencies have occasionally underwritten the transcription of already completed interviews, since the exact cost can be calculated and a finished collection guaranteed. The longer a project waits, the more difficult the transcription process becomes.

What issues need to be worked out in advance with a transcribing service?

Transcribers want recordings that are clear and distinct, with little background noise. Provide a list of proper and place names and technical terms that are mentioned in the interview to reduce the chance of error and the time necessary for proofreading and editing. Identify recordings with the name of the interviewee and date of the interview. As an added precaution, at the beginning of the recording interviewers should introduce themselves, their interviewees, and the date of the interview. This formal preamble can be done before the meeting with the interviewee to avoid jeopardizing rapport. Always retain the master recording and send only a copy to the transcriber.

Agreements should be made in advance with transcribers on the desired format of the transcripts, including spacing, type size, margins, and speaker identification. Determine whether the transcriber will prepare the index, and what index terms are most important. Caution the transcriber about maintaining confidentiality until the interviews have been opened for research. When dealing with especially sensitive subjects, hire a transcription service that requires its staff to sign confidentiality agreements, by which they promise not to divulge information from sealed interviews. Transcription services will advertise this assurance. Make the transcriber aware of whatever deadlines the project is operating under. Report any problems with the transcripts to the transcriber, especially at the beginning of the process before patterns have been established, to keep the final product consistent.[21]

Which is the oral history, the recording or the transcript?

Oral historians have an ongoing debate over whether the spoken or the written word is the “document of record.” In fact, these are two types of records of the same interview. Archivists generally consider the audio or video recording, being the original and verbatim record, the primary document. Looked at another way, one is a record of what was said and the other—the transcript—represents the intended meaning of what was said. Even the most slavishly verbatim transcript is an interpretation of the recording—veteran transcribers call it a “translation.” Different transcribers might handle the same material in different ways, including punctuation, capitalization, false starts, broken sentences, and verbal obstacles to presenting spoken words in print. Interviewers and interviewees should edit the transcripts, correcting errors, whether misspoken or mistranscribed. During the editing, interviewees may add material that was forgotten during their interviews, or may remove comments that they have had second thoughts about.[22]

Those disciplines—particularly the behavioral sciences—more interested in the study of actual speech warn against taking transcripts “too seriously as the reality.” Viewing transcripts as only a partial rendering of the recordings, they note the importance of such additional features as pitch, stress, volume, and rate of speech, as well as facial gestures and body movements, which are not captured in audio recordings. These disciplines often design particular modes of transcription to illustrate some aspect of speech they consider important, such as measuring the pauses in an interviewee’s responses. Some have devised symbols to express significant nonverbal responses. When folklorist Henry Glassie interviewed the Irish at Ballymenone, he used a diamond-shaped symbol to signify a “smile in the voice, a chuckle in the throat, a laugh in the tale,” suggesting humor visually but not verbally.[23]

In the United States, the transcript has more often than not served as the primary research tool. Created and directed by historical researchers, the pioneering Columbia Oral History Research Office during its early years produced transcripts and then, because of its limited budget, recorded over its tapes. As often happens, practical policies become elevated to the status of principle. Columbia noted that most researchers asked to use only transcripts and that only folklorists, linguists, and ethnomusicologists wanted to hear the sound recordings. Columbia thus felt justified about deemphasizing the tape and spoke authoritatively on this matter. Many oral history projects followed its model.

Canadian oral historians, by contrast, adopted “aural history” and created impressive sound archives, often with no transcripts at all. Similarly converting a practice to a principle, some oral historians rejected transcripts as a distortion or corruption of the interview. To be accurate, they argued, every word, sound, or false start should be put down on paper. The advent of the Internet has further encouraged advocates of “aurality” to stream their audio recordings online so that more researchers can hear the actual voices of the interviewees, but such procedures need not preclude posting the transcripts as well.

Too great an emphasis on transcribing has too caused many oral historians to ignore the quality of their sound recordings, so that many recordings are of such poor quality that they cannot be used for broadcasting or museum exhibition. Transcripts and high-quality sound recordings (and video recordings) involve considerable expense, and oral history projects have often been forced to take one path or the other. Still, the spoken interview and written transcript should not be seen as an either-or choice but as mutual goals.

Does editing of transcripts change and distort their meaning?

An interviewer for a community history project who took pains to produce exactly verbatim transcripts, including requests to take bathroom breaks and other pauses and interruptions, discovered that she had offended her interviewees. “Anyone who knows me, knows that I speak clearly and well,” one of them objected. “She made me sound like an idiot.”[24]

Some editing is necessary to make sense of the spoken word when it is put in writing. As David Crystal wrote in his encyclopedia of the English language: “Extracts of informal spoken conversation look weird in print because it is not possible to show all the melody, stress, and tone of voice which made the speaker sound perfectly natural in context.” Moreover, the transcriber may have made errors, garbled names, or was unable to distinguish exactly what an interviewee said. The interviewee may have given the wrong name or date or some other unintentionally misleading information. Speakers often do not complete sentences. The listener can get the gist of their meaning, but in written form these fragmented sentences can be unclear and a source of frustration.[25]

Some historians and linguists regret the practice of editing out speakers’ hesitations, repetitions, and unfinished thoughts, and encourage transcribing practices that will “convey the cadences of speech as well as its content.” They question why we should expect interviewees to speak in complete sentences, when sentence fragments and exclamations are common and readily understandably in everyday conversation. Linguists especially strive to create transcripts that faithfully reproduce human speech, employing systems that range from phonetics to meticulously defined notations, sometimes even counting the seconds that elapse when the speaker pauses. While such exercises honor the oral nature of interviewing and serve particular scholarly purposes, they can never fully replicate the tones and rhythms of the recorded voice and run the risk of obscuring the substance of the interview by leaving unfinished thoughts that could have been clarified through judicious editing.[26]

Oral historians are not the only people who edit transcripts. Members of Congress edit their remarks in the daily Congressional Record, and administration witnesses revise the testimony they have given before congressional committees. In his oral history, Carl Marcy recalled how during the 1940s he edited Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s congressional testimony:

Secretary Marshall called me to his office one day. He was very austere. He looked at me with a transcript in front of him that I had corrected. He said, “Marcy, you in charge of this?” I said, “Yes sir, I did that.” He said, “Well, I don’t know what it is, but I feel when I’m talking to the senators that I’m making sense and they understand me. But when I look at the uncorrected transcript it doesn’t make much sense.” But, he said, “After you fix it up, it looks all right. You keep on doing it.”[27]

There are advantages in having interviewees edit their own transcripts. Interviewees know what they said, or meant to say, better than anyone else. They can often spot misspelled names and mistranscribed sentences. Whether a word should appear at the end of one sentence or at the beginning of the next can affect the meaning of both sentences. Dropping a not can dramatically reverse the meaning. Words that sound alike, and may make sense in context may not be the words the interviewee used. Transcribers have heard assumed instead of as soon, block aid for blockade, and the Duke of Wellington instead of Duke Ellington. One transcript contained an unexpected comment about two Supreme Court justices: “Brandeis was concerned about marrying Frankfurter.” The speaker had actually said that Louis Brandeis was worried about the health of Felix Frankfurter’s wife Marion. Another transcript contained a mysterious reference to an unknown “I. C. Sping, head of the transition team.” Replaying of the tape revealed that the interviewee had actually said: “I ceased being head of the transition team.”

Some interviewees will defer to the interviewer to make whatever corrections seem necessary. Others, especially professional people, feel chagrined at seeing their syntax set down in print. They will correct tenses, change yeah to yes, and otherwise make themselves appear as literate as possible. Interviewers need to remind their interviewees that an oral history is a spoken record, and that it is best to keep the verbal rhythms and flows rather than convert the history into a more formal text. Writers of fiction are always trying to re-create believable human dialogue; oral history is human dialogue. The vernacular is accessible and attractive to wide audiences. Too much tampering with the transcript compromises the qualities that make oral history so compelling. Some oral historians insist that any changes in the verbatim transcripts be put in brackets. Others, seeking to avoid even the temptation of making alterations, prefer not to give the transcript to the interviewee for editing. Unless interviewees have already signed releases, however, their dissatisfaction or embarrassment may keep their interviews from being opened for research. Although such issues can be negotiated, the ethics of oral history and the laws of copyright dictate that an interviewee’s wishes be honored.

Some changes add to a transcript, as when interviewees realize that they did not finish a story in the recording and left out related material, which can be inserted in the final transcript. More problematic are relations of stories or commentary because interviewees have had second thoughts after completing the recorded interview. Rather than eliminate this material, interviewees should be advised to restrict its use for a safe period of time.

Transcripts may be edited, but the original recording should be left exactly as spoken. Interviewers should inform interviewees that no changes or deletions can be made to the master copy. Interviewees may choose to set a longer restriction on use of the unedited recording than they do on the edited transcript or to require listeners to quote solely from transcripts. Edited copies of the master recording may be released for research pending the lifting of any restrictions on portions of the original.

If a project intends to post both sound recordings and transcripts on its website, there should be more incentive to keep the transcript as close to the spoken word as possible, so that listeners can more easily follow the written text. At the same time, there will be less need for transcribers to attempt to reproduce nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions, laughter, sobs, and protracted silences that will be evident on the recording.

What is the interviewer’s responsibility for reviewing and editing the transcript?

Oral historians need to audit-edit the transcripts of their interviews. Having sat through the interview, the interviewer knows the material better than anyone except the interviewee. Sometimes interviewers transcribe their own recordings, but more often the interviewer serves as editor of the transcript. Listening to the recording, the interviewer reads the transcript to correct spelling errors, fill in words the transcriber could not discern, and generally make sense of what the interviewee said.

During the interview, the interviewer should note any unusual proper names and place names and afterward ask the interviewee for the correct spellings. Some interviewers do this in the course of the interview, but others strongly prefer not to interrupt the interview and wait instead until the session is over. These interview notes will facilitate the transcriber’s job.

Listening to the recording while editing the transcript can also be an important—and excruciating—learning experience for interviewers, who thus get to listen to their own mistakes. Note the sound quality. Did you take into account the air conditioner or grandfather’s clock or the open window when you set up the recorder and microphone, and can you hear how these noises obscure the spoken word and make transcribing difficult? Did you interrupt before the interviewee was finished answering? Did you fail to follow up your initial question or leave an important question unaddressed? Did you pursue new leads in the interview or unwisely force it back to your prepared questions? Every editing session teaches interviewers more about their techniques and better prepares them for future interviews.

Should transcribers also edit?

The responsibility of transcribers is to reproduce as closely as possible what they hear on the recordings. Transcribers should never rearrange words or delete phrases for stylistic purposes. Some projects permit a transcriber to remove “false starts,” which are sentences that begin one way and then end abruptly as the interviewee changes gears. (“First we went...we started...well, actually, even before we went,” might be tightened to, “Actually, even before we went.”) But some false starts reveal mental processes, Freudian slips, and attempts to suppress information. Nor should transcribers try to correct ungrammatical constructions. A transcriber should leave the editing to the interviewer and the interviewee and only note those places in the transcript that were difficult to understand and any questions about spelling or syntax.

Working on a particular interview, a transcriber will soon become familiar with the speaker’s verbal punctuation. Frequently, interviewees will use a word like and to start a new sentence, or a phrase like and so to begin a new paragraph. If transcribed literally, the interview will read like one long run-on sentence. Instead, transcribers are justified in replacing such constantly repeated cues with punctuation and paragraph breaks.

How should a transcript indicate sounds and gestures other than words?

Both the transcriber and the interviewer can add in brackets any additional descriptions—such as “[laughs],” “[snaps fingers],” “[uses hands to suggest height],”—that will help the reader understand what was happening, and what the interviewer intended to express. Humor and sarcasm sometimes do not translate well and may be taken too seriously unless the laughter of the interviewer or interviewee is also recorded. The transcript should also elucidate otherwise unexplainable shifts in the dialogue by noting any break in the recording, mechanical failure, or a prolonged lapse in the interview. In all of these cues, however, reasonable discretion and good sense should be employed. Their purpose is to assist the researcher, not to embarrass the interviewee.

Similarly, transcripts should be edited to provide—in brackets—the full name and any relevant title of individuals when first mentioned, such as [Mayor Boris] Johnson, or President [Barack] Obama. When a city or town is mentioned, the state should also be added in brackets—such as Springfield [Missouri] or Springfield [Illinois]—unless a series of communities in a single state are under discussion. For stylistic questions about numbers, abbreviations, and so on, transcribers should consult the Chicago Manual of Style or whatever style manual the project chooses to employ.[28]

Transcribing is more of an art than a science. The Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at the University of California at Berkeley once experimented by having four experienced individuals transcribe the same ten-minute segment of a recording. The result was four strikingly different transcripts that ranged from slavishly verbatim to highly polished, with a wide variety of editorial interventions indicating sounds and actions other than words. Each of the versions was a legitimate interpretation, but their extreme variations serve as a reminder that interviewers and project managers need to work with transcribers to set the desired style of the final product. As more projects put their sound recordings on the Internet, they will likely want less-edited transcripts that will resemble the spoken word most closely, including all the flaws of unrehearsed speech. Parallel access to the sound recordings and transcripts should also reduce the need for transcribers to reproduce inflection, accents, laugher, and other verbal cues.[29]

Should transcripts reproduce accents and dialects?

If the interview is intended for folklore studies or other purposes for which regional speech patterns are important, then rendering regional dialect in a transcript might be desirable. But dialects are tricky business that should be handled carefully.

Educated interviewees who say yeah will insist on altering the transcript word to yes. They are sorely displeased when transcripts show them saying gonna or talkin’ and would prefer to see their spoken words reproduced as they would write them. If oral historians allow these interviewees to correct their transcripts, they owe the same courtesy to those who are not used to seeing their words set down in print. As the Appalachian Oral History Project concluded, transcribing phonetically gives a pejorative cast to the speech and can “unintentionally demean the speaker.” The Appalachian project discovered that its transcribers—student workers from the same area—were unaware of their own dialect’s peculiarities (such as pronouncing our as air) and therefore spelled the words correctly. Only transcribers from outside the mountain culture tried to capture on paper what they imagined to be authentic-looking dialect. The Appalachian project trained its transcribers not to correct grammar and also not to respell what was said to approximate the dialect. That way they kept the flavor of the speaker’s style without indicating pronunciation.[30]

The historian Nell Irvin Painter came to the same conclusions about her oral history of Hosea Hudson, a southern, black labor organizer and Communist Party member. “Adapting Hudson’s spoken language to the printed page meant abandoning its sound, for Hudson does not speak as I have rendered his words,” Painter explained. A phonetically reproduced transcript would have been “condescending and difficult to read.” She chose to use standard English spellings and to avoid apostrophes in words that showed variations from standard style, “because apostrophes and dialect in literature have long singled out characters that readers need not take seriously, ignorant folk who cannot speak correctly. With black people, the usage is centuries old.” Yet as much as possible she preserved Hudson’s vocabulary and such unique phrases as “howbeitsoever,” to retain the spirit of the words without belittling the man.[31]

Transcribing in dialect further depends on the community. In Scotland, dialect work has had a long history that includes the development of Scottish dialect dictionaries. Transcribers can rely upon them rather than try to make approximations as they go along. The oral historian Graham Smith has pointed out that the words people were speaking were dialect words and to transcribe them in standard English would be translation, not transcription, adding that his “interview partners would have taken the scunner at such a practice.” (The scunner, for those outside of Scotland, is a strong aversion.)[32]

What should the transcript look like?

Each project will have its own style, but the final product should be clear, and easy to read and scan. Set wide enough margins so that the transcripts can be bound. Small typeface and single spacing make transcripts more difficult to read. Be sure to number the pages for researchers’ future reference.

Typists often used the anonymous Q and A to indicate questions and answers, but computers made it easier to insert the last names of the interviewer and interviewee each time that they speak. If the interview extended over several sessions, the transcript should indicate at the beginning: “Interview no.1 with Jane Jones, Wednesday, October 18, 2012,” and at the end: “End of Interview no. 1.” Begin the next with “Interview no. 2....” The title page should list the interviewee’s name, the name of the oral history project, the interviewer’s name, and the dates of the interviews and their location.

Introduce the transcripts with a brief explanation of the oral history project and an outline of the interviewee’s life and career. Some projects will use a data sheet on each interviewee instead. A brief biographical statement for the interviewer will also be useful for future researchers, since different interviewers (historians, political scientists, folklorists, community members) will ask different questions. Put the deed of gift up front to establish the copyright and research use of the interview. Interview transcripts may also contain relevant documents and appendices. Some projects include photographs of the interviewee and of people and events described in the interview. An index greatly enhances an interview’s research use.

Why is an index necessary?

It does not take long before even the interviewer has trouble remembering who said what in which interview. Collecting information is only the first step; retrieving it comes next. Software programs now make indexing so much easier that there is less excuse for not creating them. At minimum, indexes should include all names cited. Subject indexes are trickier but no less important. The program manager and interviewers should work out a general list of important terms for indexing purposes. Indexes help both interviewers and researchers. As interviewers prepare for future interviews, they will want to review pertinent portions of past interviews to prepare their questions. Researchers often do not want to read an entire transcript, but only those portions dealing with their particular subject. Text-searching software has also become a boon to users of oral histories, but since the transcript will often stand alone, particularly if it has been microfilmed, a separate index will still be useful.

Cross-referenced indexes add immeasurably to the research use of a collection. Since 1948 Columbia University has maintained a name index of all of its interviews. Researchers have found this massive index to be a rich resource, since it identifies not only the major players in their subject but also the minor figures whose interviews they might not otherwise have consulted but who often offer the most perceptive observations and analysis.

Should the project director review all transcripts?

Someone other than the interviewer ought to review the transcript before releasing it for research. Depending on the size of a project, a project director or editor may read all interviews or may delegate some to members of the advisory board as reviewer/evaluators. The decision depends on whether the interviews are ready to be opened and therefore can be reviewed by an advisory board member, or whether confidentiality needs to be maintained and revising should be limited to the project director. The project director should review the materials to determine whether the interviewer is following the project’s guidelines, asking appropriate questions and follow-up questions, not interrupting, and collecting worthwhile material. Directors can use the review process to advise interviewers on recommended changes in style, or they may decide not to continue to use interviewers whose work is unsatisfactory. Project directors will also want to be sure that a consistent style is followed in processing the different interviews in a project.

Legal Concerns

Journalists do not use legal release forms for their interviews; why should oral historians?

Those answering a journalists’ questions assume that their words will appear in print unless they stipulate that something is “off the record” or otherwise not for attribution. Many journalists take notes rather than record their interviews and generally use only brief excerpts from interviews in their stories. Few journalists retain their notes for posterity. Oral historians face different considerations.

U.S. copyright laws grant copyright automatically to anyone whose words and ideas are recorded in any tangible form, for a period lasting until fifty years after that person’s death. That is, even without registering the copyright with the Copyright Office, interviewees retain the copyright on anything that they have said in an interview. If the oral history project or any researcher publishes excerpts from their interviews beyond “fair use”—a relatively small number of words—without a deed of gift or contact that permits such use, then the interviewee could sue for copyright infringement.

For these reasons, archives require a deed of gift or a contract before opening an oral history for research. Similarly, publishers want to be sure that the copyright concerns have been addressed before they publish interviews in a book. To avoid headaches later, interviewers should collect deeds of gift when the interview is conducted, or at least by the time the transcript has been prepared and edited.

Most projects use a deed of gift that establishes who owns the copyright in the interview and what may be done with it. Interviewees may retain the copyright and require that they or their heirs be consulted before anyone uses or publishes excerpts from the interview. This requirement makes the process complex and should be avoided if possible. Other interviewees will assign the copyright over to the interviewer, the oral history project, or the repository but will stipulate that all or parts of the interview must remain closed for a period of time, sometimes until the interviewee’s death. Too stringent a time restriction should also be avoided, since archives do not want to store materials for protracted periods if they cannot be used.

A simple deed of gift can turn the copyright over to the interviewer or the oral history project, to use as they see fit, and to deposit in an institution of their choosing. Some deeds jointly assign the copyright to the public domain, that is, both the interviewer and the interviewee waive the right to copyright the material. Assigning copyright to the public domain vastly simplifies administration but offers little control over uses of the material. With the increasing likelihood that projects will post at least some of their interviews on the Internet, deeds of gift should be drawn broadly enough to cover electronic and other forms of reproduction.

As more interviews are posted on the Internet, worldwide public access has led some oral historians to question the standard deeds that assign control exclusively to the repository that holds the interviews. As an alternative, they advocate Creative Commons licensing that gives interviewees the right to grant permission to use their interviews. These licenses allow the interviewee to retain the copyright but permit the public to copy, modify, and share these items for noncommercial purposes, so long as they cite the original source of information. Interviewees may grant additional licenses for commercial purposes, such as a book or film. The same provisions can also be incorporated into more traditional deeds of gift.[33]

Whatever form of deed of gift, contract, or license that projects adopt should offer enough flexibility to meet the requirements of different interviewees. (See appendix 2 for examples of different legal release forms.) Interviewers should explain to interviewees ahead of time the potential uses and planned deposit of the interviews so that the interviewee knows fully what to expect. Usually, these explanations are outlined in the initial correspondence or conversation between oral historians and interviewees. Should the interviewee die before signing a deed of gift, the verbal agreement on the recording may serve as an oral contract. Otherwise, the oral history project will have to seek out the next of kin to sign the deed.

Be careful not to become boxed in by specificity. Technology will continue to evolve and create unanticipated opportunities for preserving and presenting oral history. Excessive restrictions only complicate the release of the interviews for future research. Try not to use the release form as a checkbox of preferences, but keep them as simple and straightforward as possible.[34]

Must the interviewer also sign a deed of gift?

Since the interview is a joint product, it might be prudent to have the interviewer as well as the interviewee sign a legal release. Projects that use volunteer or paid interviewers should require them to sign before they do any interviewing to avoid any misunderstandings later on. By signing such releases, interviewers agree to assign whatever copyright they might have to the project to the interview repository or to the public domain (see the appendices). Even without the interviewer’s signature on the deed, however, recordings and transcripts produced by someone hired for the job would be considered work-for-hire, and the interviewer would have no claim to copyright.

When hiring contract interviewers, the basic agreement should include the names of the project and the interviewer, the interviewer’s specific responsibilities, a payment schedule, the assignment of rights for the interviews, the assignment of responsibility for obtaining deeds of gift from interviewees, the procedures for terminating the contract, and dated signatures of both parties.[35]

Do interviewees have the right to close their interviews for a long time?

Before beginning an interview, when interviewees often feel nervous, interviewers will explain their right to close portions or all of an interview for as long as necessary. At the outset, more than one interviewee has announced, “Well, this is going to be hot, and will have to be kept closed for a long time. I don’t want to embarrass anyone.” By the conclusion of the interview, however, the interviewee usually feels more relaxed, the information elicited rarely turns out to have been salacious, and it has become evident that the people discussed are usually long since retired or deceased and that the “hot” information has cooled down considerably. At this stage, the interviewer should point out what a valuable research tool the interview will become and what a shame it would be to keep it from researchers for long. Quite often the interviewee may decide to open the interview within a short time, if not immediately. A little reassurance generally goes a long way to encourage early release.

What rights do interviewees have to publish their own interviews?

Interviewees may want the right of first use. That is, they may want to close the interview while they write their own book. The oral history may provide the outline and the core of what they are writing. Unless the project has its own deadlines for a publication, exhibit, or other public presentation of the material, and thus needs to negotiate a mutually beneficial release date, there is no reason why the interview should not be kept closed for a reasonable period that will give the interviewee the chance to publish a book (or abandon the attempt). The book will most likely depart from the interview in many respects, or it may not use all the interview material. In either case, researchers will benefit from the additional first-person material. Nevertheless, given your oral history project’s investment of time and funds in the interviews, and recognizing that some interviewees will never be able to turn a transcript into a publishable book no matter how long they work on it, do not permit open-ended restrictions on interviews that give the interviewees exclusive use and fail to set a definite time when other researchers can gain access.

When the test pilot Chuck Yeager first read the manuscript of his autobiography prepared by his collaborator, he exclaimed, “Hell, it’s just like me talking.” As it happened, the collaborator had drawn much of the book from forty hours of interviews that Yeager had done with the Air Force Oral History Program. The Senate Historical Office interviewed George Tames, who had photographed Washington people and events for forty years for the New York Times. Although never a member of the Senate staff, Tames had spent nearly every working day of his career on Capitol Hill, getting into the backrooms to snap his photographs. In his interviews, Tames gave vivid descriptions of the senators he captured on film and seemingly had a story for every photograph he took. When his interviews were complete, Tames dictated his own further reminiscences, which he published as Eye on Washington: The Presidents Who’ve Known Me.[36]

Future researchers may also find it useful to compare the original spoken interview with the polished publication. For example, the University of Kentucky Library contains the uncorrected transcript of the long series of interviews that Sidney Shalett conducted with the former U.S. vice president Alben Barkley and used to produce Barkley’s memoir, That Reminds Me (1954). The transcripts reveal a more hot-tempered, opinionated Barkley than appears in his genial autobiography, and the differences between the two versions offer useful insights for researchers.[37]

Should interviews that contain performances be treated differently?

Even if they were not issued on commercially distributed albums, fieldwork recordings remain protected by copyright laws. When dealing with the recordings of indigenous people, there are also moral issues related to traditional culture that supersede the formal legal rights of copyright law. The World Intellectual Property Organization has produced a guide for libraries and archives in safeguarding traditional cultures.[38]

Concerns about protecting the intellectual property rights of the interviewees have been heightened by the increased ease of digitally reproducing sound and visual documentation. Ethnographic recording of traditional music, dance, ritual, and storytelling often mix in oral testimony, turning the entire recording into a performance. Although interviewers have a right to use what they collected for research, the property rights to the recording remain with the performers. Release forms provide that any commercial user of the recording for a film, radio program, or recording must obtain the permission of the performers or their heirs—or at least demonstrate a good faith effort to contact them. As a consequence of these provisions, Peggy Bolger of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center points out, “The first field recordings on wax cylinders, made in 1890 by anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes, with Passamaquoddy tribe members in Maine, singing, telling tales and talking of the lives in 1890, must still be approved for use by the current Passamaquoddy people.”[39]

Do more sensitive subjects require different forms of legal agreements?

Projects tackling highly personal issues face special considerations. Those that have focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) history recommend asking explicit permission for all levels of access. The Sophia Smith Collection decided to take all of its Documenting Lesbian Lives interviews offline and make them available in the campus archives only. In the case of its Voices of Feminism project, which also included LGBT testimony, they put the transcripts online but reserved the video for archival viewing only. Subsequently, Smith adjusted its release to be more explicit about interviewees’ choices regarding access, privacy, anonymity, and copyright; the oral historian explained, “so there is less room for interpretation and a much clearer sense of what she wants done with the material.”[40]

What if someone demands the recordings and transcripts be returned?

Very rarely, an interviewee has second thoughts about an oral history and may refuse to sign a deed of gift or even ask to withdraw the interview from a collection. This unfortunate situation has also occurred when an interviewee dies without signing a deed of gift and the next of kin demands to have the interview back. It is necessary to impress upon these individuals the time and cost that it took to do the interview, and the breach that its removal would cause to the collection. Try negotiating a longer restriction on the interview rather than its removal. Sometimes the interviewee just needs some reassurance that the interview is a valuable document and does not sound foolish. But if the interviewee is adamant, the recordings and transcripts must be returned. After a reasonable interval, a project can contact those who have removed their interviews, or their next of kin, provide some information on the continued progress of the collection, and encourage them to resubmit the interviews so that the story will not be lost.

Can something said in an oral history ever be considered libelous or defamatory?

Unfortunately, yes. Individuals whom interviewees may libel or defame can sue not only the interviewee but also the interviewer and the repository that holds the interview. Such instances are exceedingly rare, but even the threat of a libel suit can be unpleasant. Use common sense. If an interviewee states something extremely negative about a living individual, something that is not widely known or previously published about that individual, and especially if the individual is not a public figure, then simply restrict that material for a period of time until the possibly defamed individual is no longer around to sue. The dead cannot be defamed.

A case in California involved an oral history with a Jewish community leader who remarked in an interview that children at a local Hebrew Academy would stand at attention in the presence of the school’s director “as if the Fuehrer were walking in.” The interview had been open in a university archive for almost a decade, but California limits defamation suits to the first year following publication. The plaintiff sued for defamation, arguing that the original opening of the document in the library had been obscure, and that the year should begin from the moment that a researcher stumbled across it and alerted him. A lower court initially allowed the case to go forward, but the state supreme court overturned that ruling on the grounds that the University of California at Berkeley had indeed “published” the interview years earlier when it originally opened it for research.[41]

Rather than keep the whole interview closed because of one potentially libelous or defamatory story, restrict that portion for a period of time until the closure can be safely lifted. It may be disappointing not to be able to open a juicy story immediately. But as a lawyer once advised an oral history project: “You could probably win a libel suit in court, but you wouldn’t want to see the legal bills that would be the result.”[42]

What should you do if the nature of the project changes after releases have been signed?

At Sophia University in Tokyo, historians began collecting oral narratives of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear radiation leakage that ravaged northern Japan in 2011. As the project progressed, it began dealing with more personal and sensitive matters than the interviewers originally anticipated. The oral historians then felt compelled to show their results to their interviewees, even though they had already signed their release forms. Since the project’s goal was to create an archive for the community, the directors felt that interviewees might not want to show some of the information to the community. This was a matter of simple decency rather than a legal requirement.

Can a promise of confidentiality be broken by the courts?

In order to convince people to speak candidly, oral historians promise confidentiality as long as their interviews remain restricted. Although such confidentiality is critical, oral historians must be careful not to overstate their ability to protect sealed interviews from subpoenas. Interviewers do not possess a lawyer-client privilege. A case involving oral histories conducted in Northern Ireland attracted international attention when the British government sought access to closed interviews that dealt with a murder. Interviewers had conducted oral histories with veterans of the Irish Republican Army and Ulster Volunteer Force. To ensure candidness, and to protect the safety of those their interviewees, the project promised to seal the interviews during their lifetime. When this plan was explained to Brendan Hughes, one of the interviewees, he replied, “If I did have a problem with that, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking into the microphone.”[43] After Hughes died, his interviews were deposited at Boston College and released in a book and documentary, Voices from the Grave. The publicity it generated alerted police in Northern Ireland, who sought access to the rest of the interviews dealing with an unsolved murder. Since the United States had a treaty obligation to cooperate with British criminal investigations, the U.S. Department of Justice served subpoenas on Boston College for its interviews with IRA members Hughes and Dolours Price. Hughes had died, but the college appealed to the courts to quash the subpoena for Price, who at the time was still living.[44]

A federal district court in Massachusetts ruled against Boston College, concluding that its oral historians had “made promises they could not keep.” When dealing with criminal investigations, the court said, “there is no academic privilege which shields the material from disclosure.” The court also pointed out that the researchers themselves had publicized the oral history project before the subpoenas had been issued. One newspaper editorial bore the headline “If You Murdered Someone, Don’t Tell an Oral Historian.”[45]

Although the judges went to great lengths to weigh the right of confidentiality against the obligation to investigate criminal actions, and limited the information that could be subpoenaed, the ruling reminded oral historians that pledges of confidentiality are not inviolate. Fortunately, few oral history interviews contain murder confessions or involve international treaty agreements. If an interviewee should discuss something that was illegal, discretion is the best course of action. Refrain from advertising the interview or using it for public presentation until after the parties are deceased or the statute of limitations has expired. When dealing with extremely sensitive subjects, interviewers need to make clear that while they will take every effort to keep the interviews sealed in accordance with the terms of the agreement with the interviewee, they can do so only within the extent the law.[46]

If an interview reveals that a crime has been committed, do oral historians have a responsibility to report it?

The Boston College case raises the issue of the legal responsibilities of interviewers and oral history projects if someone admits in an interview to having committed a crime. In cases of elderly interviewees, the statute of limitations has likely expired on any youthful transgressions, but oral historians have also confronted more recent cases of fraud, robbery, and even murder. Merely keeping such information to oneself is not a criminal offense—but making untruthful statements about it, deliberately hiding it, or actively seeking to shield the perpetrator could put one in legal jeopardy. John Neuenschwander, who is both a lawyer and an oral historian, has advised that there is only a “remote possibility” of being charged with a crime for not reporting such information, particularly for lesser crimes. If an oral history project has made a promise of confidentiality for a set period of time, then every effort should be made to honor that pledge. If an interviewer feels morally bound to share knowledge of an illegal act with the authorities, then Neuenschwander recommends first making an effort to corroborate the confession or accusation before passing it on and making sure that the crime is, in fact, a felony.[47]

Archiving and the Internet

What should be done with the finished interviews?

If the oral history project is not part of a library, archive, historical society, or other institution that deals with researchers, then its recordings and transcripts should be deposited somewhere that is capable of preserving the interviews and of making them available for general use. Public libraries are usually eager to gather materials about a community, its longtime families, churches, and schools for their local history sections. Archives will be pleased to receive copies of interviews relating to any person for whom they hold manuscript collections. University libraries often collect interviews done by students and faculty members. Larger oral history offices are willing to take in donated collections on a wide array of topics.

Each interview’s deed of gift should indicate that the interviewee knows, and approves, the interview repository. Supply the repository with basic information about the interviews, project goals, sponsorship, and funding and make sure that all interviewers have documented their preparation, methods, and interview circumstances.

Since oral history recordings and transcripts are easily copied, it is not necessary to limit the deposit to a single institution. Put copies of your oral histories wherever researchers are more likely to use them: in different libraries in a community, in archives that have the papers of the interviewee, or with institutions closely associated with the interviewee. In addition, plan to give at least one if not several copies to the interviewee. Even in inexpensive loose-leaf or spiral binding, transcripts make treasured gifts for family members. Retain at least one copy, or disk, for the oral history project’s own future reference.

How do you let people know where to find your project’s oral histories?

Having gone through all the steps of conducting, processing, and preserving oral history interviews, it can be a source of immense frustration when researchers fail to use them. Your oral history project is really not over until you have made an effort to publicize the existence of the collection. Send announcements to professional organizations or to H-OralHist and other Internet listservs for historians and other disciplines whose researchers are likely to be interested in the subject. Consider writing a brief article, drawing from the interviews, for publication in a newsletter or local newspaper. Oral histories can be included in library catalogs. Archival projects also report their collections on the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) or the Online Catalog Library Center (OCLC).

In addition to scholarly researchers, you should also make the interviews available to the community from which they came. The library or archive where the interviews are deposited may be willing to mount an exhibit based on them or post them on their websites. Local newspapers and broadcasters may draw from the collected materials for articles, programs, and documentaries. Pamphlets and other publications can be planned to give the material a wider distribution. Documentaries, slide shows, and radio and theatrical performance have all tapped into the abundant resources of oral history.

Should oral histories be posted on the Internet?

Given the democratic impulses of the oral history movement, the Internet has become a natural outlet for oral history projects—the most universal and cost-effective means of mass communication and dissemination yet devised. As soon as the Internet became widely available in the 1990s, oral history projects from high schools to government agencies began posting excerpts and entire transcripts of interviews. Some sites feature segments of the audio and video recordings, along with photographs and other illustrations. The Internet helped return oral histories to the community and expanded the boundaries of our definition of community. It became especially attractive for reaching students who preferred electronic over print media, or who could not afford to travel much distance to visit an archives. Website interviews regularly receive more visitors in a month on the Internet than in all the years they sat on archival shelves.

Some oral historians have expressed reservations about putting interviews online, worried about the need to protect interviewees’ privacy, the danger of misuse and manipulation of sound recordings and transcripts, and the “unmonitored access” of the Internet, which would mean a loss of archival control over the interviews. They question whether deeds of gift that did not anticipated electronic reproduction and distribution would permit the posting of interviews on the Internet without the express permission of the interviewees or their next of kin. Oral historians have been grappling with such ethical issues to avoid any exploitation of their interviewees. But the solution is not to avoid the Internet, for fear of stepping into a minefield. On the contrary, those projects that do not avail themselves of the Internet run the risk of being overlooked by researchers.

Posting an oral history online is not the equivalent of publishing it. The Internet is a distributor rather than a publisher, and oral history transcripts are raw data rather than books. Most researchers will not read the entire text of an interview online but will seek specific information and then move on. For citation purposes, researchers who consult interview transcripts online want the product to resemble as much as possible the original document, including the pagination. Some projects prefer to post their interviews as a PDF (portable document format), which simply reproduces the printed copy. Oral historians themselves will use the Internet when doing research needed to prepare for their interviews, from genealogical data to newspaper articles, alumni news, and background material on organizations and communities with which interviewees were associated, and even maps and driving directions to their homes.

The World Wide Web supplements the oral history archives, which continue to house the original records and transcripts. It extends archival services to the furthest reaches of the globe. It makes more researchers aware of the panoramic scope of oral history that has been conducted and more likely to use those interviews. Wider scrutiny has also led to increased peer review of interviews, with greater attention to issues of evidence and content, and more rigorous methodological standards.[48]

What needs to be taken into consideration before putting interviews on the Internet?

Projects need to build electronic media into their operating plans, informing participants in advance of the anticipated presentations and letting them know their options. They might also draft deeds of gift that specifically permit digital electronic reproduction of the interviews and prepare transcripts in formats convenient for posting. For established oral history archives the task of digitizing a large collection can be daunting. A reasonable strategy would be to start by making finding aids available online to alert researchers as to what exists where. Projects can scan older transcripts and post a sample of their interviews to display the richness of their collection. Researchers can then pay virtual visits to the collections, searching the finding aides, reading transcripts, listening to some of the recordings, and consulting with the archivists by e-mail.

Digitizing an oral history collection can be labor-intensive and time-consuming, particularly when audio and visual materials are included in the presentation. Projects can often tap student help, although the turnover in staff requires regular training and close monitoring for quality control. As websites expand with content over time, to keep them manageable, it is advisable to stick to clear and consistent formats. Unlike a book, where users will generally start at the beginning and flip through to the desired section, web browsers can approach a site at any point. Visitors need to be informed where they are and be provided with ready links to the project’s home page. “Users want ease of access and use,” notes Tamara Kennelly, university archivist at Virginia Tech. “They want to navigate easily around a site.”[49]

Unfortunately, the Internet has also made plagiarism easier, and oral historians have been dismayed to find their interviews reproduced without attribution. Projects posting interviews on their websites need to make clear to visitors the copyright status of the transcripts and audio and video clips in order to prevent illicit reproduction and rebroadcast. Some have redesigned their deeds of gift to stipulate whether the interviewee wishes to be consulted before any commercial broadcast or electronic publication of the interview. By the same token, projects should take care in reproducing film or sound clips for which they do not hold copyright or permission from the holder. Even a nonprofit educational organization can be liable for copyright infringement. Projects also need to exercise some discretion in posting inflammatory material. Libel and defamation are areas of concern on the Internet, just as in archives and publication. Interviewees, interviewers, and projects remain liable for spreading malicious untruths. Internet servers, by contrast, cannot be held responsible for the content of an interview.[50]

It is imperative that oral historians avoid any exploitation of their interviewees. Beyond revising their deeds of gift for current interviewing, projects should notify living interviewees before placing their interviews online (although it seems excessive to track down next of kin for permission, since their intentions may conflict with those of the interviewee). Oral historians need to honor the wishes of those who find the possibility of worldwide access to their interviews during their lifetimes either threatening or invasive of the privacy. But since most interviewees hope to leave something of themselves for posterity, where their memories might be published, exhibited, and otherwise not forgotten, they are generally pleased to have their interviews widely accessible. In fact, posting interviews has become so commonplace that it is not unusual for interviewees to ask how soon it will be before their interviews go online.

3

Conducting Interviews

What qualities make a good interviewer?

Good interviewing combines a mix of privilege, passion, patience, and persistence, as the pioneer oral historian Ronald Fraser defined it. Fraser felt privileged to have the opportunity to create new sources and had a passion for sharing in the re-creation of people’s lives. He also needed patience to listen to them tell their stories at length and persistence to get them to answer his questions.[1]

For Studs Terkel, successful interviewing meant “engaging in conversation, having a cup of coffee.” Terkel adopted an unobtrusive, straightforward, and sympathetic interviewing style, but he was challenging when necessary. One interviewee described him as easygoing: “He doesn’t ask particularly probing questions, and yet he’s able to get people to open up and tell these marvelous little stories about themselves. He’s a good listener.”[2]

The radio interviewer Bob Edwards similarly described himself as “a relaxed, easygoing guy, and I hope people are relaxed with me. They’re more forthcoming if they’re comfortable.” All interviewers need to put their interviewees at ease, to listen carefully to what they have to say, to respect their opinions, and to encourage candid responses. Listening skills do not come automatically, and interviewers have to work hard to achieve these results.[3]

Unlike radio interviews, however, where conciseness is appreciated and longer responses often edited, oral historians have different goals. “We want the ramble, the anecdote, the digression,” said Cathy Courtney, an interviewer for the British National Life Stories. “We start with the family history they know, and by the time we’ve talked about the parents, grandparents, some uncles and aunts and all those relatives’ politics and clothes and cooking, by the time the spotlight is on the present person, they understand where you’re coming from.”[4]

Interviews are partly performance. Not only do interviewers want to handle themselves well, but interviewees often feel nervous about their ability to recall and describe events long past; they also want to do well. No one wants to sound forgetful or inarticulate. Interviewers should become a partner in the process, helping interviewees become as forthcoming and accurate as possible. Interviewers need to guide without leading, providing names, dates, and other information to keep the dialogue moving. A critical task is to move interviewees beyond reluctance to an honest and perhaps self-critical evaluation of the past.[5]

Fundamental rules and principles apply to all types of oral history interviewing: do your homework; be prepared; construct meaningful but open-ended questions; do not interrupt responses; follow up on what you have heard; know your equipment thoroughly; promptly process your recordings; and always keep in mind the practice and ethics of interviewing.

Preparation for the Interview

How should an interviewer get ready for an interview?

Litigators say that they do 90 percent of their work before they stand up in court. Similarly, when conducting an oral history, the bulk of your work should be behind you before you ask your first question.[6] Familiarize yourself with whatever information is available about the general subject matter and about the people to be interviewed, their families, communities, jobs, successes, and failures. Interviewers first get acquainted with the outline of interviewees’ lives and then allow them to fill in the details. Read any published sources, such as family histories, histories of the town or institution, and histories of the events that the individual experienced, to understand and formulate questions.

Back issues of newspapers and magazines, published and unpublished genealogies, and other sources likely to be found in the local history section of a library or on websites are natural beginnings for your research. Some interviewees have deposited their papers in a library, although most still have their papers, scrapbooks, and other memorabilia in their closets, attics, and basements. Ask them to make these records available prior to the interview. Others bring relevant memoranda, letters, and photographs to the interview. When all else fails, ask interviewees to give brief descriptions of themselves and to suggest what other sources you might consult.

Social networking provides another means of collecting information. On Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and in personal blogs, people have increasingly been recording their daily lives and personal histories. This digital trail may make it easier for researchers to compare later recorded memories and may also accustom interviewees to talk more freely about personal matters.[7]

An especially helpful way to begin your preparations is to read or listen to other oral histories. Investigate other interviews from your project or the recordings and transcripts deposited in a library. Techniques vary, even from interview to interview, depending on the interviewer’s expertise and the interviewee’s cooperation and loquaciousness. Analyzing different types of questions, and ways of asking them, will help you construct your own questioning style. The Former Members of Congress project interviewed more than one hundred former senators and representatives and gave the tapes and transcripts to the Library of Congress. A number of interviewers participated, and their transcripts reveal a variety of styles and approaches: historians asked questions that fit a mostly biographical framework; political scientists asked organizational questions about seniority, staff, committee assignments, leadership, and other aspects of congressional group behavior.[8]

When preparing a budget, count on doing as many as ten hours of research for every hour of interview conducted. Usually, only the initial interview sessions will require so much advance research. Subsequent interviews will build on the original research and require less preparation time. The cost of preparation decreases when several interviews can be conducted from a single investment in prior research.

Is so much research really necessary?

Yes. It is the only way to determine what questions to ask. The more an interviewer knows about the individual and the subject matter, the easier it is to build rapport and conduct the interview. Interviewees become impatient with interviewers whose questions show they do not know the subject matter.

Research also helps an interviewer supply information that the interviewee has forgotten. As they backtrack through their lives, few people remember names and dates accurately. An interview can come to a standstill while the interviewee gropes for a forgotten name (“that tall man, you know, what’s his name, the economist, who smoked a pipe”). If the interviewer can provide the name (“Do you mean John Kenneth Galbraith?”), the interviewee, with great relief, will continue as if uninterrupted. If you do not know it, promise to look up the name later to fill in the transcript. Many interviewees, especially older people, lack confidence in their own memories and tensely view an interview as a test. Interviewers should try to put them at ease. Dates are also significant, since people will often jumble the chronology or merge events that took place at different times. By interjecting, “Didn’t that happen in 1980 rather than 1990?” the interviewer can help the interviewee get back on track.

Interviewers need to be sufficiently prepared to know both what to expect and what not to expect from an interview. If interviewees make claims that conflict with other accounts, encourage them to explain further. Interviewees may bring up some entirely new matter that was not part of the original research. Explore this new topic by saying, “I didn’t know about that. Can you tell me more about it?” Although interviewers work hard to prepare questions in advance, they must be willing to deviate from them sometimes to follow the interviewee’s detours, which may provide valuable information.

How many questions should be prepared for each interview?

It is safer to have too many questions than too few. Some interviewees talk at great length in response to a single question. During a soliloquy, they may anticipate several questions on the interviewer’s list and discuss these issues without being prompted. Others answer briefly and need several follow-up questions to draw them out. Whenever Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield appeared on Meet the Press, the program’s interviewers prepared twice as many questions as for other guests because the senator habitually abbreviated his responses to “Yep” and “Nope.” If an interviewer has prepared more questions than time permits, another interview session would be in order.

Avoid asking the type of question that elicits a brief answer, such as: “You grew up in Grand Rapids?” “Yes.” “And you went to public school there?” “Yes, I did.” Instead of simply verifying your research notes, ask: “What was Grand Rapids like when you were growing up there?” and, “Tell me about the schools you attended.” Transcripts that show a string of single-sentence answers indicate poor interviewing techniques. Oral historians seek broader, longer, and more interpretive answers.

Do not ask more than one question at a time; most interviewees will address only one of them. Then, either the interviewer has to repeat the other half of the question later or it is simply forgotten in the flow of the narrative.

How many times should one person be interviewed?

Single-session oral histories are “audio snapshots.” Depending on the objectives and budget of your project, try to conduct more than one interview with each person. It often takes more than one interview just to break the ice. Repeated visits help establish an intimacy that encourages candidness. Both interviewer and interviewee need some time together to develop the rapport necessary to ask difficult questions and to give honest answers. One interviewee began his fourth interview session by saying, “Up till now I’ve been giving it to you sugar-coated” and went on to discuss his most disagreeable professional relations. It took the first three interviews to gain his confidence before he lowered his guard.

Interviewees do not necessarily hold things back deliberately; it takes time for anyone to remember all the relevant details. Most minds do not work in a precise and orderly manner, and most of us cannot call forth recollections in perfect chronological order, grouped together logically. An interviewee may talk at length about President Harry Truman’s administration and seem to have completely exhausted the subject, until a later session when a question about John F. Kennedy elicits the response, “Kennedy handled that differently than Truman.” The interviewee then recounts an aspect of the Truman years that had not come to mind earlier.

Some interviewees just do not have much to say. They may suffer from “mike fright” and become tense. They may not have been very perceptive. Their memories may be clouded. One interviewee in a nursing home drifted off to sleep twice during his interview, awakening each time the interviewer began to pack up the equipment and continuing the interview as if uninterrupted. There was no second session. Other interviewees will surprise you with their volubility, the depth of their recall, and their articulateness. In these cases, it is best to return for several sessions until the interviewer feels they have exhausted the subject matter.

But beware of the lonely interviewee who seeks to prolong interview sessions unnecessarily. Some interviewees have few visitors or are not taken very seriously by their families, and they revel in an audience. Take care to be sensitive to the needs of older interviewees, but remember that you are not a psychiatrist offering free and unlimited therapy sessions.

How long should an average interview last?

Unless you are traveling and have a tight schedule that requires lengthier, even full-day sessions, plan each interview session for no longer than two hours. Longer sessions often have a “narcotic” effect on the interviewee, who can become fatigued and distracted. The interviewer will also have trouble listening to what is being said. If prolonged sessions are necessary, arrange for several short breaks to give both parties a rest.[9]

Setting up the Interview

Who should be interviewed first?

Logically, you should start with the oldest and the most significant players in the events or community that you are pursuing. For any number of reasons, some people develop more influence, respect, and standing with an organization, profession, or community. A significant player may have been the one who held a critical post, had a warm and caring personality, or served as the institution’s unofficial historian and record-keeper. If interviewed early in the process, they can help identify and locate other potential interviewees and help persuade them to be interviewed. Called the “gatekeepers” by oral historians, their assistance is often indispensable. The gatekeeper may have been a longtime employee who still communicates with former colleagues, or a surviving spouse, other relative, or a close friend of a key figure in the events. Others often wait until the gatekeeper has sanctioned the interviews. While trying to interview Benjamin V. Cohen and Thomas G. Corcoran, the “Gold Dust Twins” who shaped much New Deal legislation, I received no response to my letters and phone calls to Corcoran. But the day after I interviewed Cohen, Corcoran’s secretary scheduled an appointment, indicating that I had passed inspection.

Always keep actuarial realities in mind. Planning an oral history project can be so time-consuming that when a project is ready to begin interviewing, the best prospective interviewees may either have died or become too ill to give a useful interview. Potential interviewees should be grouped according to age, significance to the theme of the project, and availability in terms of time and location. Save for a later stage of the project those who are younger, more peripheral, and further away. Travel constraints, however, frequently require that interviewees living in a particular location be bunched together. Remember also the practical journalism advice of starting with those “who are most likely to cooperate.” Less cooperative subjects require repeated invitations and patient persistence. In the end, they may agree to be interviewed only to keep others whom they opposed, distrusted, or held in contempt from monopolizing the historical record.[10]

How do you locate potential interviewees?

The oral historian has to play detective. Word-of-mouth referrals will unearth many potential interviewees, but quite often oral historians have to hunt for their subjects. If interviewing for a biography, the interviewer who has read the subject’s papers will know which people corresponded with the subject and may have their return addresses on their correspondence. Online phone directories can help locate interviewees. When searching the Internet for information on specific people, start by checking their names in a general search engine. Government agencies place a wide variety of public records databases on the Internet regarding licensed occupations, from doctors to contractors. Databases like the Martindale-Hubbel Lawyer Locator provide information on attorneys, while Dunn & Bradstreet identifies business leaders.[11]

Certain individuals within a family or an organization make a point of keeping in contact with other family members, neighbors, and colleagues and can provide current addresses and telephone numbers. Associations and corporations publish newsletters that reach current and retired employees and can carry stories and advertisements about an oral history project. Advertisements may also locate potential interviewees, but indiscriminate calls for volunteers may inundate the interviewer with an unmanageable number of willing interviewees and not necessarily identify those who can make the most valuable contributions.[12]

What’s the best way to initiate contact with an interviewee?

By e-mail, letter, or phone call, state the purpose of the interview and the nature of the project. Explain what will happen to the recordings and transcripts, and describe the legal release the interviewee will be asked to sign. Follow up any phone conversation with an e-mail or letter to establish a record for your own files. It is especially important for older interviewees to have your name, address, phone number, the purposes of the interview, and the scheduled date in writing.

Sometimes the interviewer plans a preliminary meeting, perhaps over lunch, to get acquainted with the interviewee and to get a better idea of the major subjects that will be discussed during the actual interviews. Being able to have preliminary meetings clearly depends on the time available, for both the interviewer and interviewee, and the project’s budget. In some projects, pre-interview sessions are discouraged to avoid losing the spontaneity and candidness of unrehearsed questioning. The television interviewer Brian Lamb complains of having “ruined” some of his interviews by asking questions before the cameras were turned on, since a question asked the second time rarely elicits a response as fully satisfying as it did the first time.

Schedule the interview at the interviewee’s convenience, and make sure to arrive on time. With more prominent interviewees, scheduling can pose problems, especially if the interviewer must travel any distance to the interview. Reiterate to the interviewee the purpose of the project, and be sure to mention the difficulty and expense in arranging it. When planning to go to the interviewee’s home or office, make sure you know how to get there. Nothing starts an interview more disagreeably than for an interviewer to arrive late and tense after a frantic search for the right address. Interviewers are guests and should act accordingly. Interviews can easily go awry if the interviewer arrives late, smokes, chews gum, dresses inappropriately, or otherwise offends the interviewee’s sensibilities.

In some cultures, exchanging pleasantries when arriving at someone’s home is an essential and time-consuming prerequisite. It may involve sitting and exchanging comments about family and weather, having something to eat, or sipping coffee, whether you like it or not. Beyond social graces, the interviewee is most likely judging the interviewer’s intentions and determining how cooperative to be.

Conducting the Interview

Where should you position the recorder?

Place the recorder where the interviewer can easily see it and periodically check its functioning, but where it is out of the interviewee’s direct line of vision, to keep it from becoming a distraction. Equipment sometimes makes people nervous, but after a few minutes most will begin to ignore the recorder if it is not right in front of them. The microphone should be situated near the interviewee, preferably pinned on as a lavalier microphone. Electrical outlets, or their absence, may also determine the position of the recorder. Bring batteries in case there are no convenient outlets or the original batteries wear down. Recorders should never be completely concealed, however, since hidden recording is antithetical to the trust and confidence on which oral history depends. Surreptitious recording is unethical and often illegal.

Become familiar with your equipment, both the recorder and the microphones. Failure to test equipment may cause the entire interview to be lost or so poorly recorded that it is difficult to transcribe. Every interviewer should try transcribing an interview at least once to grasp the critical necessity of good sound quality.

Most interviewers try to set up their equipment in a quiet place where the interview will not be interrupted by children, inquiring spouses, secretaries, ringing phones, open windows, birdsong, street traffic, air conditioners, loud clocks, and the like. Interviewees will want to be good hosts, but clinking coffee cups and plates, ice twirling in drinks, and other extraneous noises will all be picked up on the recording. The interviewee may be unperturbed by this everyday commotion, but it will distract the interviewer and make the recording more difficult to use for transcribing, editing, and research purposes. An interviewer once recorded while seated at a table under a bird cage, not noticing the sound until he played back the tape and found that “noises of the parakeet scratching in his cage all but drowned out the interviewee.”[13]

By contrast, folklorists, linguists, and anthropologists may want to capture the “sound environment” of the interview—ambient sounds from church bells to ocean waves. To do so, they may conduct interviews while moving about. A mobile interview requires some advance logistics. Be sure that individuals have the physical stamina to walk or stand during the interview, and that you can position the microphone close enough to where the interviewee is walking to capture what is being said distinctly.[14]

Should questions be arranged chronologically or topically?

The scheme of interviewing depends on the goals of the project. For some projects the entire life story of the interviewee will be relevant; for other projects, the focus will be on the events in which the interviewee participated. For instance, Andrew Young might be interviewed for his entire life, for his tenure as United Nations ambassador, or for his role in the civil rights movement. Biographical interviews usually proceed chronologically. If the focus of a project is on an event, then the questions will be more topical.

Jumping right into the main question is not the best approach. Avoid making the first question too abrupt and confrontational; instead, build up to the climactic questions by establishing the historical setting and making the interviewee more comfortable with the process. Set the stage with general questions and then follow with more specific, pointed questions. Strictly topical questions may elicit responses that lack depth and context. Topical questions, however, can follow quite appropriately within a chronological framework.

Within either of these frameworks, oral historians have found that there are a half-dozen basic types of questions that they can ask. There are basic descriptive or “help-me-understand” questions; structural or “walk-me-through-a-typical day” questions; follow-up or clarifying questions; experience or example questions; comparison or contrasting questions; and closing questions.[15]

Are open-ended questions preferable to specific questions?

It works best to start with open-ended questions, such as “Please tell me about your childhood.” Specific questions can follow: “What schools did you attend?” Starting with too specific a question gives the interviewer too much control of the interview. Interviewers should let interviewees explain what they think is most significant before beginning to narrow the questions. “The best oral history is a quasi-monologue on the part of the interviewee,” the oral historian Sherna Gluck has observed, “which is encouraged by approving nods, appreciative smiles, and enraptured listening and stimulated by understanding comments and intelligent questions.”[16]

Use open-ended questions to allow interviewees to volunteer their own accounts, to speculate on matters, and to have enough time to include all the material they think relevant to the subject. Use more specific questions to elicit factual information, often in response to something the interviewee has mentioned while answering an open-ended question. Political reporters and courtroom attorneys use this type of mixed questioning in an approach that has been called “funnel interviewing.” Their search begins with general questions and then constantly narrows until the subject has difficulty not answering the final, more specific questions. Oral history is a much less adversarial means of interviewing, but the funnel approach remains useful when the subject is controversial.[17]

In framing an open-ended question, the oral historian Charles Morrissey postulates that the two-sentence format often works best. The first sentence should state the problem; the second poses the question: “The records show you were a leader in establishing the zoning laws that shaped this town. Why were zoning laws your objectives?” There are a number of possible follow-up questions: “How did these laws specifically affect your neighborhood?” “What complaints were raised about these laws?” “How effective would you judge these laws to have been?” “Looking back from today, what would you have done differently?” Questions also might relate to specific zoning incidents drawn from newspaper clippings. For such a topic, a map might serve as a good visual prompter during the interview and as appendix material for the transcript.[18]

Keep in mind that interviewers are not restricted to just asking questions. Statements of fact, concise restatements of what the interviewee has said, brief observations and comments can also stimulate responses from the interviewee as well as inject more spontaneity into the discussion. Mixing occasional comments among the questions provides some relief and can prevent the interview from sounding too much like a cross-examination. But interviewers should always use such injections in moderation to avoid skewing the contents of the interview with their own opinions.

What you are looking for is a mix of stories and interpretations. To get stories, the oral historian Ronald Grele recommends asking, “Can you give an example when that happened to you?” To get interpretation, and place the story in a larger context, the next question might be, “Was that typical? Did that happen to others in your neighborhood?” This will encourage people to speculate and generalize. Interviewers often have favorite questions they ask everyone. “Did you have any teachers who particularly influenced you?” “How did the institution change during the years you worked there?” The biographer Robert Caro regularly asks his interviewees, “What would I see if I were there?” This tactic has helped him write vividly, using personal recollections to draw word pictures that enable readers to envision the scene.[19]

The use of open-ended questions has been cited as a means of “empowering” interviewees—that is, by encouraging interviewees to relate and to interpret their own stories, such questions shift the balance of power from the interviewer to the interviewee. Those who talk of empowerment view the interviewee as an “informant” and the interviewer as a “reporter.” The interviewer may be asking the questions, but the interviewee is actively shaping the course of the interview rather than responding passively. These notions have raised the consciousness especially of those sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists who generally do not identify—or create fictional identities for—their oral sources and of interviewers who work outside their own cultures and struggle not to impose their cultural assumptions on the people they observe and interview.[20]

Can the framing of a question distort the answer?

Pollsters say that if you can tell from what position a question is being asked, then the question is loaded. “Do you support a balanced budget amendment to end waste and fraud in the government?” is loaded. “Do you support a balanced budget amendment?” is neutral. Journalists will often ask leading and manipulative questions; the preface “wouldn’t you say...” is designed to produce a response that fits a particular hypothesis. Many politicians have regretted letting a reporter put words into their mouths with such questions. Researchers working on a specific book or article similarly ask questions to fill holes in their evidence, usually having in mind the answer that they hope to hear. The danger of this approach is that interviewees want to please and will pick up clues—from the type of question asked to the tone of voice used—to ascertain what kind of answer they think the interviewer wants to hear. The result is the opposite of how an oral history should proceed.[21]

Start with broad, open-ended questions and allow the interviewee to talk broadly, ranging as far and wide as possible. Listen and make notes as the interviewee speaks, but do not interrupt. When it is clear that the person has exhausted the subject and stopped, go back and ask specific follow-up questions, clarify points of confusion or contradiction, and pursue details.

As mentioned, when framing questions, be careful not to ask more than one at the same time. Multiple questions can cause confusion or allow interviewees to ignore those parts they do not want to answer.

What if the answers are perfunctory?

Short answers may be a sign that an interviewer is asking too many specific questions and not enough open-ended “how” and “why” questions. Interviewees are not always sure of how much detail interviewers want. They may give answers that are to the point, but short, unrevealing, and unreflective. Never be satisfied with brief answers, and follow up with more detailed questions to draw the interviewee out.

Short answers may also indicate that the interviewer has been too quick to jump in with the next question. It requires some discipline to remain silent after asking a question, and to remain so until absolutely certain that the interviewee has finished answering. Try not to speak immediately after the interviewee stops, since it may just be a pause for a breath of air or for gathering additional thoughts. Silence indicates that an interviewer expects more. Ten seconds can seem excruciatingly long if neither party is speaking, but can encourage the interviewee to give a more detailed response.[22]

Sometimes answers are perfunctory simply because the interviewer has not engaged the interviewee’s interest. Try varying the types of questions and the subjects they cover. Studs Terkel described his interview with the ninety-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell. Allotted only half an hour, Terkel knew he would be escorted out promptly when his time was up. His first theoretical question elicited only a short reply. He switched to more provocative questions and noted that as Russell became engaged, his answers grew longer. With time running out, Terkel sought “the home run question.” “Lord Russell,” he asked, “what is the world you envision?” Russell’s response summarized his hopes and frustrations, ending with a touch of weariness. Although he might have ended there, Terkel tried for “a parting shot.” “You liked Shelley when you were young, in your formative years,” he said. “Do you still feel the same way?” That charming, personal question showed that the interviewer knew his subject and had come well prepared (although it might have been more effective if he had asked it earlier in the interview). The interview succeeded because the fully engaged interviewer was constantly evaluating his interviewee’s responses and changed gears to provoke more stimulating responses. Terkel reminds us that every interviewer ought to be looking for the “home run question.”[23]

How should you deal with an uncooperative interviewee?

Robert McNamara, who served as U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, began his interview for the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library by expressing skepticism about the value of oral history. He claimed a poor memory and an inability to separate his personal feelings and judgments from a professional appraisal of the events. McNamara added that he thought too many interviewers were poorly prepared to deal with the subject matter. He said he agreed to do the interview only at the urging of the president’s widow, and he conceded that the Johnson Library had assigned an expert in the field to conduct the interviews. So against his better judgment he proceeded.[24]

Former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie once greeted an interviewer by pointing out that he had given his papers to an archives so that historians would not bother him. Anyone who expected him to remember and comment on events that happened years ago “must live in the realm of the ridiculous.” The interviewer was well aware of his subject’s reputed temperament and had come prepared with a plan. He knew Muskie retained a strong attachment to his home state of Maine, and although the interview dealt with foreign policy, the interviewer asked about the foreign policy concerns of people in this town or that. The questions appealed to the secretary’s interests, and he began to speak at length, continuing well beyond the mandated time for the interview.[25]

For many personal reasons, ranging from their state of health to their unhappiness over the way their lives and careers developed, some people will be uncooperative witnesses. Perhaps they disliked or resented the individual whom the interviewer is researching. They may not like “dredging up the past.” By preparing as thoroughly as possible for an interview in advance, interviewers should be able to anticipate some of the causes of such behavior and to develop strategies for dealing with them. If one line of questioning elicits bitterness, shift to another approach. Seek areas that the interviewee enjoys talking about before raising the disagreeable questions. Be prepared to justify the need to “stir up those old ashes” after so many years and to explain why scholars are seeking answers to these questions.

Some people will answer evasively. They may be testing the interviewer’s knowledge. If the interviewer allows them to respond incompletely, they will continue to do so. Following up with more specific questions on the same subject, thereby indicating that the answers were insufficient, may elicit more complete or informative responses. If this tack does not work, then clearly and respectfully point out that the interviewee seems to be less than forthcoming. Perhaps the interviewee will make some explanation or finally give a fuller response. If not, the interview should be ended.

It does not pay to press a difficult interviewee with confrontational questions. “If you start an interview with Henry Kissinger by saying, ‘Are you a war criminal?’ all you do is make him close up,” said the radio interviewer Leonard Lopate. “I think it’s more important to find out what that person is all about—and almost all the time, if you ask the right questions, you will get the answer.”[26]

Sometimes a little humor can go a long way in establishing rapport. News reporters have found that a cheerful approach helps people relax and think less about the formality of the interview. If they can make their interviewee laugh, the interview becomes more of a conversation. Calling interviewing the “art of practiced seduction,” Suzie Mackenzie, who writes for the Guardian, advises interviewers “to smile, to laugh at their jokes, give them every possible sign that they have your complete attention....But interviewing is not about charming someone, it’s to do with making them want to charm you and then not resisting their charm.”[27]

How personal should an interviewer get?

The degree to which an interview explores personal matters is something that each interviewer and interviewee will have to work out between themselves. Like the media, historians increasingly want to know about the personal and private side of public figures. The feminist notion that “the personal is political” has also contributed to the merging of the public and personal spheres in historical analysis. Whether individual interviewees will answer personal questions is another matter.

Different people have different concepts of what is personal. When Ronald Steel was interviewing Walter Lippmann for his biography, Lippmann volunteered to cooperate fully, so long as Steel did not ask anything personal. Steel soon learned that Lippmann defined the word quite broadly. Once when Steel asked him what his father had done for a living, Lippmann stared at him silently and then replied, “I wouldn’t want you to make a novel out of this.” (Lippmann was not proud that his family’s fortune rested on rents from tenement houses.)[28] In fact, Lippmann’s lawyer, Louis Auchincloss, did turn a major turning point of Lippmann’s private life into a novel, The House of the Prophet, in which the protagonist complains: “Biography is a whole new ball game. It is possible now, even in the lifetimes of our very greatest men, to persuade their friends and acquaintances to record on tape their most intimate impressions of these individuals. All you have to do is wave in their faces the sacred banner of history.”[29]

The painfulness of recounting highly personal experiences can make an interview uncomfortable for both interviewer and interviewee. Elizabeth Norman, who interviewed American nurses trapped on Bataan by the Japanese during World War II, found it troublesome when the women cried. “I didn’t think you could cry over memories that were fifty-five years old,” she commented. “That was very difficult for me to watch, because of their sense of loss—and they lost a lot in the war. They lost their youth, many, many friends, their physical health, in some cases their emotional health, and they would cry about it. As a human being, that was hard to watch.” Interviewers need to measure the level of discomfort they are likely to cause against the relevance of the subject matter and the importance of preserving the story, treat interviewees with dignity and compassion, and pause sufficiently while interviewees regain their composure.[30]

The sociologist Richard Sennett has reminded interviewers not to react with stony indifference to an interviewee’s problems. Interviewers need to give something of themselves in order to merit an open response. He defined the craft of interviewing as “calibrating social distances without making the subject feel like an insect under the microscope.”[31]

How important is empathy when interviewing?

Empathy involves identifying with other people—trying to see the world from their perspectives and using that to shape questions that will draw them out. This does not mean you have to agree with your interviewees, but you do have to want to get their stories in their own words. A good interviewer smiles and nods, not to signify agreement but to encourage the interviewee to keep talking. The message is: “I’m listening. I hear you. Tell me more.” Make sure these are silent gestures, however. Vocalizing “mm-hmms” and “uh-huhs” will just clutter the recording. [32]

Empathy influences the emotional dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee and can affect the interview, both facilitating and constraining the questions asked and the responses given. This becomes all the more evident in projects that deal with sensitive issues. Care Stories is a British, university-based oral history of staff who looked after children in public care, including those in foster or residential homes. While planning the project, the interviewers worried about how they would manage their emotions when dealing with issues of child abuse. They feared that interviewees might find the questions intrusive. The project arranged for pre-interview interactions to enable the interviewers and interviewees to get to know each other, discover common interests, and establish trust, which encouraged interviewees to relate “highly personal, emotionally charged, and powerful stories.”[33]

Interviewers naturally tend to empathize with victims, but occasionally they encounter interviewees who were the aggressors, perhaps having carried out or supported violence against others. One oral historian found herself challenging and arguing with her interviewee’s defense of violence. “I later regretted my inability to sit back and let the narrator speak on her own terms, and was embarrassed that I had so flagrantly broken one of the golden rules of oral history: to listen and keep one’s mouth shut,” she reflected. “Yet in retrospect, and in spite of its weaknesses, this interview yielded some of the most important material I gathered.”[34]

By contrast, identifying too strongly with an interviewee can also create obstacles. The desire to protect those we admire might cause us not to ask questions that might expose their prejudices and weaknesses, not to follow difficult paths of inquiry, and even to sanitize the results of the interview. In the 1970s, Sherna Gluck interviewed Grace Burnham McDonald, who half a century earlier had founded the Workers’ Health Bureau, a pioneering effort to promote workplace safety that made her a model for feminists. During the interview, McDonald exhibited a degree of elitism and class privilege that if revealed might have undermined her historical legitimacy as a workers’ advocate. When writing about her afterward, Gluck chose to minimize those unflattering traits. “That was certainly an unfortunate historical erasure,” she decided years later. “In other words, both my concern about undermining her contribution and respecting my status as a guest in her home clashed with my obligation as a scholar.”[35]

How should you bring up subjects that may be embarrassing?

Having gone to great lengths to put interviewees at ease and to establish rapport, it is often hard to confront them with embarrassing questions. The sociologist John Gwaltney, author of Drylongso, an oral history of Newark’s inner-city blacks, once chided members of the Oral History Association for being too polite and discreet to “ask the embarrassing question.” He argued that with some gentle and persistent prodding, interviewees will talk about difficult subjects. Playing tapes to demonstrate his point, Gwaltney showed that his questions were humorous and playful, but unrelenting. Being blind, Gwaltney also had the advantage of his interviewees wanting him to understand them; they would go on at great length and punctuate their responses with, “Don’t you see?”

One way for interviewers to bring up difficult or embarrassing issues is to quote someone else. During the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, the National Archives maintained an office near the White House where they interviewed officials as they left the administration, many of them involuntarily and under some cloud. The interviewees were often agitated and unnerved over their experience and not happy to talk about it. Conducting preliminary interviews for the Ford and Carter presidential libraries, the Archives interviewer had to ask some embarrassing questions but tried to connect them with published sources: “The Washington Post reported that you left office because of such and such. Was this a fair assessment?” Since the matter was part of the public record, and the interviewees were being asked to give their own side of the story, they invariably offered their own defense. Having made the focus the newspaper versus the interviewee (rather than the interviewer versus the interviewee), the interviewer needed to be sure to follow up with questions about the subject’s self-defense, its inconsistencies, and its contradictions with other accounts.

That was the approach that New York journalist William Inglis used when he interviewed the notoriously secretive oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. while preparing an authorized biography. The elderly Rockefeller had agreed to be interviewed only to please his son, who desperately wanted to rescue the family name from the images drawn by muckrakers. Between 1917 and 1920 Inglis conducted a string of interviews that produced 1,700 pages of transcripts. Although the planned book was never published, decades later another biographer, Ron Chernow, came across the interviews at the Rockefeller Archives. Struck by their extraordinary insights, he made them the core of his own book. As Chernow explained, “Inglis would read passages from Rockefeller’s two chief antagonists, Henry Lloyd and Ida Tarbell...and Rockefeller would refute them, paragraph by paragraph.” For years, Rockefeller had refused to read what his critics had written about him, but given the opportunity to confront the most embarrassing and questionable aspects of his rise to power in the petroleum industry, he admitted, “now that I’ve gotten into it I find it interesting.”[36]

When confronted with difficult or embarrassing subjects, the interviewee’s first response may be brief, defensive, or inconclusive. The interviewer should return to the topic later in the interview. The more the interviewee attempts to explain, offers more details, and strains to make the interviewer understand, the more candid—and less canned—the responses will become. This approach takes times; once again, multiple interview sessions are important. When bringing up sensitive subjects, however, be careful not to appear embarrassed yourself. Interviewees will sense this, and it will make them uncomfortable, affecting their responses.[37]

Some interviewees will stipulate before an interview that there are certain subjects that they will not discuss. Although it is possible to allude to such topics during the course of the interview, the interviewees may break their own rules and venture into the forbidden topic themselves. Ultimately oral historians must accede to an interviewee’s request. It is legitimate, however, to note the interviewee’s demand in the files for that interview, thereby explaining to future users why certain subjects were not addressed.

Potentially confrontational topics should be deferred until later in the interview, after the interviewer has established some rapport. While working on a history of an abortive plan to use nuclear weapons to dredge a harbor in Alaska, an oral historian arranged to interview the crusty nuclear physicist Edward Teller. Time was limited, and Teller arrived late. Rather than ask his “warm up” questions, the interviewer decided to jump right in with an opening question about the most controversial part of Teller’s involvement with the project. “This interview is over,” snapped Teller as he got up and left.

To appear interested and sympathetic, an interviewer does not have to act obsequiously. If a point of disagreement is reached with an interviewee, one solution is to try to restate the interviewee’s point of view. The interviewee will usually respond by further defining the position, and the dialogue is thus extended rather than terminated. Finally, keep in mind Oscar Wilde’s observation that “questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.”[38]

What if the interviewee asks that the recorder be turned off?

An oral history is not a journalistic interview, so there is little to be gained by hearing a story “off the record.” Politely but firmly, interviewers should decline to interrupt the interview. Explain that the recording can remain closed until the interviewee is ready to release it, and that the transcripts can be edited. At times, however, interviewees may want to stop the recording to explain their hesitancy about answering a question or to ask the interviewer’s advice about the propriety of discussing a person or issue. Interviewers can halt the recording to hear their problems, counsel them, and offer some reassurance before resuming the interview.[39]

How can interviewers get beyond stories that have been “rehearsed” through frequent retelling?

Oral historians are frequently encouraged to interview the favorite storyteller and unofficial local historian. These individuals often have wonderful stories that may have folklore value, and they will tell their stories regardless of how relevant they are to the interviewer’s questions. To a lesser degree, everyone tells stories about past experiences, to relive glory days, celebrate shared experiences, or make comparisons with the present. Each telling of the story embeds it firmer in the mind. Columbia has an interview with Ferdinand Pecora about the highly publicized investigation he conducted during the 1930s of Wall Street banking and stock market malpractice. Although he gave the interview forty years after the investigation, his memory was remarkable for its detail and precision. But Pecora’s family pointed out that he had been telling these stories for years, and even after the interview was still telling them on his deathbed to the hospital nurses.[40]

Although important for memory retention, rehearsal can create stumbling blocks for interviewers. Every telling of a story embellishes it, thereby moving it further away from reality. Events are telescoped, chronology tightened, order rearranged and edited, drama or humor heightened. Rehearsed stories tend to omit negative events and concentrate on triumphs. Interviewees have not necessarily forgotten old wounds and mistakes. When questioned, they can recall past defeats, even if they do not always feel comfortable talking about them. By the time the oral historian asks the question, the answer may simply be the oft-told story.

The best defense against a well-rehearsed story is a well-prepared interviewer who can spot inaccuracies and gently challenge inconsistencies. But interviewee may have told their stories so often that they cannot remember it any other way. Some interviewees prime themselves for the interview, and other have stories that they will tell anyone under any circumstances. If the interviewer tries to cut them off, they may become confused or, more likely, will simply wait for another occasion to insert the stories in the dialogue. Since these stories have special meaning for the interviewee, it is usually worth giving them the time to tell their set speeches. (You will probably find it impossible to stop them.) After the supply is exhausted, try to ask questions that will lead down less familiar paths.[41]

Rehearsing a story, through its retelling over the years, also serves as a form of self-interpretation. People not only remember their past but also try to make sense of it, rationalizing it so they can live with it. An interview with a divorced couple will probably elicit two very different versions of the marriage and why it ended. Defeated politicians have similarly reconstructed their pasts. Interviewers need to ask these interviewees to stop and think about what they have said.

Not all stories have been rehearsed mentally or anecdotally. Questions may cause interviewees to recall events long buried in their memories. They often express amazement at their recall of seemingly forgotten memories, then recount them in explicit detail and at surprising length.

How can an interviewer assist an interviewee’s ability to recall?

Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd have compared older people’s memories to a drawer of loose photographs, full of visual images of past experiences. Older interviewees may feel as if their memories are on trial, and they will appreciate any help in organizing their scattered remembrances. Recognizing that most people do not readily remember names and dates, interviewers should become familiar with the major players in the interviewee’s life and with its basic chronology, not only to keep the interviews moving but also to put the interviewee’s mind at ease. Oral historians have similarly relied on family photo albums, newspaper clippings, and letters as tools for unearthing otherwise forgotten information. Some have even experimented with the sense of smell to discover what memories different aromas elicit.[42]

In studying elderly Jews who had come to the United States after World War II, Barbara Myerhoff observed how their memories could be evoked by singing, dancing, smelling, and tasting in group activities at a senior center. Factory workers remember the odors and noises of the workplace, and their families recall the smells of their work clothes when they came home. These senses work as memory devices, the same way that the smell and taste of madeleines stimulated Marcel Proust’s remembrances.[43]

Looking through family photographs not only prompts commentary from the interviewee but can also provide illustrations for the interviewer’s publications. The historian Pete Daniel traveled down the Mississippi River to interview people in the towns along the way, recording their recollections of the great flood of 1927, fifty years after the event. The photograph albums that many interviewees brought out helped sharpen their memories and provided stunning illustrations for his book, Deep’n as It Come. By contrast, Andrea Hammer began her research with a set of the New Deal’s Farm Security Agency photographs taken in southern Maryland between 1935 and 1943. Decades later, Hammer located many of the subjects who still lived in that region and who could talk about the people and places in the photos. Her object was to reconstruct the social context of the photographs, an exercise that demonstrated again that photographs can be misleading, and misinterpreted, without help from those who were there.[44]

Interviewees who demur in advance that they remember very little can often be put at ease with questions about normal routines of everyday life in the past, in their households or at work. “See, there was a lot more that you remembered,” an interviewer for the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii commented to Lucy Robello after her interview about life as a plantation homemaker. “Well, you asked me for it, so I had to talk about,” said Robello. “Otherwise I don’t think that was important at all....It was just normal living.” Recording a way of life that no longer existed was precisely what the project wanted, and information that the interviewee could easily provide, once she gleaned the interviewer’s objectives.[45]

Do differences in race, gender, or age between interviewers and interviewees make any difference in the interview?

Interviewees take the measure of interviewers, make assumptions about what they want to ask, and to some degree try to please them by telling what they want to hear. A study of the Federal Writers Project interviews with former slaves, conducted in the 1930s, discovered that an elderly black woman was interviewed twice, once by a white woman and again by a black man. She gave starkly different accounts of her memories of slavery, painting a relatively benign account for the white woman and a much harsher account for the black man. She may well have spoken even more differently to another black woman.[46]

Differences in age, race, gender, and ethnicity may influence both the questions asked and the responses elicited. There are no set prescriptions to overcome such differences. Some may want to match interviewers closely with interviewees, but men and women of different races and ethnicity should be able to interview each other. In seeking to make interviewees feel comfortable, interviewers might reveal a little of themselves—where they live, where they went to school, where they work, what their families do—to establish points of commonality that might cut across some of the barriers between them.

Even without any common reference, the interviewer can compensate by having thoroughly researched the subject and being familiar with names, dates, and events long past. A well-prepared interviewer becomes, for the duration of the interview, the contemporary of the interviewee. “Oh, do you know about him?” the interviewee will say. Or, “I haven’t thought about that in years.” During the interview, older people seem younger and more animated as they relive the past with a sympathetic listener.

The Oral History Association’s Principles and Best Practices (see appendix 1) encourages oral historians to work to achieve a balance between the objectives of a project and the perspectives of its interviewees. Interviewers need to be sensitive to the diversity of social and cultural experiences, and to the implications of race, gender, class, ethnicity, age, religion, and sexual orientation. They should encourage interviewees to respond in their own style and language, and to address issues that reflect their concerns. Interviewers should fully explore all appropriate areas of inquiry with the interviewee and not be satisfied with superficial responses.

Are there any differences in interviewing the famous and interviewing average individuals?

The difference lies largely in the interviewee’s previous experience of being interviewed by the media. The average person has not been interviewed and may initially feel intimidated by the recorder and microphone. For the more prominent interviewee, the interviewer’s problem will be to draw a distinction between an oral history and a newspaper interview. Interviewees must recognize that what they say will not appear on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper or on the evening news, a revelation that may actually disappoint some of them but that for the most part enables them to speak candidly. They can leave a complete record but keep it confidential so that it will not damage their careers.

Professional people can also prove difficult to interview. Lawyers, for instance, have been trained not to volunteer information. Even worse are law professors, who seem to judge questions to see how much the interviewer already knows. If prepared and able to ask probing follow-up questions, interviewers can earn their respect and perhaps a little more of their cooperation. Business executives may need some coaxing to think of the interview as something other than a promotional device. Most professional people and all politicians have been interviewed before as part of their jobs. They are used to responding to questions, and they have developed certain patterns of response. As a result, their answers may be superficial and packaged, and it can be hard to break through their veneer. Some oral histories with politicians sound more like radio scripts than candid interviews.

During the Vietnam War, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger complained to reporters that “interviewing GI’s is the worst way to find out what’s going on....The people in the middle of it have the least idea of what is happening.” But historians later concluded that the GI’s gave the press more accurate accounts of what was happening than did Dr. Kissinger.[47] When interviewing in an organization or among those who participated in a common event, it is just as important to interview the “little fish” as the “big fish.” Those on the middle or lower tiers of any hierarchy usually have more time to do interviews, a broader perspective on events, and less ego invested in the operation. Those at the top may be too preoccupied and perhaps too self-centered to provide much new information. If they are still in power, those at the top are often more cautious in responding and may give little more than a press release. Interviewing at the periphery provides information that makes it easier to interview those at the center. Conversely, interviewing the top people early in the project reassures anxious subordinates that management sanctions the project. Interviewers have to take advantage of whatever scheduling opportunities they encounter and develop their own tactics in determining which individuals in any group to interview, how many, and in what order.[48]

Should interviewers use a questionnaire?

When dealing with a group that has a common identity or was involved in a common event or organization, be sure to ask the same core questions to everyone. Especially if different interviewers are working for the same project, you should agree on a common list of themes and certain questions for all to ask. But individual interviewees have their own unique experiences that no questionnaire can anticipate. You must be willing to deviate from the prepared questions whenever something unexpected and interesting develops. Oral history, after all, addresses neglected areas of knowledge. The best items uncovered are often subjects that you were not prepared to ask questions about and perhaps had read nothing about in your research. A good interviewer hears an unexpected statement and follows up with additional questions.

Oral historians deal with individual memory and perception, which are hard to squeeze into a structured format. By contrast, behaviorists have generally preferred to collect data that could be coded and quantified. They dismissed oral history interviews for not being as objective (or true) as questionnaire-based interviewing. But in recent years, many of the social sciences have been rethinking the concept of an objective reality and have confronted the subjective (or biased) nature of all sources of information. Psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists have reexamined the forms and motivations of verbal expression. As they have embraced their subjectivity, they moved closer to oral history methodology, putting aside their quantitative questionnaires in favor of more qualitative interviewing.

Psychological interviews traditionally required the interviewer to maintain an observational posture that discouraged personal interactions, in order to collect impartial empirical data. Breaking with this pattern, some psychologists have adopted a more interactive manner to stimulate more communication and provide more depth to their interviews. For a project on “Women, Motivation and Success,” Joseph T. Chirban discarded his initial questionnaire as an obstacle and wove his previously formulated questions into something that more resembled a conversation. This led interviewees—all nationally prominent women—to move beyond their celebrity status to speak more candidly and offer more self-reflection. Chirban found that his open-ended questions encouraged the comedienne Lucille Ball to elaborate in ways not evident in her previous interviews. “She experienced my openness, respect, and nurturance, qualities that she valued, and that I recognized in her,” he wrote. “She responded in kind, which continually deepened the interview.” More interactive interviewing, he concluded, would help therapists (as well as other interviewers) to move beyond simple information gathering to a better understanding of interviewees’ feelings, values, and concerns.[49]

Nor do all social scientists favor the use of highly structured, standardized, quantitative questionnaires with anonymous interviewees. Sociologists James Holstein and Jaber Gubrium have argued that by collecting data so impersonally, social scientists have failed to question where their informants’ knowledge was coming from and how it was derived. More active, open-ended, qualitative interviewing would transform their “subjects” into collaborators with the interviewer. The interviewer’s objective should not be to dictate interpretation through a predetermined agenda but to provide a conducive environment for a conversation that addresses relevant issues. Mary Jo Festle reached the same conclusions when she directed a project to interview lung transplant patients: “When people talk, they can provide clearer, subtler, and fuller explanations than quantitative data permits.”[50]

Can follow-up questions be prepared in advance?

Follow-up questions require both prior research and spontaneity. A thoroughly prepared interviewer will sense when the interviewee is being incomplete and will press for a fuller discussion. Research also helps you spot some new information or information that conflicts with other accounts. “I didn’t know that, can you tell me more about it?” can often be the best follow-up question, since it encourages the interviewee to devote more attention to the issue and provide more details. Interviewees are often surprised when an interviewer seems to care more about a particular subject and would not have mentioned it more than in passing if interest had not been expressed.

The most important skill in asking follow-up questions is being able to listen carefully to what interviewees are saying. Those who study listening have concluded that attention spans have grown shorter and people hear only a small portion of what is said to them, a phenomenon that every parent and teacher can confirm. Even in an interview situation—so more focused than a normal conversation—the interviewer can become distracted by the recorder, preoccupied by choosing the next question to ask, or fatigued as time elapses. Listening to a tape of one of his interviews, Theodore Rosengarten, the author of All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974), realized that he had “set out to question, not to listen.” Thinking ahead from question to question, he had allowed the recorder to listen for him. “Let the machine record,” he admonished, “and you listen!”[51]

Training to remain alert saves interviewers from the embarrassing position of asking a question that the interviewee has already answered—a clear signal that the interviewer has not been paying attention—and helps flag the unexpected revelations that deserve to be followed up. In listening to the tapes after their interviews, even the most experienced interviewers will hear things that eluded them during the interview. These areas can be pursued in subsequent interviews but not as spontaneously as when they first arose.[52]

How should interviewers react to statements with which they strongly disagree?

The hardest part of listening is having to pay attention to ideas and information with which you may differ. You may be inclined to interrupt and argue, but you need to hear the interviewee out before confronting areas of disagreement. Challenge answers that seem misleading, and pursue responses that seem mistaken. Interviewees may misspeak or poorly express themselves; sometimes they are misinformed or just wrong. But they also may possess a more accurate version of events than the interviewer has seen in other sources and, given the opportunity, may be able to present their version convincingly.[53]

News reporters often adopt a more adversarial style of interviewing, confronting, challenging, and contradicting those they are interviewing. But the best have learned to hold their egos in check and not succumb to “the journalist’s disease” of being more certain about events than those who were actually there. Interviewers who are tense, hostile, impatient, or distracted usually do not listen well. Listening requires patience to hear a person out no matter how skeptical you might be of what they are saying. Reporters have compared the best listeners to news photographers capturing the scene, who concentrate on their subjects so much that they are almost invisible.[54]

Oral history collects the interviewee’s recollections and opinions, not the interviewer’s. Interviewers are not responsible for converting interviewees to any true faith, nor do they need to demonstrate that they are purer than the people they are interviewing. A true test of both the interviewer and the oral history project is whether they conducted interviews with representatives of all sides of an issue, including those whom they considered less than admirable.

But what if the interviewer suspects that an interviewee is lying or shading the truth?

Interviews may be laced with assumptions, opinions, and even conspiracy theories that background research, no matter how thorough, cannot verify. Interviewers worry about the value of such testimony for future research, and how far they should go in challenging unsubstantiated assertions and indicating their own skepticism.[55]

Never be too quick to presume that an interviewee is wrong or is lying. Your objective is to record the story from the interviewee’s point of view, even if that includes some exaggerated claims or boasting. You need not embrace totally whatever the interviewee is saying. Try to draw interviewees out further on any dubious assertions. Return to troublesome issues at different points during the interview, as a means of prodding interviewees into defending or refuting their previous statements. Do not hesitate to cite contrary evidence in newspaper accounts and other sources. Conflicting information can be attached as an appendix to the transcripts for future researchers to consider. (First, however, be sure to alert the interviewee to the added material.)[56]

Eyewitnesses to memorable events who change their testimony and contradict themselves may be reflecting their initial confusion or the array of other viewpoints they subsequently encountered. It was no conspiracy that individuals in the crowd at Dealey Plaza the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated heard differing numbers of shots and disagreed over the direction from which those shots came. Having gone abruptly from cheering a presidential motorcade to running for cover, their fear and bewilderment contributed to inconsistencies in observations and memories. Their recollections were further shaped by news coverage, conversation, speculation, books, and motion pictures. “I have read and heard so many things, it mixes together,” said Danny Arce, who worked at the Texas Book Depository. “You don’t know if it’s your own memory or it’s somebody else’s. We all read a lot of things, and sometimes inadvertently adopt things we heard from others. It’s hard to separate the two, and can get real confusing trying to figure out what you remember without having your memory colored by everything that has come out.”[57]

There have been instances of individuals who falsely claim military distinction or pass themselves off as Holocaust victims—a well-prepared interviewer may detect inconsistencies and implausible references in their stories. There is also the possibility that people are lying to themselves. Some people dramatically change their positions but convince themselves of their consistency and correctness. Some may have consciously or subconsciously distorted memories of an unpleasant past. Australian oral historians encountered “organized structures of forgetting” regarding their country’s Aboriginal population, for years largely omitted from the white society’s collective memory and recorded history. In Germany and Italy, oral historians have encountered mass amnesia about fascism. In France, interviewers have faced a reluctance to recall collaboration with German authorities during military occupation. “Better to let the dead rest in peace and the living live in peace,” commented one of those who declined to be interviewed.[58]

The German oral historian Alexander von Plato first became conscious of the disconnect between personal memories and national narrative when he was growing up after the Second World War, and his family opened their house to German refugees who had been displaced from Eastern Europe. The political story dealt with the war’s effect on Germany’s boundaries and the refugees’ anger over being relocated. “But the personal stories they told us, not full of revenge, not at all, it was so rich, it was a perspective which was sometimes totally different, nearly in opposition, to that which I had read about the refugees before.”[59]

Since an oral history interview usually takes place years after the events occurred, it can have a cathartic effect by allowing interviewees to confront long-buried memories. In such cases, the interview serves as therapy as well as to set the record straight. But even a psychiatrist would have trouble getting some interviewees to confront the past honestly. The lie sometimes takes on a mythic significance of its own, and the interview may become valuable not for the story’s accuracy but as a means of analyzing the roots of its distortion and measuring an idealized self against less favorable perceptions.

Questions of veracity and authenticity are good reasons for not relying on any single individual’s memories, but seeking out others for comparison. For instance, Henry Ford’s memoirs described how his father resisted his leaving the farm to devote himself to building automobiles. Ford’s sister offered a strikingly different account in the interviews she gave to the Ford Motor Company’s corporate archives. She remembered their father as supporting his son’s ambitions and offering to invest in his business. Biographers have been able to corroborate her assertions, while they found Henry Ford’s version “laced with inaccuracies,” even though it satisfied his own self-perception of youthful independence.[60]

Anyone writing about the Negro League baseball pitcher Satchel Paige realized that he had constantly altered the details of his life with each telling and had given out contradictory information even about his birthday. Describing him as “a fastball wrapped in a riddle,” biographer Larry Tye concluded that because Paige played in the days of segregation, he knew that despite his extraordinary talents he would never get the attention he deserved. He created a bit of mystery about himself “to romance sportswriters and fans.” Paige reshaped his personal history, creating exaggerations and ambiguity that added to his notoriety. No one was ever going to get a straight story from Satchel Paige, Tye concluded, but he could work around the distortions by tracking down and interviewing his teammates, family members, and others who knew the man and could help untangle his riddles.[61]

Should an interviewer pay attention to the interviewee’s “body language”?

Even interviews that are not being videoed have a visual component. Sitting in close proximity, interviewers and interviewees communicate nonverbally through facial expressions and body movement. Always focus your gaze fully on the interviewee. Looking around the room, staring into space, examining your nails, suggests that you are not paying attention, just as frowning suggests disagreement or disbelief. Interviewees will either interpret such behavior as rudeness or, fearing that they are boring you, begin abbreviating their answers. Except for glancing periodically at the recorder or looking at photographs and other items relating to the interview, maintain eye contact diligently throughout the interview. A smile or a nod signals that you got the point and encourages the interviewee to keep talking. Quiet signals are preferable to verbal interruptions (“oh, yes” “uh-hmmm,” “you don’t say”), which sound foolish on the recording and clutter the transcript.

Journalists are people watchers. They look as they listen and consider what a gesture might mean, why the interviewee looked away, or why a casual question elicited a vehement response. A person leaning toward the interviewer and pointing a finger projects an aggressive, take-charge attitude; sitting back with crossed legs and arms and leaning away suggests a closed, self-protected attitude. Body language may indicate nervousness about the interview, and topics that make interviewees particularly uncomfortable may cause them to shift in their seats, drum their fingers on a table, and engage in other such noticeable behavior. Some interviewees glance at the interviewer to see how an answer has registered. Amelia Fry reported that when she interviewed former California Senator William F. Knowland for a life history, he never looked at her but stared fixedly at the ceiling, “as if he was answering to a higher authority.” It later became evident that Knowland was undergoing a crisis in his personal life and found it distressing to reflect on his past. This crisis caused him to commit suicide before she could conduct another interview.[62]

In another extreme but still instructive case, an oral historian who conducted a series of interviews with prisoners at a state penitentiary detected that the inmates had “a great deal of practice at perfecting their intentionally deceptive statements.” He identified such nonverbal cues as tapping a cigarette and loss of eye contact during specific replies as signals that a statement might be deceptive.[63]

When a person’s verbal language and body language do not match, it is not necessarily a sign of attempted deception. Sometimes it is more a matter of their going through the process of recollection, especially in recalling and explaining painful memories. In his video interviews on the Holocaust, Albert Lichtblau, occasionally encounters such incongruence. He has found it “useful to confront individuals with such observations and to tell them our interpretation, and simultaneously give them the opportunity to either confirm or correct this.”[64]

Sounds also play a part in nonverbal communication. Voice pitch, hesitation, emphasis, sarcasm, and muttering of asides provide indications of attitude. When people become emotional, they tend to talk faster and raise their voices. Interviewers need to catch these nonverbal clues, since they are almost impossible to transcribe. A sarcastic inflection, for instance, can completely change the meaning of a sentence. The interviewer might point out a sarcastic response and ask the interviewee to explain the sarcasm.

Can interviews be conducted at a distance over the phone or webcam?

Ideally, interviews should take place face-to-face in order to make interviewees more familiar with their interviewers and to allow interviewers to monitor the interviewees’ reactions. Sometimes, however, distances are too great and budgets too small to permit personal meetings. And in some cases (not many), older interviewees hear better on the phone than in person. Phone jacks can connect the phone to the recorder, and the latest digital equipment has been producing better sound quality for phone interviews. But be sure that the interviewee fully understands and has given you permission to record the phone interview (the laws governing phone recordings vary among different countries).

While phone interviews can provide information, they lack the visual cues and interactivity of an in-person conversation. Since 2003 the Internet service Skype has permitted oral historians to conduct audio and video interviews worldwide, with the use of a microphone and a webcam on a computer, and several other Internet services have since been developed. They offer several advantages, namely, the participants can see each other, catch visual cues that would be missed over the phone, and develop more of the rapport that can produce a candid interview. The disadvantages are the firewalls, unsteady wireless connections, and other technical glitches that may freeze or otherwise interrupt the interview. Not every interviewee will have the necessary equipment, but interviewees without computers and cameras can use alternative sites, such as local community centers or public libraries.

Younger people might even be more comfortable using electronic communication than talking in person, although interviewers have been disconcerted to discover that their young interviewees are multitasking—doing other things on their computers while the interview was taking place, “to diffuse the tension or just because the cyber pull is too powerful.” Abe Louise Young, who interviewed LGBT youth, asked them to close all other windows during the interview to avoid having the sudden sounds of a video game pop up in her recordings.[65]

Among other experiments with electronic communications, the Artists with Disabilities project at Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office interviewed the playwright Neil Marcus, who suffered a neurological disorder that made it difficult for him to speak. The interviewer used instant messaging between two computers set side by side to supplement their spoken questions and answers.[66]

Is there a role in oral history for what social scientists call “continuing observation?”

Oral historians have rarely shared the interest of social scientists in observation as part of the interviewing process. Historians tend to isolate interviewees from their environment and to put them in a quiet place where they will not be interrupted during the interview, whereas in other disciplines subjects are examined in their natural setting. Anthropologists, for instance, live in communities to record their day-to-day observations along with their subjects’ testimonies.

Richard Fenno has encouraged political scientists to collect data by “interactive observation,” by which he means “following politicians around and talking with them as they go about their work.” Fenno accompanied politicians through their home districts, through elections, and through their legislative service:

Much of what you see, therefore, is dictated by what they do and say. If something is important to them, it becomes important to you. Their view of the world is important as your view of the world. You impose some research questions on them; they impose some research questions on you. That interaction has its costs–most notably in a considerable loss of control over the research process. It also has benefits. It brings you extremely close to your data.[67]

Fenno’s prescription describes what many social sciences consider effective fieldwork. Although oral historians often travel to the area where their interviewees live and are interested in their environment, participatory observation has not been a major component of the oral history interview. Oral historians frequently interview those who have retired and live in different communities from where they spent their careers. Observing current daily routines would not offer many clues about the past that oral historians seek to capture on tape. Sometimes, however, interviewees want to show interviewers buildings and other sites that played an important part in their past. Oral historians should take advantage of such offers and visit the sites, bringing along their recorders, cameras, and possibly video cameras to supplement the interviews.[68]

What if a translator is needed?

Doing oral history becomes a lot more complicated if the interviewer and interviewee do not speak the same language, but this is not an impenetrable impediment. Holocaust oral history projects report that many of their potential interviewees are not capable of giving an interview in English. The alternatives are to train volunteer interviewers fluent in Yiddish and Russian—which reduces their control over the questions being asked—or to employ translators to sit in during the interviews. Even if the interviews are conducted in English, the translator can help when needed with the questions and answers.

Using a translator takes up time at an interview. Conducting interviews in Mozambique, Sally Ninham asked her question in English and then waited for it to be translated. But since the answers would be longer than her questions, the subject would respond in part and then wait to let the translator translate that part of the answer to her. “It was a very slow process but it worked very well,” she reported, particularly with older interviewees who were happy to move slowly.[69]

Interviewers need to be aware of local cultures when choosing a translator to avoid recruiting someone who will make the interviewee feel uncomfortable. Too much deference out of deep cultural respect and hierarchy can also hinder the interview. “You may experience long explanations between your translator and your narrator that don’t reflect your more concise questions,” Jeff Friedman noted about his interviews with Cambodian dancers, but these exchanges may be crucial to the translation of cultural concepts.[70]

The need for translators extends to making transcripts. It is important to find a transcriber who is knowledgeable about both the subject matter and the language. Still, there will often be disagreements, ranging from semantics to spelling, between the translator and the interviewees, as John Wolford found when he interviewed in Bosnia, “even among members from the same region about how certain words, phrases, and sentiments were to be translated.”[71]

Concluding the Interview

What’s the best way to conclude an interview?

Look for a natural “wrap-up” question, something that causes interviewees to reflect back on their lives, to compare recent events with their earlier years, to draw conclusions about major events, or to look toward the future. Ask the interviewee whether there any other issues that could be discussed. Occasionally, an interviewee has anticipated a question that the interviewer did not raise. The interview itself may have triggered memories of long-forgotten people and events that the interviewer had not researched. Encourage interviewees to put whatever they consider important into the record.

At the conclusion of the interview, remind the interviewee of how the recordings will be processed and where they will be deposited. Explain what their role will be in editing the transcript and in signing the deed of gift. Sometimes the interviewee is asked to sign a release immediately after completing the recording session and another release later approving the transcript; other times no release is signed until the interviewee has reviewed the transcript. The timing depends on how quickly a transcript can be produced and on whether the interviewee is likely to request that the interview be restricted.

It is customary to present copies of the recording or transcript to the interviewee and to sometimes make additional copies for family members. If the object of the interview is an article or book, try to give a copy to the interviewee. Plan to invite interviewees to exhibit openings or other public presentations based on the interviews.

You cannot simply walk out the door with someone’s life story, their candid reflections, and sometimes extremely personal observations. Interviews can be difficult, emotional experiences, and sometimes you need to spend some time to talk with the interviewee after the interview, without the recorder running. Let interviewees know how important their interviews will be to the oral history project and reassure them that they were helpful. Give them some idea of how long it will take to process the interview, when they can expect to receive copies of the recording or transcript, when they will sign the deed of gift, how you expect the material to be used, and where the interview will be deposited and opened for research.

Should interviewees ever be paid for their interviews?

Most oral history projects work on such limited budgets—sometimes depending on volunteer staff—that they rarely can afford to pay interviewees. They operate on the valid principle that having one’s life story recorded for the future is reward in itself. A very few projects, however, especially those in which the interviews are with musicians and others commonly paid to perform, have recognized some financial obligation to the participants. Blues and jazz projects have further justified their decision to pay on the potential profitability of the interviews. “Since blues is a marketable form of oral history,” wrote Walter Liniger of the Blues Archives at the University of Mississippi, “we felt morally obliged to secure the rights of the informants and to pay them a fee for their contributions.”[72]

Obviously, any financial arrangement depends on the resources of the sponsoring project or institution. Some projects have written stipends for interviewees into their grant proposals, similar to the honoraria paid to their advisory committee members. But whether or not payments are made, all oral historians have a responsibility to inform interviewees of the anticipated uses of their interviews, whether in publication, radio or video documentaries, the Internet, or other means of public presentation that might generate royalties or other monetary compensation.

4

Using Oral History in Research and Writing

Oral history methodology seems geared to large projects; how much of it can the individual researcher apply to interviews for a book or an article?

Individual resources may be more limited than those of a group project, but many an individual researcher is no less concerned about making interviews fully usable. Since researchers are the primary users of the information they collect, they ought to set their own standards to at least equal, if not surpass, those of an oral history project or archives. Both projects and individual researchers want to collect oral documentation that is complete, accurate, and reliable; but researchers scrutinize even more intensely than do project interviewers what they hear in the interviews they conduct and apply a higher degree of professional skepticism to them. They seek verification in other sources for information gathered through interviews, and they evaluate contradictory material to draw their own conclusions.

Despite their focused efforts and self-defined goals, individuals doing their own interviewing bear definite professional responsibilities. The American Historical Association has issued the following recommendations for individual interviewers:

1. Interviews should be recorded on tape but only after the person to be interviewed has been informed of the mutual rights and responsibilities involved in oral history, such as editing, confidentiality, disposition, and dissemination of all forms of the record. Interviewers should obtain legal releases and document any agreements with interviewees.

2. The interviewer should strive to prompt informative dialogue through challenging and perceptive inquiry, should be grounded in the background and experiences of the person being interviewed, and, if possible, should review the sources relating to the interviewee before conducting the interview.

3. To the extent practicable, interviewers should extend the inquiry beyond their immediate needs to make each interview as complete as possible for the benefit of others.

4. The interviewer should guard against possible social injury to or exploitation of interviewees and should conduct interviews with respect for human dignity.

5. Interviewers should be responsible for proper citation of oral history sources in creative works, including permanent location.

6. Interviewers should arrange to deposit their interviews in an archival repository that is capable of both preserving the interviews and making them available for general research. Additionally, the interviewer should work with the repository in determining the necessary legal arrangements.

7. As teachers, historians are obligated to inform students of their responsibilities in regard to interviewing and to encourage adherence to the guidelines set forth here.[1]

Why bother to record interviews? Why are notes not sufficient?

After years of scribbling notes during class lectures, many researchers feel perfectly able to take coherent notes during an interview. They consider a recorder an unnecessary expense, a bother to worry about, and a possible barrier to a candid interview—whether with public figures, who may be overly cautious about having their words recorded, or with nonpublic figures, who may be intimidated by talking into a microphone. Some researchers consider note taking superior to tape recording. Barbara Tuchman, for instance, complained that tape recorders simply encouraged people to “ramble effortlessly and endlessly.” She described note taking as a “crystallizing process” in which the writer automatically distinguishes the significant from the insignificant. Others have cited the risk of the recorder breaking down at crucial moments as their rationale for not recording.[2]

Such responses combine cogent truths and unnecessary rationalizations. Audio and video recorders are no longer such an expense or a novelty. They can be purchased for a reasonable cost, are easy to operate, and have become so commonplace that few interviewees will be surprised or uncomfortable to see one. More important, recording radically expands and improves any interview. The longer interviews last, the more interviewers tire and miss nuances. Later, when listening to the recording, interviewers inevitably hear more than they did during the interview itself. Note takers may make honest mistakes in what they hear or find their handwriting hard to decipher. Note takers also run the risk of hearing only what they want to hear rather than what the interviewee actually says—a recurring phenomenon to which anyone interviewed by the media can readily attest.

Note taking makes some researchers feel more comfortable because it helps focus their attention—as they listen to what is being said—on the exact points they anticipate later using. But there is no reason not to record and take notes at the same time. The notes can serve as the recording’s index, which is especially useful if a full transcript cannot be made.

Recording is the researcher’s best means of self-protection. Interviewees may object to how they were quoted or may not be willing to stand behind statements they made in their interviews. A recording of the interview provides the documentation to defend against such reactions. Some interviewees, especially the more prominent, may be so skittish about being misquoted that they will insist that the interview be recorded. For his biography of Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson interviewed former President Richard M. Nixon. Isaacson took notes, while Nixon recorded the interview. When the tape recorder broke down, Nixon commented, “I’ve never been very good with these things.”[3]

What if a potential interviewee refuses to be recorded?

Interviewers operate under ground rules that interviewees set. For an oral history project, such an objection would likely cause that person stricken from the list of potential interviewees, since there usually remains little reason to conduct an oral history if it cannot be recorded. But the individual researcher may consider the person a critically important source, regardless of the ground rules. Notes may be inferior to a recording, but they are better than nothing. As soon as the interview session is over, the interviewer needs to write down as full an account as notes and memory permit.

An interviewee may decline to be recorded out of fear or vanity, emotions that can sometimes be overcome by some reassurances and flattery. The late historian Gordon Prange, whose ego matched the monumental books he wrote on the Second World War, refused to be recorded during an interview on the grounds that Gen. Douglas MacArthur had never allowed his interviews to be recorded. The interviewer took notes for a few minutes and then injected, “What a shame that this isn’t being recorded, Professor Prange, because my notes will never do justice to your cogent thoughts and beautifully crafted sentences.” Accepting that as a point well taken, Prange permitted the recorder to run for the rest of the interview.[4]

But why make a recording if you cannot afford to transcribe it?

You can make notes from your own recordings without having to transcribe them entirely. Having the recording allows you to quote accurately and to pick up nuances you may have missed during the interview. The recording can be quoted, cited, deposited in a library, and referred back to for proof should any queries arise about the accuracy of the material.

Transcripts are costly and time-consuming to create, but they increase the usefulness of an interviewer to everyone, including the original interviewer. Researchers planning to conduct extensive interviews for a dissertation, book, or other project should seek a logical repository, whether it be a university library, a state archives or historical society, or a community library, to donate the completed tapes. The repository will have legal release forms that the interviewer can use. If the interviews meet the repository’s standards, it may be able to have its own staff transcribe the interviews or join the interviewer in seeking a grant for transcription.

Once the article or book is published, is it necessary to save the interview recordings?

Researchers have a professional obligation to preserve the unique documentation they collected, both to leave a record for future investigators and to protect their own reputations. Political scientist Alexander Lamis interviewed the political operative Lee Atwater, who offered a crude and candid assessment of the racial aspects of modern southern politics. Lamis first published the interview anonymously. After Atwater died, he included the interview in another book, this time attributing the incendiary remarks to him. After Lamis died, critics charged that he had fabricated the quotation. His widow released the recording to show that her husband’s use of the quotation had been accurate and scholarly rather than politically motivated.[5]

Why should independent researchers make their interviews available to anyone else?

Scholars have a professional obligation to permit access to their sources. A footnote citing “personal interview in the author’s possession” leaves much open to question, especially if the interviewee has died. Readers may question how accurately the researcher quoted or paraphrased the interview. Even when a researcher quotes an interview meticulously, in all probability he or she needs to cite only a small portion of it. Future researchers may make different use of the same material.

While writing her doctoral dissertation on the Office of War Information Holly Cowan Shulman discovered that another historian had conducted an interview with a key official of the agency. Her graduate advisor, however, dissuaded her from asking to see a copy of the interview, on the grounds that it was someone else’s work. Although she complied at the time, she came to feel that it had been wrong not to examine the interview for her research since interviews “were a piece of historical evidence just as much as letters or diaries.” Seeking to raise the consciousness of the historical profession on the issue, Shulman has argued:

When we conduct interviews, we are creating evidence. When the next historian comes along interested in another aspect or interpretation of the same topic, he or she should have access to the interviews we did. This is the very nature of the rules of history. Otherwise, I could hide all of my evidence to protect myself from competition and argument. Or I could make up anything I wanted and assert its truth citing interviews I supposedly conducted but would let no one else see. In other words, if we historians don’t treat interviews seriously, we raise a series of problems which could hurt the profession as a whole.[6]

The use of archived interviews has been more closely linked to historical research than to the social sciences. Although social scientists accumulate a great deal of qualitative data, including interviews, field notes and correspondence, many are reluctant to conduct secondary analysis of this information. Ethnographers have raised concerns over the disconnect with the original researcher, and because it ran against “the ethnographic principles of seeking to understand settings or people in their own terms.” After considerable debate, however, the practice has become more acceptable, especially after scholars realized that the process of using secondary data was so similar to using their own interviews.[7]

Must individual researchers get signed legal releases for their interviews?

Yes, because both publishers and archives will want to determine who owns the copyright to the interviews. If you intend to publish anything extensively drawn from an interview, you will need to assure the publisher that you have obtained the interviewee’s permission. If not, publishers will send you back with their own legal releases—usually formidable documents—for the interviewees’ signature.

A legal release is also essential if you intend to deposit the recording or transcript in a library or archive. By signing a legal release, the interviewee indicates that he or she understood what the interview would be used for and establishes its ownership. Just having recorded another person’s words does not give the interviewer copyright on those words, and making quotations beyond “fair use” length might stimulate a legal challenge. The problem may not come from the interviewee but from the interviewee’s heirs, who may seek compensation for the interview’s publication.

Failing to obtain releases limits the interview’s future use. While depositing the interviews in an archives, the interviewer must go back to get signatures on legal releases. Sometimes interviewees have died and their next of kin must be located. It is always easier to have the legal releases signed when the interview is conducted.

Researchers at many universities must also deal with institutional review boards that want to see evidence of the interviewee’s “informed consent.” Standard oral history release forms should suffice, indicating that the interviewee understands and approves of the purpose and intended uses of the interviews. Some institutional review boards further require release forms to stipulate that the interviewee can decline to participate, can choose to remain anonymous, and understands the potential risks involved in participation—factors more applicable to medical and behavioral science projects than to oral history. (See chapter 7 for further issues relating to institutional review boards.)

With limited time and resources, why should independent researchers ask questions beyond their immediate research interests?

Researchers understandably think of interviews as filling in gaps in their work or expanding their own knowledge of the particulars and want to ask questions precisely about that area and nothing else. But this attitude is counterproductive in a number of ways. First, the interviewee’s memory may not immediately be able to dredge up the specific information that the interviewer is seeking. Interviewers need to spend some time establishing rapport, building up to the central issue, and understanding its context in the interviewee’s life. Interviewers need to be sensitive to the feelings of interviewees and to not dismiss other areas of their life they may consider relevant to the interviewer’s questions.

Paul Thompson began interviewing in the 1970s for a study of Edwardian England. He conducted a large survey but asked about people’s experiences only up to 1918, not about what happened to them afterward. “Now, failing to do that was a very large mistake,” he later concluded, “because it meant that there were all sorts of things that we could have asked of those people that we failed to ask.” There were many more questions he wished he had raised for his subsequent research, but by then it was too late; that generation had passed. Thompson encourages researchers to be willing to divert from their narrow interests to a broader picture of those they are interviewing: “I think it’s much better to have a life story interview rather than one which just focused on a particular period of somebody’s life.”[8]

In 1974, I interviewed the New Deal official Benjamin V. Cohen about his role in creating the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. Watergate was the news when the interview took place, and Cohen wanted to talk about Nixon. But for my dissertation, I needed to hear about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not willing to follow his tangents, I constantly steered the interview back to my immediate interests. Not until later did I realize that I had missed the opportunity to capture Cohen’s thoughts about Watergate and to find out whether the development of the “imperial presidency” had in any way changed his opinion about the expansion of the executive branch during the 1930s.

Often within a few years of completion of an oral history project, many of the older interviewees will die. There is no guarantee that these people will have been interviewed by any other programs A researcher’s notes, recordings, and transcripts of interviews therefore become valuable sources for other researchers, who no longer have access to the deceased.

Does the independent interviewer have any advantages over the oral historian in a group project?

Anyone working on a specific book or article becomes far more steeped in the subject matter and has a much more personal stake in the process. Their interviews lead to publication and promote their professional advancement, perhaps even earn them royalties. Researchers can verge on obsession with their projects, wanting to know everything. They press interviewees to go into greater detail than does an interviewer for a more general project. A number of interviewers participated in the Former Members of Congress oral history project, and, not surprisingly, one of the lengthiest and most detailed interviews was conducted by an interviewer who was also writing a doctoral dissertation on the senatorial interviewee. The interviewer pressed the senator on any number of issues, even persuading him to sing his campaign song.[9]

Individual researchers may express disappointment with the project-directed interviews they read in oral history archives because the project interviewers did not dig deep enough into the subject. The main themes may have been covered, but not enough of the smaller details are included. Because individual researchers generally are seeking answers to specific questions, they may undervalue the parts of an archival interview that do not directly address their needs. The curse of oral history is failure to pursue details.

Can an independent researcher’s interviews be considered an oral history?

There are differences between interviews conducted for one researcher’s express purposes and those conducted as oral histories for general use. Oral histories are broadly conceived and conducted, then processed, preserved, and made available to other scholars in archives. Research interviews fill the narrow needs of the individual interviewer, are rarely recorded or transcribed, and generally wind up in the interviewer’s file cabinets or in boxes in basements and attics.[10]

These distinctions blur when a researcher’s interviews are recorded or transcribed and deposited somewhere so that other researchers can use them. Oral historians have long objected to the use of the term “oral history” to describe every interview, regardless of whether it was recorded or simply handwritten notes were taken. “Historians have been interviewing people for hundreds of years; there’s nothing new about that, and I don’t think they’ve been doing oral history,” observed Philip Brooks of the Harry S. Truman Library in 1966. “I think there’s a real distinction here between a researcher who interviews people for his own purpose to derive information for his own book, and that of what I sometimes call a ‘pure’ oral historian, who is accumulating a stock of evidence for the use of other researchers, any and all researchers, as we do in an archival agency, I think this is related somewhat to the question of objectivity.” More recently, oral historians have conceded that all interviewing—archival or individual—is subjective, and that the earlier distinctions posed a false dichotomy.[11]

Some interviews may not be worthy of permanent preservation, particularly if the researcher has not followed other criteria for oral history interviewing, preparation, and processing or has not been sensitive to oral history ethical considerations. Still, in the long run, institutions—whether public libraries soliciting and collecting family history interviews for their local history sections or major research libraries working with authors and documentary film producers to collect oral history project interviews—stand to gain from a closer partnership with individual researchers.

It would be a mistake to define oral history so narrowly that it applied only to large archival collections. But to do oral history, interviewers must live up to its standards and assume its legal, ethical, and methodological responsibilities, including that of making their interviews available to other researchers for verification and further use.

Is it better to conduct interviews at the beginning of one’s research or near the end?

There is no set formula. Historians have found that conducting interviews during the early stages of research can help them determine what to look for in the archives and give them a sense of what was likely not written down. Interviews conducting during the later stages of research can fill in gaps in the record, add flavor to the story compiled from the archives, and may be more fully informed by archival research. As a general rule, however, the more research performed in advance, the better the interview.[12]

Oral Evidence

How valid is oral history as historical evidence?

A White House aide interviewed for a book once cautioned: “Everybody has a different recollection, sometimes of the same facts.” The interviewer agreed, noting that “sources lie. They embellish. They omit. They have agendas, hidden or not. They exaggerate their own prescience and the folly of their rivals. And sometimes their memories honestly fail them.” That was why he also asked his sources for relevant documents. But the aide pointed out, “Documents are sometimes misleading, too.”[13]

Treat oral evidence as cautiously as any other form of evidence. Documents written at the time have an immediacy about them and are not influenced by subsequent events, and yet those documents can be incomplete, in error, or created to mislead. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson invited the television critic Jack Gould to meet with him in the Oval Office. A memo from a White House aide later reported to Johnson that Gould had stopped at his office after the meeting and wondered, “Why doesn’t the President appear on television the same way he talked to me—the President is so gracious, affable and well informed.” Subsequently, scholars have frequently cited that memo when writing about Johnson and the media. Gould’s son, a historian, came across the quote in the mid-1980s and asked his father about the incident. Gould recalled that he had left the White House immediately after the interview, had not seen the aide, and had not said what was credited to him in the memo. The episode impressed his son as “a cautionary tale about relying on archival material without double-checking the sources used.”[14]

Autobiographies written years after the events occurred may present an inflated self-image. “Half the fascination of studying the memoirs of the past is the endeavor, by making allowance for the prejudices and predilections of the writer, to sift truth from falsehood,” wrote Duff Cooper, the biographer of the French diplomat Talleyrand, who left him much to sift. Similarly, Maya Jasanoff, after searching through the personal narratives written by Loyalists who had been forced into exile by the American Revolution, concluded: “No sources of this kind are ever purely objective. But the way people tell their stories—what they emphasize, what they leave out—can tell the historian as much about their times as the concrete details they provide.”[15]

Statements are not necessarily truer if written down at the time, written in later memoirs, or recalled in testimony. Whether written or oral, evidence must be convincing and verifiable. A federal court jury on which I served was presented with a written statement that the prosecutor described as the defendant’s “signed confession.” The defense insisted that the prosecution had misinterpreted the statement, whose many grammatical errors obscured its meaning. In the jury room, jurors repeatedly read the statement, trying to decipher exactly what it meant, before concluding that it failed the test of convincing evidence.

Oral history can be unconvincing. Some interviewees’ remarks are self-serving; they remember selectively, recall only events that cast themselves in a good light, and seem to always get the better of opponents. Interviewers may be too polite or too timid to ask probing questions about events that did not turn out well. Sometimes interviewees honestly cannot remember. They jumble names and dates and confuse people and places. Sometimes they deliberately recast their past to fit their current self and public image. Whole series of interviews can be faulted for paying attention to only one side of the issue or for interviewing only those people who would speak positively about the individual who was the subject of the project.[16]

A biographer seeking to reconstruct the life of the labor journalist Eva McDonald Valesh found that although few of her letters had survived, she had given an interview to the Columbia Oral History Research Office a few years before her death. The interview was largely factual in the details of her public life, and other evidence bolstered her opinions, but her account of her private life proved misleading. Valesh told the interviewer that her husbands had died, which was “true only in the sense that they were dead at the time of the interview.” Research revealed that she had been twice divorced, not twice widowed. “There are some minor problems with telescoping of time. And, yes, she lied about her age. She did that more than half her life, so it is with great consistency and with the excuse that she did look younger than her age.”[17]

Enough bad oral histories have been done to satisfy the worst suspicions of traditionalists, and yet enough good interviews have been conducted to validate the process. Properly done, an oral history helps interpret and define written records and makes sense of the most obscure decisions and events. An interview with a thoughtful participant and perceptive eyewitness can generate new ideas and avenues of inquiry that a researcher might have never thought of pursuing. Interviews can explore the use of language by subgroup—such as jazz slang, black English, shop-floor jargon, and even the acronyms of government bureaucrats—and discover word meanings that might otherwise have eluded researchers outside the subgroup.

Oral evidence does not always derive from oral history. The French historian Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie published what amounted to an oral history of a fourteenth-century village in the Pyrennes, Montaillou. His sources were depositions taken during the Inquisition by Bishop Jacques Fournier, who interrogated some 500 suspected heretics between 1318 and 1325. Scribes copied down the questions and answers and gave the accused the opportunity to correct the transcripts. The final copies were deposited in the Vatican archives, where six centuries later they enabled Ladurie to quote the words of the common folk of Montaillou, people who stood in stark contrast to the nobles who dominate the chronicles of the Middle Ages. Montaillou (1979) became a best seller in France and elsewhere, possibly because of its explicit accounts of sexual relations within the village. Prurient interests aside, the first-person accounts make the book compelling reading for even nonmedievalists.[18]

Similarly, the pension application process for militiamen in the American Revolutionary War amounted to what the historian John C. Dann has called “one of the largest oral history projects ever undertaken.” In 1832, when Congress agreed to pay a yearly pension to any militiamen who served for more than six months in the Revolution, thousands of elderly veterans applied. Since written records were scarce, the government required them to dictate their reminiscences to court reporters, giving as many names, dates, and other details as possible. Government clerks then scrutinized these testimonies to determine their accuracy. Selecting from a great mass of applications a century and a half later, Dann published the first-person eyewitness accounts of foot soldiers, runaway slaves, and women who followed their husbands into combat. Their accounts authentically describe not only combat but also everyday life in the camps, wounds, diseases, and the whole social setting of the Revolutionary War.[19]

Oral history makes a critical addition to oral evidence: a trained interviewer who can guide an interviewee’s recital of events that he or she may not have thought about for years but can recall vividly when asked. Questions prompt interviewees to discuss issues they might otherwise have skipped over. Interviewers can question inconsistencies between the oral account and written documentation. A good oral history can present and preserve convincing evidence and put it in quotable, first-person prose that enlivens historical narratives. But oral history should not stand alone as a single source. Researchers need to seek out available material to substantiate both written and oral evidence. If written and oral information contradict each other, then the researcher must dig even deeper to determine which is more accurate.

While preparing to interview Stuart McClure, the former chief clerk of the Senate Labor, Education, and Public Welfare Committee, much of the research centered on the National Defense Education Act. In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, McClure wrote a memo to the committee’s chairman, Lister Hill, suggesting that the public attention generated by Sputnik might help pass the education bill that had stalled in Congress—if they called it a “defense education act.” One account of the bill’s passage devoted a chapter to the fight between the Senate, which wanted to make the money available as grants in the form of scholarships, and the House, which insisted on making it available as loans. During the interview, when asked why the Senate lost the battle, McClure laughed and replied:

Oh, that was another clever, clever ploy. That was done on the House side. They narrowed the issue. There were millions of dollars for all kinds of other things, but Carl Elliott [the Alabama representative who chaired the House subcommittee on education] and his guys narrowed the issue to whether we should have the federal government hand out scholarships or loans....The House denounced scholarships, it was a waste of money and socialism and all of that. And the minute the damn scholarship issue was done for, dead, the bill swooped through. I don’t thing anybody had read any other title in it. Oh, that was clever stuff. Carl Elliott was a brilliant strategist, as good as Lister Hill in his way, in different houses.[20]

Here oral history exposed a legislative ploy that not only fooled most members of the House of Representatives but also the scholar who had published a history based on official documentation. The debate over loans versus scholarships had been a subterfuge designed to allow the House, which had previously defeated federal education bills, to save face and claim victory. McClure’s story has the ring of credibility—first, because it is logical, and second, because Senate staff rarely give credit to House members, except to express sheer admiration for a brilliant legislative strategy.

Do courts accept oral history as evidence?

Without the interviewee being present for cross-examination, courts generally regard the recording or transcript of an oral history as hearsay. Nevertheless, they have permitted oral histories to be subpoenaed as evidence and have accepted oral traditions in rendering verdicts. In dealing with land claims of native peoples, courts in several nations have acknowledged the inadequacy of written documents—although legal obstacles to those native claims remain formidable. When those fighting a land claim in Canadian courts argued that oral histories “did not accurately convey historical truth,” the chief justice of the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that “stories matter” and that the legal convention of hearsay could be waived in regard to the oral traditions of Canada’s “first people.”[21]

When South Africa established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine past government tactics used to suppress resistance to Apartheid, critics of the commission argued that the oral history it gathered was unreliable and grossly inaccurate. The stories that victims told were subjective, they charged, telling “their understanding of what happened to them and not necessarily what happened.” A minority report asserted: “Exaggeration is a natural consequence of human suffering.” These critics assumed that when the alleged perpetrators took the stand, having been granted amnesty, they would refute the victims’ claims of human rights violations. Instead, the perpetrators confirmed the most outrageous of the stories and affirmed the reliability of the oral history.[22]

Can information from an oral history ever be cited by itself, without other supporting evidence?

It depends on the information. Max Hastings, who interviewed hundreds of World War II veterans around the world for his books, argued that even when they played a small role in events their memories “contribute to a sense of mood, time, and place that can make an important contribution to a portrait of how things seemed to contemporary participants.” A personal description, the expression of an opinion, or the telling of a colorful anecdote would permit citation of the interview as the single source. But the more controversial the subject, the less an interview can stand alone. Critics would question the authority of the interviewee. Was that person in a position to know, or does the interview constitute simply secondhand speculation? When in doubt, employ the journalist’s practice of seeking at least two witnesses before asserting a statement of fact—if, indeed, a second witness is still alive.[23]

Independent researchers can also borrow from journalists the practice of having one interviewee comment on what another has said. A novice reporter, sent to cover a dispute involving a local developer, interviewed the developer and wrote his story. “Did you talk to the architect?” asked his editor. The reporter dutifully interviewed the architect and added his comments to the story, but his editor was still not satisfied. “Take what the architect said back to the developer and get him to respond,” the editor instructed, “then take what the developer said back to the architect, and after they’ve answered each other’s charges, then you write your story.”

In cultural resource-management projects that included oral history interviews, despite the misgivings of archaeologists and others on the team who were not oral historians, efforts have been made to determine the quality of evidence that the interviews gathered. The oral historian Dan Utley described how, in one project collecting information about a defunct farming community, each interviewee was encouraged to talk at length about the annual hog killing, a universal experience within the community. “The hog killing stories were then compared and used as a rough guide to evaluate the memories, descriptive abilities, and involvement of the interviewees,” he explained. “It was not easy to sit through numerous descriptions of the slaughter process, especially after breakfast, but they did provide an important comparative dimension to the overall project.”[24]

Isn’t most oral history anecdotal?

People naturally recount events and personalities anecdotally, in small self-contained stories that illuminate or instruct. Anecdotes often focus on humorous situations and characteristics and in conversation are designed to stimulate a smile or a laugh. In many ways, the anecdote is a writer’s freshest material. The term derives from the Greek word anekdota, meaning “things unpublished,” and it is often the telling stories taken from interviews that make a book original and different from previously published sources. Anecdotal is not synonymous with apocryphal, meaning spurious or unverifiable information. Names, dates, and other facts can usually be more reliably obtained elsewhere, but each interviewee has a unique store of anecdotes.

Although scholars sometimes denigrate anecdotes as the antithesis of analysis, these accounts can actually be informative, offering their analysis in a vivid and colorful manner and enlivening a narrative, often with a touch of humor. Good writers have an eye and an ear for a lively and believable anecdote that can make their points both memorably and compactly. Critics also dismiss oral history and other forms of narrative history because anecdotal information, by its nature, is randomly gathered and not statistically significant enough to make generalizations from. Social scientists look to census data, marriage licenses, death certificates, and voting statistics rather than to interviews, unless they are using a standard questionnaire and questioning a large, representative sample. Oral historians tailor their questions for individual interviewees, and time and financial limitations tend to restrict their pool of interviewees.

Although anecdotal information has a personal flavor, the collected stories from a group reinforce each other and show common threads in the lives of the group’s members. Mixing anecdotal information with the hard data of statistical abstracts, the skilled researcher and writer can re-create a colorful as well as a convincing portrait of the past.[25]

Can an interviewer argue with interviewees if they seem wrong about what they are saying?

Individual researchers have more liberty than archival oral historians to inject the interviews with their own opinions and to challenge the interviewees. Remember, however, that all interviews are voluntary and last only as long as the interviewee desires. Keep in mind that too forceful an intervention by the interviewer may also distort the interviewee’s responses.

Deliberate carefully when trying to decide whether interviewees’ stories are accurate, misleading, or erroneous. An individual researcher usually approaches an interview with a thesis to prove and may assume that anything contradicting that thesis is wrong. Give the speaker a fair hearing, and then challenge any inconsistencies in the testimony with other sources. When pressed, the interviewee may provide some additional rationale or even hard evidence to support previously unsubstantiated assertions. An impaired ability to listen can be a dangerous affliction for interviewers.[26]

“Research involves the shedding, not the confirmation, of our preconceptions,” the historian Blair Worden has asserted. “If historians go to the archives expecting certain answers to their questions, careful study of the evidence will almost invariably change their minds.” Living sources can magnify this condition by looking interviewers in the eye and telling them they are wrong and by revealing unexpected information. Interviewees may see things entirely differently from the researcher, and although interviewees might be biased or just plain wrong, so might the researcher’s thesis. The best information to emerge from an oral history is often completely unexpected: a different way of looking at something, turning preconceived notions upside down. An interviewer may want to argue points with an interviewee, but it is self-defeating to seek out people to interview and then ignore what they have to say. Or as Lyndon Johnson used to say, “I ain’t never learned nothin’ talkin’.”[27]

Although interviewers strive to take a neutral role during the interview, neutrality may not be acceptable in its publication. When James Green published his interview with the historian C. Vann Woodward in the Radical History Review, it stimulated a series of angry letters to the editor expressing outrage that Green had not rebutted Woodward’s critical remarks about the Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker. The opinions had been Woodward’s, but Green took the blame for his silence and apologized for not challenging Woodward’s assertions. “My purpose in interviewing Woodward for RHR was not, however, to expose our political differences,” Green explained, “but to examine his contribution to the Left’s understanding of Southern history and to the study of race, class and region in U.S. history.”[28]

Some caution is always advisable. A best-selling book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (2010), received superlative reviews and was considered for production as a movie, until reports surfaced that a key source had been an imposter who fabricated his role in the bombing and made up events out of whole cloth. The author said he was stunned, and the publisher stopped selling the book.[29]

Is it possible to get a worthwhile interview from someone with whom you profoundly disagree?

The emphasis on interviewing “from the bottom up” has presumed that interviewers at least admire their interviewees even when they do not agree with them. But some researchers record the lives of people whose politics and ideologies they find “unsavory, dangerous, or deliberately deceptive.” The sociologist Kathleen Blee, who interviewed former Ku Klux Klan members from Indiana, has no sympathy for the Klan’s anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and racist politics, and violent attitudes. She found it unnecessary to appear empathetic when interviewing Klan members and made little effort to shy away from controversial topics. She anticipated “no rapport, no shared assumptions, no commonality of thought or experience” and expected her interviewees to be too wary of her to reveal their true attitudes. But her expectations proved groundless. Not only did the former Klan members seem at ease during their interviews, but they assumed that she, “a native of Indiana and a white person,” had to agree, even if secretly, with their views. “Even challenging their beliefs had no effect on their willingness to talk,” Blee noted, concluding that despite profound differences, rapport was disturbingly easy to achieve.[30]

Interviewers may encounter people with whom they disagree profoundly but who can expand their perspectives on an issue. After publishing an article on the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, Pamela Sugiman received an angry e-mail from Lois Hashimoto, a woman who had lived in the relocation camps but did not see herself as a victim. In Hashimoto’s mind, those who had been interned had not only survived but also flourished in triumph over their unjust treatment. Rather than dismiss the criticism, Sugiman contacted Hashimoto and interviewed her—even if listening to such views made Sugiman squirm. Although neither one changed her opinion, they built a warm relationship. Sugiman reasoned that researchers “cannot exclude memories from our accounts because they are inconsistent with public memory or from what we view as historical truth.” To best understand the complexities of the past, oral historians must remain open to hearing and learning from other perspectives, no matter how much they might conflict with our own views.[31]

Won’t interviewees try to convince their interviewers to adopt their viewpoints?

A certain amount of intellectual seduction—interviewees trying to make interviewers agree with them—may take place. Sitting down to talk with prominent figures can be a heady experience, and it is all too easy to slip into a false sense of intimacy that can diminish scholarly distance and detachment. The makers and shakers who spend their careers assiduously trying to manipulate the media may treat historical researchers in much the same manner. They want the researcher to see events from their perspective to validate their positions. Some of them are campaigning for historical vindication just as energetically as they did for public office.

Researchers can also be captivated by less prominent individuals who have lived noble lives, suffered oppression, or been crusading spirits. Empathy helps greatly in conducting interviews. Allan Nevins once said that an interviewer needs gemutlichkeit, an “obvious sympathy with the person whom he interviews, friendliness and tact, as well as courage.” But researchers much also demonstrate scholarly skepticism. Interviewees were players and partisans in the events and often have positions and reputations to defend. Researchers are observers, not players, and must not let personal admiration keep them from weighing the evidence dispassionately and creating a convincing account of people, movements, and past events.[32]

How does a researcher go about finding oral history interviews that have been collected and are open for research?

Although researchers may feel an impulse to grab a recorder and begin interviewing for themselves, the best place to start is with oral histories that have already been collected, transcribed, and opened. Many authors have used these collections and many books have cited them, but only a small portion of these vast resources have been tapped.

Internet search engines have greatly facilitated locating oral history interviews thus boosting their use. Many oral history archives have posted their directories and catalogs online, sometimes accompanying them with full transcripts and audio and video clips. The websites of the various national and regional oral history associations include links to many of these repositories.

Is it legitimate for a researcher to use interviews conducted for someone else’s earlier book?

As researchers’ periods of study move further into the past and survivors are no longer available to interview, they have to rely more on “second-generation” use of oral history, reexamining interviews that were conducted for other publications. The original interviewer may have cited only portions of the material or may have overlooked significant clues buried in the testimony. Seemingly innocent remarks may take on new meaning in light of later developments. New trends in historical research may highlight issues that earlier researchers considered marginal or insignificant. Second-generation research potential increases the importance of depositing and preserving interviews in libraries and archives—for verification, reinterpretation, and reuse long after the interviewee and the interviewer are gone.

When Mark Stoler wrote his concise biography of General George C. Marshall, he worked in the shadow of Forrest Pogue’s monumental four-volume biography of Marshall. Although General Marshall had steadfastly refused lucrative offers to write his memoirs in the 1950s, Pogue persuaded him to give interviews. Eventually, Marshall warmed to being interviewed and left behind a rich, reflective commentary on his impressive career, particularly his earlier years. Since General Marshall died years before Stoler began his research, the historian made use of Pogue’s interviews at the Marshall Research Foundation in Lexington, Virginia. Repeatedly, Stoler quoted from Pogue’s interviews for Marshall’s evaluations of his colleagues and self-assessments of his actions. Although drawing from the same sources that had been available to Pogue, Stohler’s book was a fresh interpretation of the material Marshall shared with the earlier researcher.[33]

How reliable are an interviewee’s reconstructions of conversations with others?

People often recall events in the form of conversation (“so she said to me...”). They remember the words of presidents and other famous people they have met; they remember arguments, warnings, humorous and ironic remarks, and beautifully turned phrases. People reconstruct dialogue not only in oral histories but also in their letters and diaries; the results can be colorful but treacherous.

Interviewers hear only one party’s version of a conversation, generally years after it took place. In evaluating such evidence, think about whether the comments are characteristic of the person to whom they are attributed and whether they make sense in the context of the time and place of the conversation. Be suspicious of interviewees who always managed to get the last work or administer the perfect squelch. They may be recalling what they wish they had said or may be claiming credit for lines spoken to them rather than by them. The humorist Garrison Keillor once confessed in a radio monologue that his childhood reminiscence about an overripe tomato thrown with perfect aim was absolutely true—except that his sister had thrown it at him, not the other way around.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noted that remembered dialogue helps “impart immediacy to narrative” but warned that such information should only be used when the remarks are “plausibly supported by context or other evidence.” He added: “I have extended this tolerance to oral history and employed the literary convention with the same critical caution I hope illustrious predecessors have applied to written documents. It remains a convention.” [34]

How legitimate is it to cite anonymous interviews?

Disciplines that emphasize fieldwork and participatory observation regularly construct pseudonyms to conceal the identities and protect the privacy of the communities they observe. Anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists may interview people as representatives of types rather than as identifiable individuals. Their fieldwork techniques permit the creation of fictional identities for people and places. They believe that anonymity encourages interviewees to speak more candidly and that it protects interviewees, their families, and their jobs from retribution. This does not mean that they hide the purpose of their research from their interviewees. A sociologist who studied watermen in the Chesapeake Bay for a dissertation never admitted to the families who took her into their homes that she was using them for her research and secretly recording their conversations. Protests over her book prompted the American Sociological Association to approve more stringent guidelines for professional conduct in fieldwork. Oral historians agree that deception is never justified.[35]

Some anthropologists have found that even when they anticipated using anonymity, their participants were willing and eager to be named. That was the case when Penny Robinson studied Pakeha women in New Zealand. Since she was also photographing them, “it seemed rather a farce to not name them.” Those doing visual anthropology regard it as contradictory to include people’s faces and villages while concocting pseudonyms for them.[36]

Oral historians influenced by the social sciences have felt a similarly strong need to protect interviewees’ well-being by not revealing their names. They feel that sometimes the general message carries more significance than the particular speaker. For instance, the historian Sherna Gluck regretted that the political climate in the Middle East prevented her from revealing the real names of the Palestinian women she interviewed. “They have made it clear, however, that this personal recognition is less important to them than making their story public.”[37]

Yet anonymity clashes with some of oral history’s most fundamental objectives. Having sought to give “voice to the voiceless,” it is inconsistent to render them nameless. Oral historians conduct life review biographical interviews because they consider interviewees important as individuals and want to record their unique experiences and perceptions. Future historians using those interviews will also expect some verification of sources. They will want to know where the information came from and what biases might have affected the testimony. Just as critics of journalistic practices have complained that unbridled anonymity allows public officials to evade responsibility for their views, oral historians believe that their interviewees should be held accountable for what they say for the record. Nothing based on anonymous sources can be proven, and the evidence remains at the level of rumor and innuendo. “When sources choose anonymity,” the oral historian William W. Moss warned, “whether out of privacy, humility, or fear, the record produced not only suffers the loss of user confidence that accompanies any anonymous testimony, but the primacy assertion of oral history that the individual indeed matters is also lost.”[38]

Sensitive interviews can be sealed for safe periods of time, but the Oral History Association has recommended anonymity only in extremely sensitive circumstances.[39] By accepting anonymity under dire circumstances, oral historians indicate that it should never be a routine practice. When authors claim that their books are based on hundreds of interviews and cite none specifically, or assert that none of their interviewees chose to be identified, there is a strong suspicion that anonymity was part of the researcher’s design and that interviewees were never encouraged or given the opportunity to speak for the record. The use of blanket anonymity also raises the question of the expiration of that anonymity. Was the promise of anonymity eternal, or can the interviewees’ identities be restored to them at some safe point in the future?

One solution for writers seeking to balance their interviewees’ anonymity with scholarly verification is to deposit the recordings and transcripts in a library or archives with provisions for identifying the interviewees after a safe interval. The political scientist Richard Fenno gave his interviews with members of Congress to the National Archives. Since these interviewees had left public life, they could be identified without fear of political embarrassment, thereby enhancing the future research value of the collection. A history of the U.S. space program drew heavily from interviews with past and present employees of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), asking about their personal backgrounds, the type of work they did in the space program, and their perspectives on how the agency changed over time. Given that many of the interviewees were still NASA employees, they were assured that their names would not appear next to any quotations used in the published history—which identified each interview only by number—but that the transcripts, linking names to the numbers, would be preserved in the NASA History Office.[40]

What about sensitive issues in transcripts that are posted online?

The impulse to post interviews promptly online clashes with the reality that candid accounts may make the interviewees vulnerable. Applicants for schools and jobs, undocumented immigrants, and members of ethnic and religious minorities may be penalized for exposing their life stories to online searches. The easiest solution is to hold the collection in an archives for future release rather than to post it right away. Some projects, however, are eager to disseminate their findings to promote their causes and are thus unwilling to wait. The Student Liberation Activist Movement (SLAM!) oral history project, which conducted interviews with young radical political protestors, chose to post the audio interviews without the transcripts, to make them less searchable, and to use only the first names of the interviewees online.[41]

Theory

What is the role of theory in oral history?

Any interview involves an interpretation of the past. People will remember events and express opinions from their own particular viewpoints. Interviewers will ask questions about things they consider significant. Those processing the interviews will index or otherwise highlight the major themes to facilitate future use. Researchers will then interpret the interviews to draw out meaning for their own purposes. Some oral historians manage to combine all of those roles. Whatever your connection to the process, it is useful to consider the range of theories that have developed regarding the interpretation of oral history.

A critic once contended that the practice of oral history “claims to be self-effacing and world-revealing. How can a collection of interviews be anything else? But if you look closely at these oral histories, you can never forget who has shaped them and to what end.” Although meant as a negative—that oral histories actually reflect the perspectives of the interviewer as well as the interviewee, and that readers should be forewarned they are not dealing with “just a series of oral histories”—this assertion simply states a fact. Interviewers do indeed shape their interviews by whom they choose to interview, what questions they ask, and what extracts they select for publication. The role of the interviewer in steering the interview, the peculiarities of memory, and many other issues amply demonstrate that oral history goes far beyond holding up a mirror to society.[42]

Theorists pay attention to more than the information that interviewees provide. Such efforts began by questioning the validity and reliability of memory, and soon spread to other analytical issues. In Europe, oral historians encountered widespread silence and unwillingness to talk about past support of fascism. The Italian historian Luisa Passerini came to appreciate that her interviews were an expression of culture that mixed “the dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires.” She accepted the subjective nature of her sources: oral histories are not “static recollections of the past” but memories reworked according to the interviewees’ later experiences. Her realization led other oral historians to consider what people remember and forget and the ways in which those memories of the past are produced “through the prism of the present.”[43]

Because they create their sources, rather than rely exclusively on archival documents, oral historians saw the resemblance between their research methods and those in the social sciences who utilized fieldwork. They began studying how those disciplines analyzed interviews. For instance, anthropologists and sociologists considered individuals in the context of their communities and raised issues of how gender, race, and ethnicity determine how members of a community remember and retell the past. Linguists examined the structures of communication. Psychologists raised questions about memory and trauma.

Interpretation has become an inescapable feature of oral history at every stage. Interviewers engage in interpretation during the interview. (Why is this person evading the subject? Could I frame the question differently? What could that have meant?) The transcript prompts further interpretation between the transcriber and the interviewer who audit-edits. (What was that word? Is that an acronym? Where should the punctuation go?) The researchers who use the interviews—whether or not they conducted them—then seek to extract meaning from what was or was not said. Theory is therefore present in the process and its outcome, assisting the oral historian in doing the interview and in analyzing it later.

What is grounded theory?

As opposed to the individual testimonies that oral historians conduct, anthropologists employ ethnography as a method of collecting data about groups of people and use interviews to examine a collective society (although these distinctions are often blurred). The anthropologist Heather Howard notes that “the art of good ethnography is precisely in how well the many layers of data are woven together.” Where anthropologists use interviewing to understanding different cultures from the perspectives of those within the culture, sociologists conduct interviews to link individual experiences with larger cultural and structural issues. These social sciences view the social world as patterned and predictable, which enables them to apply scientific methods to examine the variables and test their hypotheses. Traditionally, social scientists have conducted quantitative research, using standard questionnaires from which they could generalize, and promising anonymity to the participants. More recently, these disciplines have experimented with a type of qualitative interviewing that more closely resembles oral history practices. Once the social scientists finish their interviews they engage in data analysis. The cycles of interviewing and analysis that they conduct is called “grounded theory.” The idea behind it is that each cycle of analysis will inform the next round of interviews.[44]

What theories have been applied to oral history?

Those theories most applicable to oral history involve narrative and memory. Narrative theory grew out of literary studies before it came to influence sociology, anthropology, and history. Memory theories began with experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, and spread into history, autobiography, and aging, while also influencing folk history, popular history, public history, and oral history. Memory studies have included autobiographical memory, aging, gender, and collective memory. In fact, there are so many themes and variations that one historian has dubbed them “the memory industry.”[45]

Oral history interviewees will often say, “You got me thinking.” Some of the stories they tell during interviews are well rehearsed from regular repetition. Other stories have been buried in their memory and will surprise people as they recall them. Rather than accepting all memory as true, oral historians consider what people remember, what they forget, and what they get wrong. Whenever possible they try to verify the information provided in an interview—seeking objectivity—but they have increasingly found the subjective nature of nature of memory worthy of study.[46]

The historian Lynn Abrams makes the point that it is “the practice rather than the content that marks out oral history as distinctive within historical research.” Oral history differs from other historical sources in that it exists only because the interviewer has selected the participants, conducted the interviews, and preserved the results. By asking questions and engaging in exchanges with the interviewees, the interviewer becomes a participant in the process. Recognizing this fact, oral historians looked to the social sciences, where researchers conduct fieldwork, and imported many of their interpretations about the narrators’ interactions with their interviewers.[47]

How does narrative theory relate to oral history?

Narrative theory weighs the relationship between language and thought. It views an interview as a multilayered document that is the result of an interviewer and interviewee “negotiating and creating a text.” It also postulates that they way people tell stories follows “conventions of process and purpose, presentation and style, place and performance.” Instead of accepting outward behavior as having a rational purpose, those engaged in narrative theory believe it reflects underlying signs and symbols. Narrative theory has challenged the notion of objective history, seeing the past as recalled and recounted as simply a construction, shaped by the way it is told.[48]

Oral historians influenced by narrative theory grew less concerned about the factual accuracy of an interview than in trying to understand why the story was told that way. This meant that an oral history could be analyzed both for the information it provided about events as well as the narrator’s attitude toward those events. Rather than highlight the uniqueness of each narration, however, narrative theory focuses on the similarities among many stories, suggesting that the memories people retain are shaped by their cultural values and environment, reflecting a society’s collective memory.[49]

Although useful in interpreting oral testimony, narrative theory can distract from testimonies that do not fit collective patterns. Nor does narrative theory pay much attention to the ability of interviewees to reflect critically on their own experiences. “Human subjectivity is more active, engaged, and critical than contemporary theory permits,” the oral historian Anna Green has argued. “We must keep space for the resistant, curious, rebellious, thoughtful, purposeful human subjects.”[50]

How have memory theories informed oral historians?

Ten months after an airplane crash in Amsterdam—a story all over the news—Dutch psychologists interviewed residents of the city about what they remembered. When asked if they had seen the television coverage of the actual crash, more than half said yes and went on to describe it in detail, even though there had been no film of the accident. People were responding to blatantly suggestive questions. This incident serves as a reminder that the questions asked can unduly influence the answers received. Researchers who seek confirmation for ideas they have already formed and hope for specific answers, must be careful not to plant ideas by the way they frame their questions or even by their body language. It is always better to ask open-ended questions that do not presume the answers.[51]

Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology, has studied the way people remember and forget and categorized what he calls the “seven sins of memory.” He lists three sins of omission:

1. Transcience: the weakening of memory over time.

2. Absent-mindedness: the breakdown between attention and memory.

3. Blocking: thwarting information we are trying to retrieve; for example, when people say, “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

He also lists four sins of commission:

1. Misattribution: assigning a memory to the wrong source.

2. Suggestibilty: memories implanted from leading questions, comments, and suggestions.

3. Bias: rewriting our past experience to meet current beliefs.

4. Persistence: obsessing or ruminating on disturbing memories we would prefer to forget.

Among these “sins,” the most pervasive is transcience. Recent experiences block out memories of older ones. This is the same process that helps people sort out the humdrum from their more meaningful experiences—those memories last longer. Schacter warns us not to think of memory as snapshots from a family album that “if stored properly, could be retrieved in precisely the same condition in which they were put away.” Memories work differently, allowing us to extract key elements from our experiences and store them. Later we reconstruct memories of those experiences rather than retrieve exact copies of them. In the process of reconstructing we will likely express feelings, draw conclusions, and even add information obtained after the experience.[52]

Dwelling on memory’s imperfections might cast doubt on human memory as a valid source of historical information, but Schacter calls this view misguided. He points out that the problems raised actually reveal memory’s adaptability. Despite its sins of omission and commission, memory provides “the scaffolding upon which all mental life is constructed.” Memory allows us to draw on past experiences to inform the present, preserves present experiences for future reference, and permits us to revisit the past at will. Memory’s vices of memory are also its virtues: “elements of a bridge across time which allows us to link the mind with the world.”[53]

Oral historians are learning much from the scholarship on memory studies. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes observe that those conducting memory studies tend to frame their work differently than oral historians: “They ask questions about the broader social and cultural process at work in remembrance, and they are equally concerned with written forms of self-representation, from autobiography to blogging.” This approach helps remind oral historians to look beyond a narrow focus on an individual narrator’s life story and to appreciate that an interview is just “one form of memory taking.”[54]

What is the effect of people frequently retelling their stories?

Telling a story over and over again makes it more durable. A psychological study of people who experienced a major earthquake found no correlation between the accuracy of memories and their closeness to the epicenter. Living through such an event was “definitely worth talking about,” especially when friends and relatives called to check up on them. “Once you realize you have a story to tell,” the psychologist reasoned, “it’s hard to stop.” Frequent retelling helps consolidate the story in long-term memory. At the same time, the story becomes more rehearsed and polished. A form of reconstruction takes place in which the story changes with each retelling, sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly.

Remembering and retelling help people make sense of their personal experiences and locate them within the larger historical context. In the 1980s, the Popular Memory Group at the University of Birmingham studied the ways in which the British remembered World War II. The researchers compared private and public memories, and the ways in which some memories became dominant and others were marginalized. They could see that the state, the media, and educational institutions all influenced people’s memories of a collective experience, but they also found that individuals’ novel experiences played a role in generating different ways to explain that past. The retelling of one’s own personal stories helps those memories survive the onslaught of a national narrative.[55]

Does trauma affect memory?

Traumatic events register differently from everyday experiences in people’s memories. Those who have interviewed survivors of hurricanes and other disasters report that the interviewees were “more focused on the rich details of the ‘how’ and ‘what’ when it comes to more recent memories,” which affected the way they answered questions. Interviewers should be prepared to deal with stories that are thicker in detail than usual.[56]

Oral historians who deal with trauma say that they work at the intersection between tragedy and memory. They must take care not to intrude on those who are trying to put their lives back together and not badger them about painful experiences. However, they often find that victims of traumatic events are eager to talk about their suffering. The act of remembering those events can help people make sense of them.[57]

Some painful memories are suppressed for years, and people only become willing to talk about them later in life. Other memories may be so painful that people cannot suppress them, even when they try. Those individuals become “stuck” or focused on the past, which can lead to psychological distress. Recollections of trauma can be disabling, but psychologists also call them protective, since they remind us of responses to life-threatening dangers.[58]

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, the Columbia Oral History Research Office set out to interview New Yorkers about their experiences before media coverage had a chance to shape the collective memory. They began by interviewing those who escaped from the World Trade Center, those who were in the immediate vicinity, those who lost family members, and those whose lives were indirectly traumatized, notably the city’s Muslim population. Seeking to understand how people constructed meaning out of what happened, they found great ambiguity in people’s minds and a reluctance to draw immediate conclusions. “A person might describe the horror of their experience and then go on to describe some aspect of the day of 9/11 that was very ordinary,” observed Mary Marshall Clark, who directs the project. “People had trouble integrating the experience, which tells us something about the impact of the trauma.” The project created one of the largest archives of qualitative interviewing on massive trauma, which scholars can use to assess the social and psychological impact of catastrophe.[59]

In what ways have oral historians explored traumatic subjects?

Beyond interviewing survivors of natural disasters, oral historians have focused on individuals and groups that were uprooted, exiled, repressed, and impoverished; on the impact of dictatorship and disease; and on oppression, struggle, vulnerability, suffering, discrimination, and contested identity. These themes are most notably evident in work taking place in regions that have undergone major political, social, and cultural changes, where researchers explore the roots of repression in past regimes.

Do interviewers need any special qualities when conducting oral histories about trauma?

The 9/11 project concluded that interviewers dealing with trauma must be able to connect “viscerally and emotionally” with those they interview. Beyond the usual concerns and practices of conducting an oral history, they need to create a neutral and supportive environment for the interview and not express excessive emotion over what they are hearing. Although they need to connect with the interviewee, they also need to avoid identifying with their interviewee’s experiences. One older woman who escaped the towers unharmed later collapsed from the stress and was bedridden for weeks. Her interviewer fell into a similarly depressed condition. After a visit to the project’s trauma specialist, the interviewer realized that she was identifying with the victim.[60]

Oral history is not psychology, but a clinical psychologist who does video interviews with Holocaust survivors has recommended using multiple interview sessions to draw out memories, thus conducting a deeper conversation rather than simply obtaining a testimony. In these sessions, questions help memories take shape and find words to express them. “One thought sparks another, and then another, that I may not have even thought I had,” marveled one survivor. “We’re learning together.”[61]

Those who have worked with victims of political repression and other traumas recommend conducting the interviews in their homes or another location where they will feel safe and making the interview more conversational. These are also factors in reminiscence therapy, which conducts end-of-life interviews that often involve personal anguish. Medical care givers sometimes worry that interviews will cause their patients emotional upset. Susanna Johnston has responded to this by arguing that older people can gain strength from sharing emotions and “take a pride or somber satisfaction in recalling the dangers and emotional upheavals they have survived.”[62]

What do oral historians mean by interviews as a form of “empowerment”?

Some interviewers have embraced oral history as a form of advocacy for groups that have been marginalized, oppressed, or otherwise excluded from the historical narrative. Lynn Abrams has called this “part of a more general move to encourage ‘victims’ to see themselves as ‘survivors.’” They see the interpretation of history as a power struggle and have sought to help such groups take control of memory and history. The overthrow of totalitarian regimes has also encouraged oral historians to conduct interviews that will rewrite the older, official histories and rethink commemorations—although opening this discourse usually has to wait until the regime has fallen. Those concerned with empowerment point to the power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee, and seek to shift the balance of power from the interviewer to the interviewee and thereby democratize the project’s product.[63]

Theories about empowerment view oral history as a form of social justice. By studying the culture, speech, and behavior of those on the periphery of society—including disabled people, individuals with mental problems, the homeless, and prisoners—researchers believe they can learn more about their own society as a whole and about themselves as individuals.[64]

Ronald Grele has cautioned against the notion that people’s lives will be changed by being interviewed or that they will somehow be introduced to historical consciousness. Interviewers may raise questions that interviewees might not have considered before, and lift the events of daily life to an object of investigation, but when the interview is over, both will go back to their separate spheres. “So I don’t know what this empowerment in the interview might mean,” Grele commented. In some cases it may cause people to question aspects of their lives that had previously been unquestioned. In other cases it may encourage members of a community to engage in collecting their own history. “That is another sense of empowerment, where the power of interpretation moves from the academy to the community, but it’s a power of interpretation. It does not necessarily mean there’s going to be a shift in the economic, social or political forces at play in that community.”[65]

Publishing Oral History

How much editing of interviews is acceptable for publication?

Transcripts of recordings are edited, and most published oral histories have been further edited, condensing and highlighting remarks and in some cases rearranging testimony for chronological and narrative purposes. But how much is too much? Oral historians have expressed suspicion over the popular books of Studs Terkel, who usually removed his own questions and sometimes reordered his interviewee’s answers. When Charles Morrissey questioned some of the Vermonters quoted in Terkel’s American Dreams, Lost and Found (1980), they objected to the way their remarks had appeared in print. One complained that Terkel “applied his thoughts to my words and came up with the version in his book.” Another felt that his words had been rearranged “in such a way that I can’t make sense of it.”[66]

Some of the best known “oral history” books have been produced by professional writers who lacked training in historical research and handled oral documentation rather loosely. Serious questions were raised about the authenticity of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976); many felt it was a work of historical fiction more than history. Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1974), in a similar fashion, seems to mix Truman’s recollections with Miller’s creative writing. Miller did not publish his interviews until after Truman’s death, and some of the statements he attributed to Truman strain credulity. Miller’s rambling remarks to an Oral History Association meeting in 1975 augmented the audience’s worst suspicions. “I don’t consider myself an oral historian,” Miller later admitted. He then added, “Oral historians don’t either. I spoke at their national convention several years ago and they loathed me, detested me, because since I don’t know the rules of oral history—and operate as a reporter, which I consider myself—I violate them.” After Miller’s death, seven hours of his recorded interviews with Truman, conducted in 1961–62, were opened for research at the Truman Library. Historians who reviewed the tapes found nothing in them to support his book’s more sensational claims.[67]

The work of some professional historians has also been called into question, notably the historian Stephen Ambrose’s interviews with President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s appointment books showed that Ambrose spent much less time with Eisenhower than he had claimed. They met only three times for a total of less than five hours and were never alone together. Ambrose’s books on Eisenhower, published after the president’s death, listed more interviews, raising suspicion that he had embellished his evidence.[68]

Editing and rearranging interviews for clarification and cutting away tangential material are appropriate so long as the original meaning is retained. The goal is to sharpen the focus without putting words in the interviewee’s mouth or altering the essence of what was said. For instance, if an interviewee spoke at length about someone’s positive characteristics and fleetingly of one negative quality, it would be misleading and unfair to quote only the latter.

In reproducing large sections of oral history interviews for publication, researchers should consider including the questions as well as the answers. Some subjects may not have been discussed simply because the interviewer asked nothing about them. Other subjects came up precisely because that was what the interviewer wanted to know about. By leaving as many of their questions in the text as feasible, oral historians not only show what questions elicited the responses but also demonstrate that the interviewee did not necessarily volunteer the information and may even have had to be coaxed to reveal private and potentially embarrassing information. Without the questions, the basic dialogue of an oral history is lost, creating the impression that people raised the issues when, in fact, they were responding to queries. Similarly, when several interviewees focus on a particular trait or make a similar observation, it could be simply because they are all responding to the same question.

Oral history has become fashionable among popular writers and other purveyors of popular culture who are not always careful about its presentation. Cullom Davis, who directed the oral history program at the University of Illinois at Springfield, warned of its “debasement” by those who fail to “observe the canons of our profession.” He charged that publication or oral history without interpretation produces little more than a scissors-and-paste scrapbook and a disorganized mass of recollections. “As serious practitioners, whether lay or professional,” Davis argued, “we must identify the hucksters and charlatans who exploit oral history’s intrinsic appeal for their own shallow, ahistorical and even unethical ends.”[69]

Should oral history interviewees speak for themselves, or do they require scholarly interpretation?

In one of his novels, David Lodge imagined a dialogue between a newspaper interviewer and the writer she was trying to interview. The reporter saw her interviews as real life because she used a recorder and invented nothing, but the writer noted that she left out the dull bits that would be too boring to read. “I concede the point,” she replied. “An interview is not an exact record of reality. It’s a selection. An interpretation.” The writer defined it as a game for two players. “The question is, what are the rules, and how does one win? Or lose, as the case may be.” The reporter rebutted, “I don’t see it as a game. I see it as a transaction. A barter. The interviewer gets copy. The interviewee gets publicity.”[70]

The compelling nature of the spoken word, the enjoyment of reading the vernacular, the honesty and humor of so many interviewees, has kindled a strong interest in allowing oral sources to “speak for themselves.” This approach, which often involves little interpretation on the part of the compiler, sometimes results in books that resemble collages. The literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick dismissed “tape recording without an interpretive intelligence” as “a primitive technology for history” designed to relieve the author of the burden of writing. Hardwick insisted that a book requires an author’s “signature of responsibility.”[71]

Reviewing the biography of Robert F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Henry Fairlie dismissed oral history as testimonials of dubious value. It is up to the historian “to do the hard work of sifting,” wrote Fairlie. “When we are given the personal words of various actors, that is all we are given, and we have either to take or reject their word that something happened as they say....That is what we have historians for: to take their word that this was so.” Historians act as judges, interpreters, and critics, compiling and analyzing sources of the past. Historians are rarely eyewitnesses to the events they write about. They reconstruct events and the temper of the time from a mixture of sources, balancing the reliability of one piece of data against another, arranging them in a coherent pattern to make sense of what happened.[72]

The very act of editing and arranging interviews shows that the author has not simply allowed interviewees to speak for themselves. Editorial intervention begins with determining whom to interview, what questions to ask, which interviews to include in the volume, in which order, and how much of the original interviews to publish. Even if the editor refrains from adding an overt interpretation, he or she is still deciding which interviewees are most worthy of being recorded and published. Having gone that far then, the editor owes something more to readers. At the minimum, authors of oral history collections should provide some background for their interviews to place the interviewees in context, offering suggestions about why they said what they did and took certain positions, and sometimes spelling out where interviewer and interviewee did not agree.

A certain romantic belief has developed that putting a microphone in front of people will miraculously provide the road to truth. In his influential review of oral history literature, Michael Frisch has argued that what historians do—interpreting evidence, weighing, testing, and connecting people and events—is still critically important. “And yet, at the same time the exciting thing about oral history is that the process becomes a less exclusive one,” he added. The scholar and the subject collaborate: “They come together and provide a good advantage for understanding the meaning of the experience.” This is the notion that Frisch calls a “shared authority”: “the grounds of authority are very different, and have different meaning, but there is a kind of sharing in the process of the interpretive authority, which is one of the exciting things about doing oral history.”[73]

If writers quote from interviews they conducted, do they need to first submit them to their interviewees for review?

Some researchers allow their interviewees to check their quotes before they use them. “I think it’s only fair,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reasoned, “that when you talk to people, you should give them the same kind of control over an interview as they have over an oral history transcript.” Other researchers might chafe over this idea, given that an interviewee might change or delete something entirely. Yet anyone who has ever been interviewed by a reporter and then misquoted in the newspaper article can appreciate how differently the teller of the tale and the listener can hear the same story. Context is essential for accuracy, and even a perfectly quoted sentence can have its meaning altered when taken out of the larger text.[74]

At the same time, interpreting what the interviewees said remains the historian’s domain. A researcher and an interviewee may form entirely different opinions about the events being discussed. Even though interviewees were eyewitness, their perspectives could be distorted, and their memories incorrect. By collecting evidence from a multitude of sources, the historian may come to a different conclusion. The author’s duty is to quote the interviewee correctly and not distort the remarks to fit a thesis. Otherwise, the author is entirely responsible for the finished product.

What do reviewers look for when reviewing oral history books?

Reviewers have been notoriously inconsistent in dealing with oral history. Too often a review begins with an admission that the reviewer knows little about oral history or does not trust oral sources, characteristics that never seem to disqualify them from reviewing the book. They distance themselves from the methodology and consequently add little to our understanding. At the root of their complaints, however, is a fairly common call for the author to assume a more interpretive role. Commenting on the increased appearance of books based on interviews, the novelist and frequent reviewer Diane Johnson asserted, “There does seem in this technique an almost cowardly reluctance to think.”[75] In the same vein, Timothy Foote began a review of an oral history of the Second World War by noting: “Anything calling itself oral history probably ought to be approached with deep suspicion. Time is short. There is much to read. We’re already awash in ill-chosen words. And though tape recorders are splendid gimmicks, people who present interviews as history are farther from the mark than a cook who insists that a loose collection of eggs, sugar, milk, vanilla, flour, and a few squares of bitter chocolate are in fact a chocolate cake.”[76]

Reviewers more experienced with oral history have reacted to the literature through the lens of their own disciplines or tailored their reactions to fit the publications in which their reviews appear. After conducting a survey of oral history reviews, the book review editor Linda Shopes observed that reviewers in the Oral History Review generally wanted to know more about the interviewing process and procedures than about the subject matter and particular findings of a project, although the accuracy of the information gathered was often a major touchstone of OHR reviews. Reviewers commented on whatever unique insights and perspectives emerged from the interviews but took the authors to task for not testing the accuracy of oral evidence through corroborating sources. Reviews in the more theoretically oriented journals are more likely to be interpretive, focusing on subjectivity and how oral tradition and narratives “can reveal the complex consciousness of a culture.” Reviews in the more ideologically oriented journals tend to raise questions of a political nature.

Reviewers for general, non-oral history journals express more concern about oral history’s substantive contributions to historical knowledge. These reviews emphasize the importance of first-person narrative in conveying a sense of people as historical actors and actresses. General historical reviewers tend to respond best to authors who use a variety of interviewees together with other documentary sources, and who place the data in a broad analytical context. The chief conclusion that emerged from this sampling of reviewers was that the author of an oral history volume will inevitably be judged as a historian and cannot escape that role by suggesting that the sources “speak for themselves.”[77]

Publishers tend to view reviews as idiosyncratic. Unless a consensus emerges from every corner, they will take a bad review with a grain of salt. They pay more attention to where the review coverage comes from—whether in highly focused scholarly journals or more broadly mainstream publications. This indicates the audience that is most likely to respond to the book, which makes publishers think about whether to include more books in their lists of the type reviewed.

How should oral histories be cited as references?

How to cite interviews is a question that touches on the one of how seriously researchers take oral sources. Of all the academic disciplines engaged in interviewing as a research tool, professional historians have devoted the least amount of methodological attention to its problems and potentials. This laxity contrasts sharply with the intense seriousness historians bring to written sources. Authors dutifully list every manuscript collection, book, and article consulted, and then limit the bibliography of oral sources to a few lines acknowledging those who “shared their knowledge” in “conversations” with the author. Footnotes identify the interviews with cryptic initials and often without dates or other information that would tell the interested reader how the interview was collected. Some interviews are not cited at all. Substantial numbers of histories drawn from oral sources give no indication of whether the recordings and transcripts are deposited somewhere, either for other researchers’ use or for verification. It remains puzzling why professional historians have accepted on faith the author’s reliability in note taking, transcribing, and even interpreting oral information.[78]

Guides to historical writing specify that the standard reference should begin with the name of the interviewee. The title of the interview (if there is one) should be in quotation marks. The citation should include “interviewed by [name of the interviewer]” and mention whether the interview is a recording or transcript, and whether it has been published as part of a book or journal article or in any other medium, with standard references to such publication. The citation should indicate whether the interview is in the author’s possession or has been deposited in a library or archive. Keep in mind that the purpose of a citation is to show where the information comes from and to help the reader find the original source. Page numbers for transcripts, or other publications, should be provided. For interviews found on the Internet, cite the archives where the collection is physically located as well as its electronic address.[79]

The following are examples of citations of interviews from oral history archives, from independent research, and from published sources:

Woodrow Crockett, interviewed by Bill Mansfield, March 15, 2001, recording and transcript, Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, National Park Service, Tuskegee, Alabama.

Sen. Hugh D. Scott, interviewed by the author, January 27, 1986, recording and transcript deposited at the Senate Historical Office, Washington, D.C.

Harry Bridges, interview by Harvey Schwartz, Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 9–31.

What do publishers seek in oral history books?

Among the prime questions publishers ask are: Who is the intended audience, and how will this book serve it? What contributions will it make to the field, and how will it be different from everything else that’s out there? Have you obtained the necessary copyright permissions from your interviewees to publish their interviews?

Publishers have different primary objectives. Some trade book publishers and university presses tend to be national and international in scope, while others might be more locally oriented. Consequently, some topics will appeal more to one than the other. As with any topic, look over the oral history titles on their backlists to see what they have published in the past as a guide to what new works they might accept.

The publisher’s guidelines will be available online. Follow them carefully in preparing a proposal (not a manifesto) that summarizes the content of the book and its major themes. Tell them something about your background and experience to establish your credibility. A table of contents, introduction, and a few sample chapters that show what you intend to do with the interviews will also help—the more material the better to give an idea of the shape of the book. Proposals will probably be reviewed not only by the editors but also by experts in the field, who may make suggestions for improvement. Again, the more material these reviewers have, the more they will understand the scope of the project. Otherwise, reviewers may focus on issues that are not included, even if you already had that in mind, which may require additional submissions. As an author, you do not need to embrace all their suggestions—especially if you feel they contradict your intentions—but you will need to take them seriously and explain to the publisher what revisions you are prepared to make. Remember that editors are there to make your book as presentable as possible.

It is unlikely that publishers will want to see anything the size of Gone with the Wind. Such doorstops are expensive and unfeasible for course adoption. Aim for a manuscript somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 words (the latter including notes). This means you may need to eliminate or substantially reduce some interviews, which can be a painful process if the interviewees are still living. Include the most colorful and representative in the text and thank the others in the acknowledgments, making sure to identify where the rest of the interviews are available for research.

If the interviews and analysis are available elsewhere as published articles or unrevised dissertations, publication might be regarded as redundant. You will need to rework the material in a meaningful way. A dissertation will serve a graduate student in getting a degree, but it usually requires substantial revision to address a wider audience than one’s doctoral committee. Take time to step back, dump or define any jargon, polish the prose, and incorporate and highlight new material.

In the digital age, not every oral history needs to appear in a book. Interviews can be made just as widely available online, often with audio and video components. But printed books will remain a significant medium for storytelling and scholarship, and will continue to play a role in the scholarly universe, particularly for faculty seeking promotion and tenure. Books are an appropriate medium for making arguments and explaining interpretations. They set a frame around the interviews, offering context that differentiates them from the original transcripts. In that sense, they produce something that is cooked rather than raw. Through editing and analysis, books organize the information so that readers can engage in it and connect it with other literature. Books are a collaboration between authors, editors, and publishers that shape ideas into attractive and approachable products. Publication has helped give substance to oral history, articulating trends and providing platforms for new ideas and analysis.

5

Video Oral History

Should oral histories be recorded on video?

Doing interviews on video used to raise anxiety over costs, camera angles, and physical appearance, and whether bright lights and a camera crew would distract the interviewee and diminish the intimacy of the interview. Digital equipment has now made it so much more practical to capture oral history visually that the excuses for not using video have become less valid. Digital video cameras have reduced the need for extra lighting, sound equipment, and crew. They have lessened the need for studios to control sound and light conditions and allowed interviews to take place in more natural settings. Video recordings also vastly expanded the creative uses of the interviews.

Memories are recounted in more than words. Transcripts can indicate laughter, sobs, finger pointing, or fist shaking. But some expressions and gestures are too complex or subtle to reduce to words. When Richard Sweterlitsch audio recorded an interview with the Italian-American Sophia Bielli about the granite industry in Barre, Vermont, he realized that her language was not just verbal. “Sophia spoke with her hands punctuating her oral statements, and with her face and eyes she communicated her intensity and reactions to what she was saying,” he observed. “It was obvious that I had to document the visual along with the aural.”[1]

Transcripts, audio recordings, and videos all impart the same basic information, but video provides an extra dimension to oral history interviews. Transcripts reduce language to written symbols. Audio recordings convey tone, rhythm, volume, and speech patterns. But the facial expressions and body language captured by video reveal even more of an interviewee’s personality. A smile, a wink, a frown, a look of perplexity would be missed in an audio interview and convey more than what can be reproduced in the recording.

The setting in which the interview takes place can also add color and context. For many families, videoed oral histories with elderly relatives are treasured keepsakes. For museums and archives, video interviews expand the potential uses of oral histories as valuable resources for exhibits and documentaries. The Smithsonian Institution used video interviews with zoologists not only to talk about but also to show changes in zoo facilities and animal care. History Associates, Inc. conducted a video history of a large Washington, DC law firm, producing a video that mixed interviews with film footage around the offices and around the capital. Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture videoed African American dance traditions. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York incorporates a series of ten-minute films combining video oral histories and film footage throughout its exhibitions. Producer Steven Spielberg has underwritten the filming of tens of thousands of interviews for the Survivors of Shoah Visual History Foundation. San Francisco’s Legacy Project video interviews and captures the motions of dancers dying of AIDS.[2]

Video is highly practical when recording group interviews. Anyone who has tried to transcribe an interview with multiple interviewees knows the frustration and helplessness of not being able to tell who is speaking, since voices in a group sound impossibly alike. Speakers will interrupt each other, cut in, and speak simultaneously, all chaotic conditions for the transcriber. One solution is to assign someone to sit in the session and note the order of speakers, but a video provides a much more precise means of distinguishing speakers.

Why aren’t all interviews done on video?

Video interviewing requires more equipment for recording, processing, and preservation—and some new skills. Some interviewees might not warm up quickly to the cameras, might become more self-conscious, and might have more trouble speaking candidly. A video interview can result in hours of visually static images of a “talking head.” Practitioners need to be assured that video technology has advanced to the point where it is worth the investment, that the video can be considered reliable, that the recordings will last, and that an archives can afford to maintain them.[3]

Behind their pragmatic reasons, the reluctance of many oral histories to try videotaping suggested “technophobia.” Similar fears had caused a few interviewers to use reel-to-reel tape recorders long after the majority had switched to more portable and affordable cassette recorders. They had good reasons for their caution—reel-to-reel tape was superior to cassettes for archival preservation—but “we’ve never done it that way before” is a poor excuse for not exploring and trying new equipment. While veteran oral historians hung back, National History Day judges observed that high school-age students were quick to master new technologies and that the videos they produced were often impressively polished, professional, and creative.

Some projects video every interview, but others use cameras more selectively. There are advantages to conducting audio oral histories first in order to collect basic information, and then return to video a portion of the interview, allowing the cameras to illustrate the oral history. The video segment may cover new ground or repeat some questions to recapture highlights of the previous session. Video interviews with dancers, artists, and craftspeople can be devoted to recording them at work or to having them describe and explain their creations. Having recorded most of the interview on audio gives the interviewer and the interviewee a better idea of what to expect during the video session, making them both a little more comfortable in front of the camera.[4]

Researchers have discovered that the video portions of an interview can be more quotable than the audio portions. If the video interviews serve as summaries of longer series of audio interviews, the interviewees have had some time to think about their responses and, perhaps because they are also more conscious of the cameras, tell their stories more succinctly. Interviewees, in a sense, edit themselves the way a film editor might cut a story down to size. Not only does this make for better video, but the transcripts of the video segments are also often more compact and articulate than the sometimes rambling versions of the audio recordings.

Documentarians often resort to coaxing an interviewee to repeat a phrase, louder, with different emphasis, or in more complete sentences. The necessity of some staging in video offends those practitioners who believe an oral history should always be authentic and unrehearsed. In fact, there has never been any truth to the adage that “photos never lie.” Just as Civil War photographers rearranged bodies on the battlefield to heighten the visual effect, modern documentary makers often choose to meld history with artistry.[5]

If the ultimate objective is to produce a documentary or mount an exhibit, then it makes sense to video every session of every interview. But if the objective is an archival collection for all types of research, selective videoing is more cost-effective. Vivian Perlis, director of the Oral History and American Music Project at Yale University, has described the video component as “the finishing touch” of their oral histories. Initially, the project historians conducted videos of all their interviews at the homes of interviewees, such as Aaron Copeland, but they came to realize that some musicians are “more filmic” than others and that the expense of regular on-site interviewing was growing unmanageable. They did subsequent videotaping at a studio at Yale and even then videoed only major figures rather than all interviewees.[6]

Won’t the camera make interviewees nervous?

Projects that give interviewees the option of being recorded on audio or video report that almost everyone chooses video, even if (or especially because) the video will be posted on the Internet. Video cameras have become sufficiently small and compact to be hardly more distracting than an audio recorder. Video interviewers have also employed any number of techniques to get people talking and at ease in front of the camera. They record in a setting where the interviewees will feel most comfortable. They ask them about their childhoods and ask about cherished possessions they might show.[7]

Video specialists recommend that interviewers explain the equipment to interviewees, demonstrate how it works, make sure that they are seated comfortably, and ask them to make eye contact with the interviewer rather than the camera, which should be placed to the side of the interviewer.[8]

In fact, television and home videos are so commonplace in modern society that interviewees are far less likely to be put off by cameras than might be expected. Video interviews with elderly residents in nursing homes, for instance, show that even people never before videoed quickly feel at ease and talk naturally on camera. Keep in mind, however, that interviewees can become fatigued and not look their best for the camera. Some video historians have raised the ethical question of what obligation a project has to interviewees who, because they slumped or were nervous or made awkward gestures, are disappointed or embarrassed over their video appearance.[9]

Sometimes the interviewer can be more nervous than the interviewee on camera. Listening carefully to what is being said and thinking ahead to the next question, interviewers also have to wonder about how they appear themselves (although interviewers are usually not seen in the picture). It takes some practice to switch from audio to visual taping. The Oral History Association once sponsored a debate between a video supporter, who had conducted all of his interviews on video, and a video skeptic, who had previously expressed deep-felt reservations that the camera destroys the intimacy needed to establish rapport in an interview. Before the debate took place, however, the skeptic decided that to be fair he needed to do a video interview himself. At the debate, he admitted that to his astonishment it was the best interview he had ever conducted. Not only had he been freed from monitoring the recorder, but the crew had been unobtrusive and the interviewee had no problem talking on camera. Delighted with the results, the skeptical interviewer became an enthusiastic convert to videoed interviews, forcing the video supporter to interject a few words of caution about video’s potential problems into his presentation on its benefits.

Should interviewees be prepared in advance of a video interview?

Interviewees need to be informed of the purpose of the interview, of any special requirements for videoing, of their legal rights, and of the need for their signature on a release form. For conducting video on location, interviewees need to know about, and give permission for, setting up equipment in their homes. Some interviewers recommend appropriate dress to interviewees or at least advise them on the types of colors and patterns to avoid (white or black, and clothes with bold stripes or patterns). Interviewers should be available to talk with interviewees in advance of the interview to answer their questions and satisfy their concerns. Such information and reassurance often helps interviewees feel comfortable with the video medium, encouraging them to speak as candidly as possible.

Does the use of video versus strictly audio recording affect the types of questions that an oral historian asks?

The medium definitely affects the message. Oral historians who work with video report that they have had to reformulate questions to elicit the type of information that makes for better visual presentation. They often have replaced abstract and generalized questions with more specific inquiries, asking fewer “why” questions and more “how” questions. They have asked interviewees to demonstrate how equipment worked or to go through their usual routines, eliciting the type of detail that an audio interview could never approach.[10]

Shifts in questioning become more pronounced when curators, exhibitors, documentary makers, and material culture specialists conduct their video interviews with specific ends in mind. The museum curator might be seeking a video of a worker talking about and demonstrating a mechanical or artistic process to accompany the actual machinery or display in the museum. The questions would be aimed precisely toward that end. The National Park Service set up lights and cameras in the home of Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, and had Carter conduct a tour of the house and grounds. Although the interview raised questions about Carter’s life and career, and particularly about his post-presidential years, the chief focus was on the architecture of the house and an inventory of the Carters’ furniture, memorabilia, and other belongings. Eventually, when the house passes to the National Park Service as a historic site, the videos will enable curators to re-create the environment in which the Carters lived. Excerpts from the interviews will then be shown at the visitors’ center.[11]

Although the type of question may change, the way in which questions are posed should not. However complete their transfer from the aural to the visual medium, oral historians must maintain their professional standards and avoid the temptation to emulate the more aggressive television news interviewers. Interviewees may pose, but oral history interviewers should never play to the cameras.

Does video affect how questions are answered?

All interviews involve a certain amount of performance, which can be heightened by the camera. Interviewers note that the intrusiveness of a camera and sometimes a crew can disrupt the cozy conversational style of an audio interview. “It was no longer a personal chat between Ray and myself,” commented one interviewer when he switched from audio to visual, “but something more public for both of us.”[12]

The performance aspect of an interview is not necessarily a detriment. The Women in Journalism Oral History Project conducted multiple audio sessions and one video session with each interviewee. For the most part, the video interview covered the highlights of material already covered in the audio recordings. I tapped the collection extensively while writing a history of the Washington press corps and at the end realized that almost all of my citations were from the transcripts of the video sessions. By that point, interviewees had rehearsed their stories by telling them during the audio sessions and could express themselves more succinctly for the cameras. The stories were virtually the same, but the syntax and style of the video interviews proved much easier to quote, whether because they were recapping what they had previously said or performing for the camera—perhaps both.[13]

Setting and Equipment

Should a video oral history be conducted in a studio or in a more neutral setting?

While filming a documentary on an old movie theater, an oral historian arranged to record people’s reactions when they reentered the building after many years and then moved to a more comfortable spot to do sit-down interviews, where she could better control the sound and lighting. She found that the mix of locations worked best and encouraged those who plan to do video interviews to “think beyond the camera.”[14]

Studios are artificial—perhaps even intimidating—settings for interviews. As a result, many interviewers would rather bring the camera to the interviewee’s homes or equally familiar surroundings. The natural setting provides a more interesting backdrop and usually an abundance of stimulants for interviewee’s memories. The Smithsonian Institution has conducted video oral histories in the laboratories and workshops of its scientists and curators. The Minnesota Historical Society similarly videoed on location, from farmyards to boat docks, after first completing audio interviews. Once the audio segments were made, several interviewees were selected to retell portions of their stories on camera and to point out places or demonstrate activities related to their testimony.[15] By letting the interviewees “set the stage,” selecting the most comfortable or fitting setting for their interviews, the choices they make are potentially informing and are part of the retelling as a performance—since performances include staging.[16]

While more visually interesting, natural settings add to the problems of doing a video interview, including the inconvenience of moving equipment; the obstacles to acceptable sound quality; and the unpredictability of light, sound, and background noise when videoing outdoors. Video interviewers need to know the limitations of the equipment and must be prepared to solve technical problems in the field. They need to prepare checklists so that equipment is not forgotten. Taking video to an interviewee’s home or place of work may require an advance trip to the site to decide how to set up the equipment. Considerations include seating the interviewee away from the glare of a window, avoiding noisy rooms, being conscious of wind and other outdoor noises—from birds to buses—and watching out for inquisitive neighbors and dogs. When taping outside, the wind may create noise or play havoc with the interviewee’s hair, distracting viewer attention. The sun may cast unflattering shadows, and clouds may cause the light to fluctuate during taping.[17]

A studio setting improves quality control for video interviewing but often results in “talking heads” and lacks the variation in images that improves and enlivens a documentary. One compromise would be to conduct part of the interview in a studio and then take a camera to follow interviewees through more natural settings—walking around their homes or neighborhoods, at a factory, going down a road by themselves or with the interviewer. These images can later be edited, with the studio audio used as a voice-over. Still photographs also can be interspersed.

After the interview has been completed, a “sweeping pan” can be taken of the room where the interview took place to capture the interview environment for the historical record. Photographs from a family album can also be videoed at the end of the interview. Known as “cutaways,” this additional footage can be interspersed later throughout the interview to vary the visual effects.

Tom Lean, who interviewed British scientists for the National Life Stories project, observed that his subjects often needed to describe how things fit together or moved, “such as the trajectory of a rocket or how data flows inside a computer.” While they spoke, their gestures reinforced their words, conveying speed, scale, movement, and interaction. He felt that asking them to explain what they did with their hands for an audio recording would be inadequate. The visual memories were among the most striking parts of every interview. “Descriptions of people, instrument readouts, items of equipment, layouts of laboratories and research establishments, remind us that there is a rich visual culture to science that it might just be possible to capture on video,” he concluded. So he took interviewees “back to places where they worked, creating a powerful contrast between their own memories of the site and how it stands now” to illustrate change graphically.[18]

How large a budget is necessary to do video oral history?

Digital and other video cameras are relatively affordable, but a full-fledged, good quality video oral history is not inexpensive. Costs range widely but basically include fees for the interviewer’s preliminary research, interview time, travel and transportation expenses, editing of the interviews, and possible editing time and facilities for documentary presentations.

When the interview is completed, transcribers or indexers are needed. Duplicate recordings must be made for archival preservation and use, and sometimes copies of the recording or transcript must be given to the interviewee. General office expenses and supplies cannot be overlooked. Those costs mount up. When applying for grants to do video histories, it is essential not to underestimate the costs, or else operating expenses will evaporate well before the project is completed. In fact, most granting agencies and foundations have acquired a good sense of the financial requirements of video oral history and dismiss applications that are underbudgeted—as sure sign of the applicant’s inexperience.

Modern culture has grown so video-oriented that projects may find it harder to raise funds unless they are producing video. Corporate sponsors see commercial possibilities in using the video on websites, mobile phone apps, and documentaries. Bourbon distillers, for instance, financially supported the University of Kentucky’s video interviews of their industry as a means of not only preserving their corporate history but also of promoting heritage tourism along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.[19]

Is a camera crew necessary? What is wrong with the interviewer simply setting the camera on a tripod to run itself?

An interviewer needs to concentrate fully on the give-and-take of the interview. Running an audio recorder offers distractions enough, but doing a video interview involves so many tasks that it is generally advisable to bring along someone with expertise in handling the equipment. In particular, one must regularly monitor a video interview. Interviewees will shift around or slump in their seats and, before long, will be half out of the picture unless you adjust the camera. Remote monitors allow one to see what the camera is recording and to adjust the camera angles accordingly. Yet paying close attention to the monitor can keep the interviewer from listening to what is being said.

Before the advent of digital cameras, video producers considered it a grievous mistake for the interviewer to try to be the camera operator as well. Then digital cameras offered automatic focus and sharper images without additional lighting. As a result, experienced video interviewers who once relied on a crew have found that digital cameras enable them to operate entirely on their own. Less experienced interviewers, however, should keep in mind that amateur filming diminishes the ultimate usefulness of the video images. Make sure that those operating the equipment are fully aware of the project’s objectives, of the mood it is seeking, and of any interviewee mannerism to be recorded. A video interview is a collaborative effort, not only between the interviewer and the interviewee but also between the interviewer and the technicians responsible for the quality control of the video recording.

Even an experienced film crew may not be used to recording oral histories. They need to expect long answers to questions and to shoot them continuously, rather than capture an image more dramatically, for instance, zooming in for close-ups and pulling back for wide shots. Since video oral history may be used by different researchers for different ends, consistency is more valuable than artistic maneuvers. Most importantly, those making the videos also need to know that these recordings are meant to last in perpetuity.[20]

How many people are necessary to run a video oral history project?

Numbers vary according to project budgets, but the functions that have to be handled are the same, regardless of the size of the staff. In better-funded projects, these functions are divided among several staff members; the staff of smaller projects wear many hats. All oral history projects, audio or visual, need a director who will set the agenda, raise and administer funds, handle contracts, maintain the paperwork, and supervise the rest of the personnel.

If the aim is to produce a documentary, you’ll want a crew. This would include a producer (who may be the project director or the interviewer doing double duty) to choose the interviewees, the times and the sites of the interviews, and the crew to conduct the interviews. A director (who may also be producer) supervises the technical crew and the setting of the lights and cameras and maintains the general aural and visual standards of the day’s taping. A camera operator (who may also be the director) composes the shots, videos the interview, and monitors the recording. Larger projects may employ a sound operator to handle the microphones and monitor the audio recording levels, and a “grip,” or assistant, to set up and take down the equipment before and after the interview. A production assistant could take care of the paperwork, get release forms signed, handle the master copy, and deal with problems as they arise.

All of those functions devolve on the singular oral historian, who from necessity acts as interviewer, camera operator, and paperwork handler—but more help assures better quality control.[21]

What kind of video equipment should be acquired for an oral history project?

The better the quality of the equipment, the better the video interview. The initial consumer video recorders were not appropriate for long-term preservation and use in exhibits or documentaries, which required professional-quality cameras and studio videos. Digital video has been easier to use, reproduce, and edit. Digital video also offers greater resolution than previous video camcorders.[22]

Cameras are only as good as their lenses. Use a lens wide enough for video recording in close quarters. Good sound quality requires external microphones. Cameras’ built-in sound capabilities may add objectionable noise to the recording. If the camera has an external microphone input, a boom mike will provide good quality sound recordings without intruding on the picture. Wired lapel mikes pinned unobtrusively on a lapel or scarf will eliminate most background noise but also limit the interviewee’s freedom to move around. Wireless microphones allow more movement but are more prone to radio frequency interference. Purchase microphones that are in a price range compatible with your camera equipment. Quality declines with inexpensive cameras and microphones. Work with reputable dealers, and while taking advantage of whatever discounts are available for equipment, make sure that you understand the warranties and guarantees.[23]

It is also advisable to audio record the interview separately, making sure that you get both the questioner and the questions. Some of the best videographers have experienced a sinking realization that even though they were monitoring an interview the sound was not being recorded. Synchronizing the audio and video recordings can save the day when one or the other fails. Experts recommend that the best audio to video setup is to provide microphones for both the interviewer and interviewee, connected to a quality recorder. Then connect the audio recorder via the output jack to the camera’s audio input. Any backup audio recording can also be used for transcribing and archival purposes. For group interviews, projects have used condenser microphones to capture all the voices without excessive background noise.[24]

Digital video technology has been a boon to documentary producers who shoot with only a single camera. Editing interviews creates “jump cuts” that are usually masked by inserting other images between the breaks. “You’ve got to think reverses, b-roll and graphics, something to cut away,” the filmmaker William Gazecki commented. “How are you going to string this together when you’re using bits and pieces later on.” The more seamless the editing, the less distracting it will be for viewers. Digital technology offers filmmakers “all of your postproduction tools at your fingertips in one room.” But while digital technology affords low-cost access to production, Gazecki reminds us “it’s really just a tool. The real meat is in the idea, in the concept.”[25]

What’s the optimal way to set up the cameras for an interview?

A video oral history must frame and light a picture properly. Poor camera work can make even the most interesting interview dull. If you have gone to the trouble of using the visual medium, you need to be conscious of the picture you are getting. Although oral historians interview to gain information, video offers the observer an array of new insights. The aim is to present the picture so that it does not overwhelm or distract viewers from the substance of the interview but enhances the meaning of what is being said.

Video documentaries are almost always viewed on television-sized screens, and television is still mainly a close-up medium, where head and shoulder shots predominate. In framing the picture, it is important to give the speaker adequate “head room” and “look space.” Balanced head room prevents the head from appearing too close to the top of the frame or sinking below it. Eye room similarly suggests the amount of space from the face to the side of the frame. For variety, if used sparingly, the camera can move in for a close-up that shows the face only from the eyes to the mouth. Viewers mentally complete the picture. The video specialist David Mould also notes that “the human body has certain natural divisions—at the neck, at the waist, at the knees,” and he warns against framing an interview so that the bottom of the pictures breaks at one of these divisions.[26]

The way a subject is framed can constitute a subtle form of editorializing. The popular television news show 60 Minutes frequently shoots its interviewees in extreme close-up, cutting the tops of their heads from the picture and focusing on their eyes. By contrast, when the camera turns to the program’s own interviewers, it pulls back to give them full head and shoulders and “lots of visual breathing space.”[27] Shooting below or above the interviewee also distorts the picture. A more neutral picture of the speaker is taken at eye level, so that the viewer sees the speaker at the same level.

Interviewees should sit at a slight angle to the camera and talk to the interviewer rather than to the camera. When filming in someone’s home, you might have to move some of the items from behind where the interviewee will sit. The background should be relatively uncluttered to avoid diverting viewers’ attention. Interviewers should dress appropriately for the particular interview and should avoid wearing unusually patterned clothing that would clash with the backdrop. Some projects tighten the frame from the shoulders up to minimize such distractions. Always use a tripod to keep the picture steady. The best tripods have a fluid head for ease and smoothness of movement.

Camera angles differ when taping a group. Video oral histories have experimented with many different arrangements for interviewers and interviewees. A particularly successful arrangement is to place the interviewer, back to the camera, in the open end of a V-shaped table at which the interviewees are sitting. The interviewer can maintain eye contact with whoever is speaker, just as the camera can focus easily on the speakers, either individually or in groups[28]

Keep in mind the time needed to set up and take down equipment before and after an interview. Veteran documentary makers urged video historians to add “pad time” to their shooting schedule. You should not expect to begin taping for at least an hour after arriving at a location. Leave time also after the interview to video photographs, maps, and memorabilia.[29]

Is it appropriate to use a zoom lens during a video interview?

Zoom lenses change the picture composition to create more diverse and interesting visual effects: to produce close-ups or perhaps to capture an artifact of a speaker’s expressive hands. But video specialists cringe at “unmotivated” zooming and recommend that the zoom in or zoom out take place during the question rather than during the answer. Documentary makers inevitably edit the interviews for their particular needs, cutting out false starts, phrases, and whole sentences and paragraphs; they prefer a standard camera angle and position and head size because the speaker’s head remains a uniform size. They aim to produce a seamless product that appears “as if nobody did anything.” Ideally, viewers should not be aware of editing techniques. Documentary makers may also favor some variety in shots, however, and suggest that at least two standard framings be used. Video historians must consider all the possible uses of their product and proceed accordingly.[30]

Should both the interviewer and interviewee be seen on camera?

The chief focus should be on the interviewee. The interviewer’s questions shape the dialogue, but the reason for doing interviews is to hear what interviewees have to say and, on video, to watch them say it. When the budget covers the use of only one camera, as is most often the case, focus on the interviewee during the interview. If necessary, the interviewer can be filmed asking questions and reacting (that is, listening quietly) after the interview is over. Television news broadcasts have long employed this technique, which is a pivotal point in the movie Broadcast News. As in the motion picture, staged “reaction” shots raise ethical issues and should be handled very carefully.

Some oral historians object strongly to taping only the interviewee. Noting the collaborative nature of an interview, they ask, why video only one party to it? “The integrity of the document may be compromised if only half of the interview ‘team’ is photographed and recorded,” wrote Thomas L. Charlton from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. He prefers using two cameras: one to focus exclusively on the interviewee, the second to focus alternately on the interviewer and on group shots containing both the interviewer and interviewee. Some video oral historians have also used a split-screen technique. Multiple cameras are easier to use in a studio than on location.[31]

Processing and Preserving Video Recordings

What type of documentation is needed for a video oral history?

Just as with an audio interview, video oral histories require some basic data for research use. At a minimum, documentation should include the date of the interview; the names of the interviewee and interviewer; a summary statement on the interviewee and the subjects covered; whether there are transcripts of the interview; whether the recording is audio or visual; the running time or length of the interview; any restrictions on the use of the material; and the additional locations where backup copies have been stored.

Are deeds of gift also required for video oral histories?

Federal law specifies that any tangible recording of a person’s words is protected by copyright. Interviewees retain ownership of their words until they sign a deed of gift, contract, or release form, which usually transfer intellectual property rights on the interview from the interviewee to the sponsoring institution or documentary maker. Video release forms can be the same as those for audio oral history, with one difference: the use of an interviewee’s face as well as voice in a documentary can be unsettling if unexpected, so some video releases include a statement that the interviewee has been notified of the uses to which the material will be put.[32]

What archival considerations should be taken into account when making video oral histories?

As with sound recordings, archives face the problem of new technology making their older equipment obsolete. Some video interviews were recorded in formats for which archives have no playback equipment. The recordings have to be converted or they are not usable.

Each time a videotape was played the picture quality decreased, so a master video recording was required for preservation. “Dubbing masters” were used to make copies for showing and editing. Archivists preferred “larger, thicker, wider tape” for recording, reproduction, and preservation, but such high-quality recording required cumbersome equipment and considerably higher costs. Then manufacturers increasingly abandoned the one-inch and three-quarter inch videotape that archivists preferred in favor of Betacam and digital formats.[33]

Digital video systems offer easier recording and editing. Audio and visual recordings are converted into data and can be handled the same as any other electronic data. Computer software programs facilitate online editing of both audio and video, and the product can be transmitted electronically and stored on archival-quality compact discs (CDs) and high-density videodiscs (DVDs). Digital audio and visual recordings can also be copied with little loss of sound and picture quality (unless the signal has been compressed in order to save file space).[34]

Archivists complain about receiving messy electronic files. They urge donors to clean up all video recordings before depositing them. One “archival train wreck” included ten minutes of footage of a potted plant since the camera had been left running after the interview had finished. Given the expense of preserving video, unnecessary material simply wastes an archives’ resources.

Paradoxically, high-resolution digital video is both inexpensive to record and expensive to preserve, because the files are so enormous and take up so much space on a server. Doug Boyd, an authority on digital oral equipment, has warned against a “blind commitment to video technology” that could drive an archives “into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” Digital technology has changed rapidly, making state-of-art equipment obsolete before long, and questions remain about DVDs as a long-term preservation medium. “Patiently waiting for a technology to mature does not make you a Luddite,” Boyd advises. “It makes you technologically responsible.”[35]

Should older videotaped interviews be converted for digital storage?

The decay of videotape, the fading of color photographs, and the disintegration of highly acidic paper has create the ironic situation, one photographic specialist noted, “that we’re becoming the most fully-documented people in the history of the species, yet ours is the epoch most likely to vanish from the record.”[36]

Even stored under optimal conditions, the life span of home videotape was estimated at about fifteen years. Archivists and museum curators who have accessioned older government videos to their collections have opened a cassette only to find a ribbon of clear acetate and a pile of brown powder. According to one report, “the oxide was dropping off videotape like so much dandruff.” Heat and moisture made the tape deteriorate all the quicker.

Video archives should preserve their videotapes digitally before the images deteriorate. Every copy made from the digital master is the second generation—that is, as good as the first copy of the original.

Digitizing old tapes is an opportunity to physically evaluate the recordings and create an inventory of the collection, including file size, format, resolution, means of storage (on a computer server or flash drive), and the location of all the backup copies. This information will facilitate future media migration.[37]

What’s the best way to preserve digital oral history recordings?

Those archives that have compiled substantial video oral history collections report that user expectations are growing, placing new burdens on them not only for preservation but also for improving access to their video archives. That television and documentary producers tend to demand material in a rush can be an aggravation for an archivist, but more troublesome are the questions about how the material will be used. With large collections, an archives cannot consult with each interviewee about the use of their interviews beyond whatever the interviewee specified in the deed of gift. Still, it can be disconcerting for interviewees to see themselves unexpectedly in a broadcast.

Archives must explain the copyright provisions for their videos and should obtain some written confirmation from the producers concerning their intended use of the material. The Smithsonian Archives, for example, initially makes recordings available in formats that discourage its use for broadcasting. Broadcasters and documentary makers view the video and determine what portions they want, then formally apply for a high-resolution copy.

Like audio interviews, videos may be sealed or otherwise restricted by interviewees for a period of time. In at least one instance, a videoed interview was requested for use in a court proceeding—although not subpoenaed—and the interviewee agreed to its use in court.

As mentioned, as a tiny segment of the marketplace for recording equipment, oral historians and archivists must make do with what is produced and available, hoping that the technology they invest in will not be replaced too soon. Like audio recording, the safest path is to “follow the music.” Whatever form of technology produces popular music videos, movies, and other recordings, will likely prevail the longest. Interviews can be recorded on flash-based memory drives, and then migrate to a portable hard drive or computer server for processing and preservation. One high-resolution video can fill a single hard drive, but compressed video can save storage space and still provide broadcast-quality copies.

Be sure that you have the necessary software to play back recordings and to move them to the next generation of technology—but also be aware of the costs involved with using proprietary software. To be safe, make duplicate copies, store them at different locations, and keep a record of where they are deposited.[38]

Are there special requirements for cataloging and indexing video oral history?

Digital indexes, especially if they include video, differ from the traditional card catalogs and back-of-the-book indexes. To meet user needs, projects create a database that combines audio and video recordings, transcripts, photographs, and other documentation. Some indexes have highlighted major issues and themes discussed within the interviews. Some have time-coded the videos and abstracted them in several-minute intervals that correspond to the transcripts, if they exist. Some projects have augmented their own indexing with user-generated tags, drawing on researchers’ proven interests.

The more that video oral histories have been broadcast as television documentaries or posted online, the more users want access, notes Doug Boyd, director of the oral history center at the University of Kentucky. Users demand “access to archival materials of all kinds from their computer, while at home, in an airport, or sitting in Starbucks.” To meet these needs, his program developed a customized collection-management database with powerful search capabilities. Creating a customized database is expensive and time-consuming, however. Another option is for projects to use the services of commercial platforms.[39]

Randforce Associates at the University of Buffalo has pioneered in creative digital indexing. They have developed indexed and annotated databases for oral history collections, using thematic coding to “support the locating, sorting, gathering, display, and export of passages across the collection.” In working with History Makers Inc., a Chicago-based project documenting African American life, Randforce coded the collection first by a series of historical topics related to African Americans, then to the biographical dimensions of personal experience, and finally flagged personal stories as examples of specific themes, an approach that combines historical context with oral history documentation.[40]

The bigger the collection, the more indexing is necessary to serve as a road map for researchers. Between 1994 and 1999, the Shoah Foundation did video interviews of 52,000 Holocaust survivors, amassing 105,000 hours of testimony on their experiences before, during, and after World War II. To help users navigate this immense collection, the Shoah Foundation developed a data management indexing system that aimed for objectivity by concentrating on the most definable topics discussed at length in the testimonies. This system worked best when dealing with common themes leading up to and during the war: encounters with European anti-Semitism, forced relocation, and incarceration.

The indexing worked less well with the interviewees’ postwar experiences, which were worldwide and cut across political and social spheres; they did not revolve around a single event as dramatic as the Holocaust. Since researchers were frustrated by the under-indexing of postwar experiences, Max Baumgarten volunteered to watch a set of videos from Los Angeles, transcribe them, and construct an indexing system that revolved around frequently referenced categories. Instead of building the testimony around dramatic events, he turned all the content into index terms and entered the information into a spreadsheet for organization. “By reading against the grain and exploring the testimonies in intimate and untraditional ways, I was able to familiarize myself with the nuances and subtleties” of the postwar years, he reported. This exercise served as a reminder of the intellectual challenges of indexing and the time and effort required to make it effective.[41]

What is the potential for individual research in video oral history?

Researchers still prefer transcripts, which can be skimmed and photocopied, but when they turn to the recordings they often learn more than they would from an audio interview. By viewing a film or video, noted one video specialist, the researcher not only hears voice inflections but sees raised eyebrows, hand motions, and body language, “everything, in short, from clothing to reaction gestures and mannerisms.” Gestures combined with words sometimes convey very different meanings.[42]

Some researchers have used the video camera themselves to gather material and information for their work. David Seaman recorded artists in the process of creating. While interviewing West Virginian artist Ruth Rodgers, Seaman showed her meditative process: sitting and visualizing what she wanted to put on the canvas. Then, as she painted, he crawled on the floor and reproduced what she had seen in her meditative state. Seaman found that people who communicated in the visual arts—painting, photography, and sculpting—also communicated well in words and provided articulate running narratives for his videos.[43]

The Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley has engaged a “digital videography” that mixes artists narrating their own lives together with images of them in their work space and samples of their work. “Living History/Performing Narratives” began with an oral history, done in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, of a conceptual artist, David Ireland, who turned his entire house into a “developing art performance.” The use of video allowed for critical examination of the ways in which artists’ life stories and artistic creations intersect.

Don’t television networks already save extensive video interviews?

Network collection and preservation of video has been less extensive, and more recently initiated, than is generally assumed. Nations with publicly owned television networks took the lead in depositing their film and video at their national archives. The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s collection at the Canadian National Film, Television, and Sound Archives in Ottawa provides an outstanding example. By contrast, the privately owned American networks went for decades blithely unconcerned about preserving their film and video heritage and either discarded film or routinely erased and recorded over videotape. Universities made the first effort to save broadcast materials; in 1968 the Vanderbilt Television News Archives, for instance, began collecting an extensive backlog of television news programming. The National Museum of Broadcasting in New York has also begun preserving and exhibiting old television programs and news broadcasts. Purdue University houses the C-SPAN archives, and the University of Maryland is home to the National Public Radio and Television Archives.

Much video remains uncollected, however, especially interview segments (or outtakes) that were not used in documentaries or broadcast on the news. In Hawaii, a video producer’s “sheer frustration” in seeking resource material led to the creation of the Film and Video Archive Project. Producer Chris Conybeare realized that as soon as a television documentary is finished and goes on the air, its producers go on to other projects, rarely stopping to think that although they used only three minutes from an interview, the “other twenty-five minutes they didn’t use might be very interesting, historically, to people who are scholars, or even just the general public who has a curiosity about history or culture.” Those working on the Film and Video Archive Project also realized that because the shelf life of videotape was so short, these outtakes, without proper maintenance, might be entirely lost within a few years.[44]

Supported financially by Hawaii’s public broadcast channel and its state legislature, the Film and Video Archive Project began by compiling an inventory of the condition of videoed interviews in the state. The archive also has encouraged groups applying for funding to produce video documentaries to make provisions to archive all of their interviews. Since documentary makers usually operate on budget tight on both time and funds, stopping to preserve the material they do not use in their finished documentaries can be an expensive nuisance. They are more likely to comply with this provision if they have built preservation into their budgets and scheduling from the start. Doing archival work as an afterthought, when the documentary has been completed and shown and new projects are beckoning, is not nearly as successful.[45]

Other oral history archives with extensive audio interview holdings began and continue to collect video interviews and outtakes from producers in their region. The University of Kentucky, for instance, has received the interviews done for documentaries such as Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and Long Road Back: Vietnam Remembered (1985). The deposited recordings and transcripts are available for others to research.[46]

Video Documentaries, Exhibits, and the Internet

What is the difference between a video oral history and a documentary?

A video oral history in itself is not a documentary. Few people would want to watch the many hours of video necessary to conduct a life review oral history. Instead, the video interview is source material for documentaries, exhibits, and Internet postings. One oral history project included thirty hours of video interviews, of which twenty-five minutes appeared in the seventy-eight-minute documentary. But even this product was cut down to “a television hour,” or fifty-six minutes, requiring further reductions in the interviews shown. In another project, fifty hours of interviews were condensed into a one-hour program. In any documentary film or video project, an interviewee who speaks for an hour on video usually appears for only a few minutes, or even a few seconds, in the final product.[47]

Video interviews are more than just another source, however, they have profoundly influenced the nature of documentaries. Older documentaries relied heavily on newsreels and television film. “The producer usually centered on some sort of theme like The Roaring Twenties of The Depression Thirties,” noted the pioneer oral historian Dean Albertson. “A snappy narrative against a background of contemporaneous pop music would be provided, and voilà, a history film.” Documentary productions have drawn increasingly on oral histories, and the availability of interviews from particular times and places have shaped the subject and focus of their projects. The old-style documentary showed newsreel clips of women working in a World War II airplane factory, with an omniscient voice-over narrative explaining how women went to work during the war. But The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter quoted the women themselves, reflecting on their own experiences, talking decades after the war.[48]

Oral histories have helped documentaries become more intimate, more compelling, and more complex. Projects such as Vietnam: A Television History (1984) and Eyes on the Prize (1986 and 1990) appeared on national television and have been far more widely used as educational tools in schools. The textile strike that swept through southern cotton mills in 1934 had been the subject of books and dissertations but reached a much wider audience—including current and former textile workers—in a televised documentary The Uprising of ‘34 (1995). From the Earth: The Pioneers of Lander County (1996) drew on the stories of the diverse community of immigrants who settled in the isolated mining and ranching region of northern Nevada during the twentieth century. Stranger with a Camera (2000) investigated the death of a Canadian documentary filmmaker in Appalachia from the multiple perspectives of both the film crew and the community. Enemies of the People (2009) conducted interviews with former Khmer Rouge leaders in an effort to understand their complicity in the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

Before the oral history-based video documentary Living the Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky (2002) was completed, project staff conducted focus groups with potential viewers; they expressed a strong preference for hearing stories and getting to know the characters, rather than having a narrator tell them what to think. Although the project had conducted 175 interviews with Kentuckians who had been civil rights activists, the documentary makers responded to the focus groups by selecting only fifteen of the interviewees to make recurring appearances throughout the program and let them provide the narration. When Living the Story aired on Kentucky Educational Television, the producers also organized “viewing parties” that met at community centers around the state to watch the program and then discuss its meaning and the historical events it covered.[49]

Video interviewing requires making choices as to whom to interview. Turning video interviews into a documentary requires further choices as the documentary maker selects material from the interviews. The editing of the interviews also reveals how much documentary makers value the video interviewees as interpreters of their own experiences who can provide anecdotes about people and pivotal moments and help re-create the drama of a moment. By minimizing the role of the narrator and allowing interviewees to speak for themselves, some documentaries have carried the message that only those who “were there” are allowed to speak for history. In reviewing the popular documentary series Vietnam: A Television History, Michael Frisch complained, “It is as if students of the Pentagon Papers or journalists or historians, over the years, have not learned more about these events than immediate participants can possibly have experienced, much less remembered and willingly discussed, and as if we had not, in the process, arrived at alternative ways of understanding these events.”[50]

Academics also have been troubled that documentaries do not fit the generally accepted notions of scholarship. Films and videos had no footnotes or bibliographies, and rarely explained their methodologies for determining what was included and what was left out of the final film. They offered little means of verification or corroboration to written sources. “Perhaps this is one of the reasons why a scholarly book or article seldom if ever cites a video documentary as its source,” noted Richard Sweterlitch, an academic who has produced video oral histories. “We simply don’t trust productions which lack the critical apparati of scholarship.”[51]

To meet such criticism, documentary makers turned to the Internet, establishing interactive websites in conjunction with the documentaries. Generally designed for education purposes, these sites contain supplementary background material, additional interview segments, suggestions for further reading, and links to related sources, often to the full text of interviews. For instance, a documentary on The Clinton Years (2001), jointly produced by ABC’s Nightline and PBS’s Frontline drew on interviews with twenty White House staffers, advisors, and cabinet members. The program’s website contained not only the text of each episode but also the transcript of each interview.[52]

Documentary makers now have a wide selection of movie-making software that enable them to fade, zoom, and pan across still pictures, and to add text and audio clips from oral histories. Experienced video producers encourage new practitioners to take the time to learn these programs to become comfortable with them or find someone who can assist.

What do documentary filmmakers want from oral history projects?

When they deal with historical subjects, documentary makers are usually dependent on what is already on film, both interviews and stock footage of the past events the interviews describe. They operate under time constraints and do not usually have the opportunity to examine your entire collection. They need guidance in identifying the portions of the collection most relevant to their topic and any supporting materials—the more visual the better. Who were the central figures? Who provided the most compelling accounts? Who offered contradictory opinions? They may also want contact information for still-living interviewees to make additional recordings. They will need to know what legal releases govern your collection. In short, the needs of documentary filmmakers are not unlike those of other researchers, except that their time and needs are usually more pressing.

Do artistic considerations take precedence over accuracy in video?

Being a visual medium, video makes the picture a primary consideration, a priority that can frustrate those more concerned with the information an interview generates. It is a common complaint among television journalists. The veteran television reporter Daniel Schorr commented that whenever he offered a story, his producer would ask, “What do we see?” Dramatic pictures can blow a story entirely out of proportion on television. The evening news opens with picture of a dramatic rescue from a burning building, while the next morning’s newspaper relegates the same story to a paragraph or two buried deep in its pages. On Capitol Hill, television commentators have complained that they could get better coverage for senators and representatives if they could get them to ride around in fire engines.[53]

At an Oral History Association meeting, the prolific documentary maker Ken Burns discussed the ethical problems of using illustrations to tell a story even if they were not always accurate. Burns once decided to use a photo of Huey Long surrounded by uniformed police to illustrate a voice-over explaining that Long traveled with armed bodyguards because he feared for his life. Long’s guards dressed in street clothes rather than uniforms, but a photo of plainclothesmen would not have made much of a visual point. Burns selected an untypical picture because it told the story better. To justify his decision, he related the practice of a football coach who would ask an injured player what time it was. If the player could not answer correctly, he would be sent to the hospital for observation—unless the coach really needed the player, in which case he would tell him the time and send him back into the game. If an illustration is really needed, Burns advised, use it. Just be careful, he cautioned, not to make cutting such corners an automatic practice.

The video interview presents an unvarnished look at the interviewee; a documentary doctors both the audio and visual to produce a more polished product. The practice of some documentary makers of not always distinguishing between generic and specifically identified photographs raises questions about the integrity of the process. By using illustrations that make the point that the speaker is discussing, but show someone other than the speaker, a video misleads viewers into thinking that they are looking at historical photos and film of the speaker. Documentary makers may choose to leave in a statement that, though they know it to be slightly erroneous, is told colorfully by an important source. They may coach an interviewee to repeat a line, over and over, until they hear it just the way they want it. Even more troublesome is the technological advance in video editing that allows documentary makers to trim and rearrange a speaker’s words without the audience being aware that it is not hearing the remarks strictly as spoken. Digital imaging similarly permits editors to alter elements of the picture. Careless or devious editing can make speakers seem to say exactly the opposite of what they intended.[54]

How much control does an oral historian have over how interviews are used in a documentary?

Oral historians’ control depends on their role in making the documentary, particularly on whether they were producers or consultants. “Consultants are at a disadvantage; they only consult,” observed E. John B. Allen, who did interviews and consulted on a documentary on skiing. “The director and cameraman work full time on the film. As the cutting, editing, i.e., the finalizing of the film takes places, it enters on a life of its own.” The oral historian as consultant may find that advice previously taken is discarded in the editing process, that misleading, historically inaccurate film footage has been used because of its visual impact, and that the final product does not correspond to the consultant’s personal and professional standards.[55]

Historians who have worked as consultants for documentaries are often appalled at the filmmaker’s blatant manipulation of people’s words and disregard for facts in order to create a more visually exciting product. Documentary makers are eager to attract and appeal to large audiences. They seek to be enlightening and educational, but also entertaining and provocative. Recognizing these dual and conflicting needs, the American Historical Association has promoted standards that encourage historians to “be sensitive to the artistic and dramatic rights of film and video collaborators and seek solutions that respect both historical and artistic-dramatic concerns.”[56]

How have museums incorporated video interviews into exhibits?

Museums quickly embraced video oral histories as a means of presenting information in a visually appealing manner. As collectors of objects, museums are always seeking ways of placing them in context and showing how people used them. Oral history reconstructs the context, but audio alone rarely goes into great deal about objects and the ways they were used. Video interviews, however, can be directed far more toward objects.[57]

Video also makes speakers more real, providing them with faces and gestures and emotions. The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, illustrates its message with both audio and visual interviews. In the stark “Voices of the Holocaust” hall, visitors listen to audio interviews of a series of survivors telling their stories. The disembodied voices have a haunting quality. Later, in a small amphitheater, visitors watched videoed interviews with concentration-camp prisoners recounting their experiences. A woman recalls sharing her soup with a friend; a man weeps as he remembers talking with his father in the camp barracks; another former prisoner describes a guard with a bulldog-like demeanor who saved her life. Their faces—some stoic, some wretched with emotion, some solemn but occasionally smiling—complement the words and capture the audience. Viewers gather in larger numbers and tend to stay longer for the video than the audio presentations. A less emotional topic might need more artistic staging, but tears welling in a speaker’s eyes make the point vividly.

Interviews conducted for the Mashapaug Project—an urban pollution study in Providence, Rhode Island—created a “Reservoir of Memories” exhibit and website. Recordings and other materials collected were organized into a “toxic tour,” where museum visitors board a stationary bus to take a virtual tour of the Mashaupaug Pond, narrated by the oral histories.[58]

At the Boott Cotton Mills Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, the National Park Service set up a self-guided tour of the factory with an emphasis on realism. At the shop-floor level, the machinery and other artifacts and authentic background noise help visitors “hear, smell, and feel” what workers experienced. Upstairs, in a more traditional museum setting—an exhibit on the broad history of weaving—video monitors present the testimony of retired spinners and weavers about their relations with other workers, salaries, and working conditions. One reviewer noted that “seeing and hearing the interviews of individuals such as Valentine Chartrand, a spinner who witnessed the fatal accident of a co-worker, and Victor Sherbon, who talked about the death of the mill, elicit emotional responses that no label or artifact could match.”[59]

Won’t a lot of “talking heads” make an exhibit dull?

Depending on the subject matter, and the quality of the narrators, video interviews can make fascinating exhibits, even if they contain just head-and-shoulder images. Exhibits usually feature short clips from longer interviews, revolving around a colorful story or an emotional moment. The video does not need to be limited to a standard shot of the interviewee talking just past the camera. The interview audio can be used as voice-overs for additional film of them at work, at home, or at some relevant and visually intriguing location. Designers can create engaging video experiences using audio while showing a collage of still and film images, making the exhibit interactive and multidimensional.

While videos attract visitors’ attention, museum curators have observed that they do not hold interest for long. One survey calculated that the average time visitors spent at any video was a little over two minutes, until something else caught their eye and they moved on. Realistically, therefore, clips should be vivid and concise highlights of the interviews.[60]

What ought to be considered before putting video interviews on the Internet?

Oral history projects increasingly post their recordings and transcripts on websites, where the video interviews draw the most attention. This is when the distinction between high-quality professional videography and amateur productions that were conducted in poorly controlled environments with inadequate lighting become most obvious. Archives often acquire poorly conducted videos that are difficult to watch.[61]

When deciding what to post, ask: Who is the audience? Family members and researchers who might want to watch the entire interview probably constitute just a small percentage of the users. Most viewers will be satisfied with highlights. Instead of posting full reference material therefore, projects often rely on edited clips, a few minutes in duration, that have been excerpted from hours of interviews. These can serve as promotion for the larger archives. Class projects have used “video bulletin boards” to allow students to upload and download interview clips and exchange messages about them. Various social media also provide outlets for sharing video interviews.

Older projects have to determine whether deeds of gift signed in the pre-Internet era are flexible enough to authorize putting them online. More recent oral histories are being collected specifically with the goal of creating an online archive, which both informs the interviewees and helps improve and standardize quality as the projects train interviewers to meet this objective. The Densho Digital Archive, which interviewed Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II, sought to balance protecting its interviewees while still reaching a large audience on the Internet. It posted excerpts from some, but not all, of its interviews on YouTube as well as its own website. Projects have also turned to social media both to advertise and disseminate their interviews.[62]

The goal of creating a website is to make it equally attractive and usable. It should provide well-illustrated and interesting material that can be navigated easily and downloaded quickly. For management purposes, an online archives that welcomes submissions should set file-size limitations for high-definition images and require data on the interviewer, the interviewee, the subject matter, and the legal releases.[63]

Ultimately, is using video worth the effort?

The video oral historian Brien Williams has commented that even the most poorly produced and wretchedly preserved video of Abraham Lincoln would still have enormous value. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. concurred:

I think if we had videotaped interviews with Emerson, Socrates, Charlemagne, it would be marvelous. On the other hand, videotaping compounds all the problems of expense, storage, dilapidation, and so on. Obviously it would have to be used selectively. But, for commanding figures, particularly those who haven’t been amply documented on television, it would be particularly useful. Eric Sevareid’s interviewing of Walter Lippmann, for example, would be invaluable to historians a hundred years from now wondering what Lippmann was like. But only an unusual case would justify the expense. There are not that many Walter Lippmanns.[64]

Some video historians envision a time when all oral history will be videoed. But many barriers remain to universal videotaping. Because the oral historian cannot always control the location of an interview, audio recording on-site, rather than videotaping, will continue to be the logical choice sometimes, especially when interviewees for whatever reasons of privacy or vanity refuse to have their pictures taken. But if the opportunities are available, the funds are forthcoming, and the subjects are willing, then future researchers and users of oral history may ask why we failed to capture the historical picture as well as the words.[65]

6

Preserving Oral History in Archives and Libraries

Why are oral history projects so often associated with archives and libraries?

The oral history movement in the United States traces its roots to the archival collections at prestigious universities such as Columbia, Cornell, Berkeley, and UCLA. These collections started not as individual projects to produce specific books but as a means of gathering reminiscences for general research use. At many of these “founding” programs, the staff conducted most of the interviews. Since then, archives and libraries have provided the institutional home for many oral history projects, offering space, services, and sometimes—although not always—salaries for the project staff. Once interviews have been conducted, archives and libraries process and preserve them, prepare catalogs and other finding aids, and make them accessible for research, often posting them on websites.

This early identification with archives profoundly shaped the conduct of oral history in the United States. By contrast, independent researchers—or sometimes smaller centers of scholars conducting interviews for specific projects—were responsible for the advent of oral history in Europe. Over time, Europeans and others in the international community increasingly acknowledged what Ronald J. Grele, a director of the Columbia Oral History Research Office, called a “sense of collective responsibility that these are documents made for public use, not just private documents for the private research or those connected with a particular center.” American archivists identified oral history as another way of supplementing the letters, diaries, and memoranda in their collections. They sought interviews with the same prominent people who donated manuscripts to their archives, thereby giving oral history its initially “elitist” bent.

Archival oral historians also promoted the ideal of the interviewer as a neutral, objective observer, free from any compulsion to prove a particular thesis. Philip Brooks, who directed the Truman Library, described the “pure” oral historian as someone who was “accumulating a stock of evidence for the use of other researchers, any and all researchers, as we do in an archival agency.” Such an archival oral historian was “almost by definition likely to be doing a more objective job than the one who is writing his own book, especially the one that has a case to prove.” Given their preference for paper, archival oral history projects championed the transcript rather than the tape as the primary record and ultimate product of an oral history interview. Although oral history has remained closely associated with archives, each of these preconceptions has undergone significant modification over the years, just as archives themselves have changed.[1]

With archives filled to capacity with paper records, why should they bother collecting oral history?

The London banking house of Baring Brothers opened for business in1762 and collapsed in 1995, the victim of risky speculation. Over the two centuries of its operations, Baring amassed a considerable archives, which the bank that bought Baring pledged to maintain. A trustee of the archives, Johnnie Russell, happened also to be a trustee of a boys’ club that was conducting an oral history with its alumnae. At a presentation of the boys’ club project, it occurred to Russell that they could just as well fit oral history in the Baring Archives to record “the voices of people at all levels in the bank.” The archives financed the project by auctioning off duplicate materials from its collection. Initially, the archivists worried that interviewees would talk exclusively about the collapse of the bank, but those who had spent their careers working for Baring wanted to talk about its operations as a whole, not just its demise. The interviews became a record of accomplishments as well as a reflection on what went wrong. Former staff who expressed skepticism at the beginning talked at length once they began to participate. “I think people have been quite amazed by how much material comes flooding out once they get talking,” Russell mused.[2]

In contrast to Baring’s experience, there are both researchers and archivists who believe that archives have higher priorities than conducting oral history. The popular historian Barbara Tuchman once protested that “over-documentation” was causing those who wrote contemporary history to drown in “unneeded information,” a problem she believed oral history adds to rather than alleviates. Tuchman charged oral history with producing “trivia of appalling proportions...with all sorts of people being invited merely to open their mouths, and ramble effortless and endlessly into a tape recorder.” In a similar vein, archivists have argued that with paper and electronic records expanding and budgets shrinking, they must set priorities and determine the cost-effectiveness of their various functions. Oral history, being expensive, is therefore more often expendable. Both views are regrettably shortsighted.[3]

Although Tuchman aptly identified the explosion of modern paperwork, she neglected to address the declining qualitative value of that documentation. As the records of government agencies, corporations, and other institutions have multiplied, their worth has decreased. Subpoenas, state open records laws, and the federal Freedom of Information Act have made many officials reluctant to express themselves candidly on paper. Memoranda can disguise what actually happened or try to shift responsibility. Telephones and electronic communications have reduced the reliance on traditional written documentation. As researchers gain access to modern records, they often discover them to be unrevealing and uninformative.

Oral history can be as useful when there is too much documentation as when there is too little. Every presidential administration leaves behind more paperwork than did its predecessor; the National Archives estimates that every few months the federal government now generates as many records as all those produced between the administrations of George Washington and Woodrow Wilson combined. Scholars trying to trace the development of modern federal policymaking are confronted with more material than they could possibly read in a lifetime. Additionally, it is nearly impossible to know what documents an official actually wrote or ever saw. A researcher who plowed through the papers of a recent senator complained that the collection consisted almost exclusively of routine correspondence and mass mailings and that he had found almost nothing from the presidents with whom the senator had been closely identified.[4]

Faced with hundreds or thousands of cubic feet of records, usually with limited finding aids, researchers need guidance. Oral history interviews with the principal figures can serve as road maps, suggesting which individuals and what issues should be followed through the manuscript collection. Researchers with limited resources want to make maximum use of a collection in a minimum amount of time. Smart researchers have learned to look first for oral histories; unfortunately, others leave oral histories to look at last.

Being well aware of the limitations of the written record, many archivists have recognized the need for “auxiliary documentation.” Oral history is more than a supplement and less than a substitute for other archival materials. As one more type of research tool among many, oral history can be especially helpful in filling the gaps that often obscure the motivations behind individual and institutional actions. Gaps may also exist in what written records can contribute to our understanding of the actions of whole groups of people who, perhaps because of gender, race, class, or ethnicity, have not been represented in the archival collections. The challenge for archivists, James Fogerty has written, “is to go beyond their collections to individuals not represented, who have no personal papers or records to donate. This is an unusual activity for an archives but is one way in which the gap between collections and subject areas can be bridged.”[5]

Surely it is not an archivist’s job to create records?

The reason pained expressions sometimes appear on the faces of archivists when they talk about oral history is that its practice breaks so many of their rules and customs. Archivists have had difficulty agreeing on a terminology for oral history and refer to “collecting oral history” as if interviews, like manuscript collections, were out there waiting to be acquired. But the information exists only in the interviewee’s mind, and someone must first record and preserve it in some tangible form. In doing oral history, archivists find themselves creating, not just collecting, a new resource.[6]

Many archivists feel uncomfortable being both curator and creator of primary documents. Oral history is an entirely different type of record from those they normally handle, since it is not an artifact preserved from the past but a present record that attempts to re-create the past and is subject to memory failures and reinterpretation through intervening events. When archivists serve as interviewers who draw out these memories, they also step out of character to become something of a player in the events. The demands of this new role have raised fears that archivists may become advocates of one form of documentation over another, instead of maintaining professional detachment and neutrality. Of course, whenever archivists choose to accession one collection over another, oral history or not, they put their supposed neutrality on the line. Some archivists consider oral history a secondary form of documentation and regard all the planning, conducting, and processing of interviews a diversion from their primary responsibilities. These concerns most likely reflect the increasing identification of archivists not so much as historians but as information specialists, records managers, and computer specialists.[7]

Despite these objections, oral history has become a standard addition to modern archival collections. As more librarians and archivists handle oral history collections, it is essential that they become familiar with the theory and techniques of oral history research, interviewing, and processing.

How does funding shape an archival oral history collection?

Funding impacts oral history the same as it does other archival activities: it affects the scope and priorities of a project. Conducting and processing interviews can be expensive. Although housed in university libraries, some of the most prestigious oral history archives—such as the Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley—long operated without direct subsidies from their host university and raised their own operating funds to finance interviewing and processing. They sometimes conducted with individuals, families, corporations, and associations that underwrote their own interviews. This fact of fiscal life can produce some outstanding research resources that might not otherwise exist, but it can also skew a collection toward those who can afford to be patrons. Oral history archivists need to seek alternative sources of funding to ensure that their collection contains a wide representation of voices, and scholarly researchers need to support such broad-based oral history collecting.[8]

When public institutions downsize, oral history archives are constricted by low budgets and minimum infrastructure. University archives that depend on student volunteers will sometimes borrow interns from other departments—when they have free time from their assignments—and give students various jobs, such as reviewing transcripts. Archives also tap the school’s student body of graphic designers and computer experts to build their websites and take advantage of free software programs.

Oral history archives have always had to be financially creative and flexible. When the U.S. Navy engaged the Columbia Oral History Research Office to interview high-ranking naval officers, an interviewer went to Washington to begin a lengthy series of interviews—until Columbia discovered that navy regulations prohibited a flat sum payment for a year’s worth of interviews. Rather than allow the bureaucracy to defeat the project, they arranged for the navy to purchase each interview when completed, and each payment underwrote the next step in the program.[9]

In Britain, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has awarded grants to thousands of museums and libraries that conduct and preserve oral history. Grants from U.S. funding agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); state humanities commissions; the Ford, Rockefeller, and Doris Duke foundations; and the Pew Charitable Trust have launched and supported many oral history projects. But the priorities of both government and private agencies go through periodic shifts. In the 1970s, funders were quite generous to oral history of all sorts. In a spirit of democratization, the agencies underwrote some well-intended but unprepared projects that consumed their grants without producing anything more than boxes of tapes that were untranscribed, undocumented, undeeded, unidentified, and consequently unusable. Concerned funding agencies encouraged the Oral History Association (OHA) to establish standards by which they could judge oral history proposals and completed projects. At an appropriately grant-funded meeting at the Wingspread Center in Racine, Wisconsin, OHA established its first evaluation guidelines in 1979.[10] When political majorities and budget priorities changed, federal funds grew scarcer and oral history projects turned to state humanities councils. Although more limited in the amounts they could grant, state councils remained convinced of the benefits of oral history interviewing. State humanities councils helped underwrite transcriptions of interviews that had already been conducted, a way of marshaling their resources to produce a tangible product—the transcript—for deposit in an archives and possibly for further use in publications and exhibits. The state of Kentucky went a step further when it established the Kentucky Oral History Commission specifically to fund interviewing and transcription of Kentucky-related subjects. Kentucky remains unique in this respect, but legislatures in California, Hawaii, Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey have officially funded oral history projects within their states.[11]

By the 1990s, NEH regained interest in oral history and gave support to projects at such organizations as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Washington Press Club Foundation. NEH’s preservation and access division has shown special interest in the archival preservation and digitizing of oral history audio and video recordings. Competition for federal funding has grown intense, however, and applicants must weight the limited chances of being funded against the time-consuming application process. Private foundations, corporations, and state and local agencies remain better avenues for support.[12]

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Columbia Oral History Research Office launched a major oral history initiative to interview a broad cross-section of New Yorkers affected by the collapse of the World Trade Towers. Although it was a humanities-based program, it received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), whose granting officers recommended that the oral historians partner with an experienced sociologist who could write the kind of grant proposal the NSF generally handled. The Rockefeller Foundation then provided funds to expand the interviews among other communities, such as Muslim immigrants. The New York Times Foundation gave the project financial support to document professional responses to the crisis. To make the issues broadly available to the public, the project also received a small grant from the NEH to enlist a variety of consultants, including those employed in education, the literary field, and at museums. Additional grants helped digitize the materials in the archives and conduct video interviews.[13]

Universities have development offices that can advise where to seek outside funding. Several online sources provide assistance in identifying potential funders, among them Foundation Finder, which offers basic information on private and public grant makers, including corporations, foundations, and charities; Grants.gov, which explains how to find and apply for federal grants; and Community of Science, which has a searchable database of organizations who have given and received funding.[14]

Is it appropriate for an oral history archives to charge fees for publication use of their interviews?

Although archives do not, and should not, charge for research access to oral histories, publishing lengthy excerpts from those interviews is another matter. Many library-based oral history collections have enough institutional support to be able to forgo fees of any type, but other oral history archives run on shoestring budgets and are constantly looking for ways to raise funds. One way has been to charge users for any reproduction that goes beyond “fair use.” In setting costs, archives need to be reasonable and flexible. If their goal is to disseminate information, then setting fees too high will discourage users. Doctoral dissertation writers are rarely in a position to make a payment. Most publishers will not pay for such costs, which would then become the author’s responsibility.

A bigger problem arises when oral history archives sell the reproduction rights to their collections to publishers and other agents. Such arrangements may initially raise needed funds for the archives, but the terms of these agreements can put unreasonable restrictions on the use of the collection, such as prohibiting researchers from making copies. Some archives have sold the literary rights to their interviews to one company, which in turn has sold it to another, which thereafter controls the reproduction fees. In a sense, these archives have lost control of their own collections.

Managing Oral History Collections

Is there any difference between accessioning oral histories and written documents?

In accessioning any form of documentation an archives determines whether the material is appropriate for its collection, takes legal and managerial control over it, and decides how soon and under what conditions it can be used. Except in the case of exit interviews or debriefings that are done as a requirement of a job, military assignment, or completion of a project for which someone has been paid, most oral history interviews are voluntary efforts and interviewees retain the copyright until they have deeded it to the archives or to the public domain. Like manuscript collections, donors may set conditions on the oral histories they give to an archive. It is the responsibility of the archives to ascertain the donor’s wishes, negotiate any mutual concerns, and honor any restrictions the donor has set.

Deeds of gift and contracts can vary widely, from simple to very complex, depending on the legal advice sought. Attorneys naturally want to protect an archives from any contingency, but some interviewees may blanch at the sight of an overly complicated deed. A brief, straightforward agreement engenders less reluctance to sign. On the other extreme, more prominent interviewees may insist on adding stipulations about permission to quote and other potential uses of their interviews. Wherever possible, archives should adopt a simple release form that indicates what restrictions have been set and when those restrictions will expire. Without such releases, archival oral histories are unpublishable beyond “fair use,” since publishers will not take the risk of printing material whose copyright is in question. Sometimes scholars who have recorded verbal agreements with their interviewees, giving them control of the interviews, sign an agreement with the library or archives to deposit the collection as a whole, establishing its copyright and making provision for its research use and reproduction.[15]

Oral history projects that have started and stopped, sometimes over and over again, may leave archivists with cartons of unprocessed materials. Along with the recordings, a project should make sure to include the signed release forms and transcripts, if there are any. “Orphaned documents” are what librarians and archivists call material in their collections that they cannot make public, either because of the lack of a legal consent form or because the format on which the material was recorded has become obsolete, and the document cannot be retrieved. This makes oral history doubly vulnerable to orphan status and heightens the need for vigilance to ensure oral history interviews will be available for future use.[16]

What kind of data should be kept on each interview?

Archivists want to know the provenance of records, by which they mean the circumstances under which the records were created and originally maintained. For oral histories, they want to know who conducted the interview, with whom, when, where, and for what purpose. In addition to the sound recordings and transcripts, archives often retain copies of legal agreements, correspondence with the interviewee, background information used for the interview, photographs of the interviewee, and indexes to the recordings. All documentation, including the transcripts, should be done on acid-free paper and stored in archival-quality, acid-free boxes.

Data should be kept on all recordings that provides the names of the interviewee and interviewer, the date of the interview, the sequence of recordings (if more than one occurred), the location of the interview, and whether or not a transcript has been made.

Archives may ask interviewers to prepare summary sheets on their interviews, recording their impressions of the interviewee and anything significant that happened during the interview. Since the interview itself is an event in the interviewee’s life, researchers will be curious about its context. If the interview was never completed or did not deal with certain significant events in the interviewee’s life, researchers will want to know why. Did the interviewee cancel sessions? Was the interview terminated earlier than expected? Did the interviewee set ground rules about not answering certain questions? Without some explanation of omissions, the documents will leave the impression that the interviewer neglected important areas of inquiry. Although such administrative files do not require release forms, oral historians should keep interviewees informed as to what sort of material will be made accessible to researchers.

As an oral history archives grows, the need for a general log quickly becomes apparent. Whether done as a file, in a book, or as a spreadsheet, the log should contain basic accessioning and labeling information for every interview and collection. By keeping a record of the interviewer’s notes and correspondence, from letters setting up the interview to thank you letters at the end, an archives also has a record of interviewees being kept fully informed of their rights, which is useful if they or their heirs later question or object to the opening of the interview for research or publication.

It is fairly common for oral history projects to include introductions to individual interviews, summarizing the person’s life and providing other background information. Oral historians in general, however, have not been as diligent as anthropologists and ethnographers in noting their personal observations of the interview’s circumstance, and not every oral history collection keeps all of this data. Each archives determines what types of records will best serve its researchers. Whatever decisions archives make, consistency is key: archivists should think through the process at the outset to avoid having to go back to re-create information and fill in gaps later.[17]

How should interviews be arranged in a collection?

A government attorney, in all seriousness, once advised a federal historical office against arranging its oral history files alphabetically by name and recommended that the office keep its interviews “in a box at random.” The attorney worried that an alphabetical file would constitute a system of records, as defined by the Privacy Act, and would therefore constitute an invasion of privacy. However seriously offered, the advice was ridiculous. Almost any other system of arrangement would make more sense.

Oral histories are most often cataloged by name of the interviewee, individually or as part of a larger collection. Some archives create an alphabetical or numerical accession system for arranging all interviews and accompanying materials. Others divide the interviews according to the specific projects for which they were done. The interviews conducted around a community, event, or group of individuals can be filed according to that project name, though arranging by subject becomes more complex unless the project titles were clearly subject oriented. Specific subjects can be located through indexes and other electronic retrieval systems.

Should an archives prepare its own oral history processing guide?

Given how many different staff and volunteers might be involved in conducting, processing, accessioning, cataloging, and retrieving oral history, any archives with a substantial oral history collection should seriously consider preparing its own procedures manual. A guide would serve as an introduction for newcomers and assure overall consistency. Starting with a mission statement, the guide should suggest general areas for investigation through interviews and outline procedures for handling the oral histories, from acquisition to conservation, including samples of all forms used and the rationale of the filing system. For instance, records of the actual interview, such as transcripts, indexes, and correspondence may be filed separately from organizational papers such as financial records, internal correspondence, and bills for supplies and equipment. The guide should set standard procedures for transcription, and for cataloging and indexing the interviews to assist in their retrieval for research.[18]

Now that transcripts are routinely produced and stored online, processing guides should account for electronic handling of restricted materials. Closed interviews or interviews in progress should not be saved in shared directories, where they might be accessed by unauthorized personnel and researchers.

What types of finding aids are most useful for oral history?

In the digital era, researchers expect everything to be available online, easily searchable, and free, and tend to ignore collections that lack digital finding aids. Libraries and archives need to improve access to their records and to help researchers navigate and interpret their collections. This is critical for all types of collections, but all the more so for those posting audio and video interviews.[19]

Oral history collections have a tendency to accumulate so many interviews that even the interviewers have trouble remembering who said what. For both internal administration and efficient research use, oral history archives must develop finding aids, whether catalogs, abstracts, outlines, time indexes, or digital text searching. Doing the interviews is not the end but the beginning of the process. Archives have to make the interviews accessible and attract researchers to use what has been collected.

Researchers, who want to know whether they have seen all the pertinent material on their subject in an archives, have a responsibility to inquire about what records are open, but the institution also has an obligation to ensure that cataloging information about their collections is available. Nothing infuriates researchers more than learning after they have left an archives that they missed important additional information. When dealing with archival oral histories, researchers face three major retrieval problems: learning the location of an oral history with a particular individual or about a specific subject, determining which interviews to consult, and then finding the information within a recording or transcript.

The most common finding aid is a simple, alphabetical list of all the individual interviews within a collection by name of interviewee, whether in a publication, an in-house catalog, or online. In addition to the name of the interviewee and the date of the interview, the list might include a biographical sketch of the interviewee and identify key subjects and individuals discussed. Finding aids should indicate whether the recordings have been indexed or transcribed and note whether the interview is open, closed, or otherwise restricted, and when the restrictions will end. Longer lists can also be organized topically, bunched around common themes or historical eras.

Either the recordings or transcripts of interviews can be indexed, ideally by subject as well as by name. The Columbia Oral History Research Office has kept a file index of everyone mentioned within its interviews; this index has become an enormous and valuable tool for searching through its thousands of interviews. (Discovering who has mentioned your subject is a fascinating exercise. It has often been observed of oral history that the most useful insights come from the least expected sources.) When transcripts have been digitized, text-searching programs also make it possible to search an entire interview, or a series of interviews, by names and other key words.[20]

Randforce Associates at the University of Buffalo has turned interviews into more usable resources by developing audio and video word searching. Even without transcription, indexes can be created and interviews can be annotated, cross-referenced, searched, and browsed. The system also facilitates pulling together excerpts from a variety of interviews about a similar subject to create a slide-based presentation.[21]

Sound Recordings

Do oral histories belong specifically in sound archives?

From the start, sound archivists and librarians have been key players in shaping the development of oral history, grappling with evolving technology, helping to set standards for durable recordings, and developing new ways of expanding their use. Rather than simply “places of deposit,” sound archives have been partners in the creation, preservation, and widespread sharing of interviews.[22]

Most archives divide their collections according to physical types, separating photographs, sound recordings, and electronic records from written documents. These divisions may be for managerial purposes or for the preservation of the audiovisual and electronic materials under the most appropriate temperature, humidity, and storage conditions. Specialists in sound archives have been more concerned than most oral historians with sound quality—and for good reason, given the poor quality of so many of the recorded interviews they receive. Too many oral historians think that they have succeeded so long as the recorded voice is audible enough to transcribe, but poor recordings reduce the possibility of any uses that go beyond simply conveying factual information, such as contributions to exhibits and documentaries.

Archives can either disperse oral history interviews among the collections from which they were drawn or centralize the sound recordings and transcripts in a special oral history section. Whatever the option chosen, if the interviews are separated from their original agency records, or if the recordings and transcripts are stored in separate areas, then cross-references must alert researchers to these divisions and show where to locate the material. Never underestimate a researcher’s ability to misunderstand archival cataloging systems. Unless the signposts are obvious, researchers may devote themselves entirely to manuscripts and neglect oral history and other types of nonprint documentation.

Transcripts, easily skimmed and photocopied, are so commonly the research tool of choice that the preservation of original sound recordings has not received its deserved attention. Since archives, especially those in large institutions, often separate audio from printed materials, archivists responsible for preserving sound recordings may work separately from other archivists and be more technologically oriented, belong to different professional associations, and read different literature—all the ingredients for failures of communication. One sound archivist complained that “the silence of the archival community on the subject is deafening.” The digital revolution, however, helped reunite print-oriented archivists with sound, video, and photographic sources.[23]

Audiovisual archivists who deal with “aural” history may not distinguish music, speeches, radio and television broadcasts from oral history. An audio archivist once commented, in all sincerity, that if interview recordings were preserved, he could not understand the purpose of also keeping a transcript. To him, the recording and transcript were duplicate copies of the same record. His view was as erroneous as those of print-oriented archivists who, in their devotion to the transcript, went so far as to record over the tapes once the transcripts were completed. As Louis Starr, then director of the Columbia Oral History Research Office, reported in 1962:

We erase most of our tapes for re-use. This is largely because we permit our victims to edit their transcripts. While the editing, we urge, should be done with accuracy alone in mind, there is nothing to prevent a man from changing his own words—particularly in view of the fact that we regard the material as his, and ourselves as merely the custodians. Thus if we kept the tapes, we’d be saving a first draft, which would make a lot of our people unhappy.

Cost is another factor, and so is storage—the problem of “feed back” has yet to be solved. Finally, we are inclined to doubt the practicality of saving, for example, 200 hours of Madame Perkins on tape, assuming she permitted us to do so. It would have to be indexed to be of much use, and that in itself would be pretty expensive. Only one scholar among the hundreds who have used the Oral History Collection has ever asked us for a tape, incidentally.

Fortunately, by the late 1960s Columbia had reversed this policy and has since been saving its tapes. Oral historians and archivists began to view both the sound recording and transcript as “primary” in their own mediums and to deem both worthy of preservation.[24]

Should sound recordings be preserved any differently than other documentation?

Although there are enough similarities in the preservation of paper and audio documentation to permit their storage together, sound recordings confront archivists with problems unique to their medium. Paper, particularly if low in acidity, can sit unattended for years without much damage, but sound recordings need constant care. Tape, if left unplayed for long periods undergoes a process by which the sound on one layer is imprinted on the next layer, a condition, called “print through,” or “voice over,” that creates an echo on the tape. Fungus can attack certain types of sound recordings, quickening their deterioration.

The digital revolution that began in the 1990s produced digital recorders with superior sound quality, permitted copying without loss of clarity, and facilitated digital editing and placing interviews on the Internet. But archivists could not be sure of the long-term preservation of digital recordings. The first digital audio tape (DAT) recorders were expensive and needed frequent repairs, making oral history projects reluctant to adopt them. Next came minidisk recorders, which had their own problems. In 2001 Apple introduced the iPod, and students promptly began using it to record interviews simply by attaching inexpensive microphones. Although veteran oral historians prefer more substantial recorders, there is little correlation between the size of the recorder and sound quality of the recording. Digital recordings can be transferred from the flash clip in the player to a computer server for storage and copies made on CDs or flash drives for research use.

The evolving technology that made it easier to do oral history also made its preservation more difficult. Older interviews were recorded on machines that no longer exist, outside of museums. One archives found a set of interviews done on an obsolete belt-type recorder from the 1950s, but unable to locate such a machine, even from its manufacturer, could not play back the tapes. Interviews on wax cylinders, wire recorders, belt recorders, and dictaphones have been copied onto reel-to-reel and cassette tape, and are now being digitized. Reel-to-reel recorders became harder to locate even if their tapes were in good condition (projects have found eBay a good place to look for obsolete equipment). The catalog of horrors was enough to suggest that oral history archives that are not regularly caring for their tapes and making transcripts were playing Russian roulette with their interviews.[25]

The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) has sought to alert both oral historians and paper-oriented archivists to the special needs of audiovisual documentation, particularly during the transition from analog to digital recordings. On a worldwide basis, it monitors new technological developments and publishes guides for best practices in preservation and cataloging—complicated by the fact that sound recordings invariably arrive at an archives with release forms, transcripts, tape logs, field notes, photographs, and other “accompanying documentation.”[26]

Should magnetic tapes be converted to digital recordings?

Yes, and it is urgent, despite the time and expense involved. Throughout the late twentieth century, oral history interviews were recorded on various types of magnetic tape, which had a recommended shelf life of twenty-five years. If maintained properly, some of these tapes could last for decades, but archivists were advised to make copies periodically. Standard audiotape became brittle and cracked, sometimes stuck between layers, or it shed the coating from its backing after a few years in storage. Older oral history programs encountered some real crises with tape preservation. The George C. Marshall Research Foundation in Lexington, Virginia, discovered that the wire recordings the historian Forrest C. Pogue conducted with General Marshall in the early 1950s had deteriorated badly. With the help of an NEH grant, the original wire recordings were copied, transcribed, and published.[27]

Analog tapes were recorded on any number of different types of machines and formats, which went out of fashion and disappeared from the market. The advent of digital recording offered new opportunities to salvage and maintain the multitude of older recordings by transferring them to a common digital form for long-term preservation; this ensures that researchers can continue to listen to them and that the recorded voices can be used for future exhibits and documentaries.

Archivists must also deal with researchers who expect their entire collections to be available electronically, despite most archives’ limited budgets. Virginia Danielson, curator of the Archive of World Music at Harvard University, has pointed out that cataloguing a collection and putting the catalog online is less expensive than digitizing the entire collection, and yet: “As a nation we have not managed to catalog our collections. We have not managed to complete online conversion of the catalogues that do exist.” Not everything in a collection requires the same degree of access. Catalogs should receive top priority for online dissemination. Selected interviews of more general appeal can be incrementally digitized and placed on the website. More sensitive material can be dealt with later when the restrictions have lifted.[28]

How should digital recordings be archived?

Digital recordings represent sound by a series of digits, making each copy sound as clear and sharp as the previous one. The original sound on digital recordings can theoretically last forever as long as it is routinely copied. CDs employ a laser reading mechanism; there is no wear on them during use and no degrading of sound. Yet as practitioners have learned, digital failures can be catastrophic. If the disk is damaged, the entire recording may be lost. CDs have a short life span, depending on their quality. They should be kept in a cool, dark environment, while archivists constantly monitor the development of new storage technologies.[29] CDs can be scratched and made inoperable, so for long-term preservation a “gold master” is preferable (gold reacts more slowly with oxygen and produces less deterioration). Researchers should work off of copies—never the gold master.

Just as analog tape recording went through numerous variations of equipment, digital formats will surely change. Digital technology has the advantage of being easier to migrate from one system to the next, and each new development may reduce costs. When the price of hard disk drives declined, sound archivists made more use of them for permanent storage of their collections. They trust that as the servers age and are replaced with newer models, the digital files can simply be copied into the new systems, making hardware obsolescence less likely.[30]

Most digital recorders operate with flash drives that can then be downloaded to a server or external hard drive. Since external hard drives can fail, however, it is advisable to copy the files onto two of them for double security. Digital tracks can also be accidentally erased during the transfer, so sound archivists recommend “scrupulous training” for those handling the transfer. With many digital formats available, it is also important to avoid relying on proprietary software and instead use “free-ware” and “share-ware” programs.[31]

Digital archivists have summarized the three phases of operation on which preservation will depend: “interoperability,” or creating digital files in standard, nonproprietary formats that will continue to be supported over time; “redundancy,” or storing files in more than one location on secure media; and “migration,” or transferring files to new media before the old medium becomes obsolete, and its formats are no longer supported.[32]

What if the sound recordings are damaged?

Archivists must expect the unexpected and be prepared for fire, flood, and other natural and human-caused disasters. Older tapes that become damaged may not initially be copiable. In 1989, when Hurricane Hugo struck the South Carolina coast, among the many items submerged under water were the tapes of the interviews that Theodore Rosengarten conducted for his award-winning book All God’s Dangers. Forty-eight reels of magnetic tape were soaked in water and caked with mud and sand. After a month’s delay, the tapes were turned over to the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where each tape was wound by hand through a bath of distilled water and then up in a cardboard tube filled with air warmed by a hair dryer. The dried tapes were then wound onto new reels and were playable enough to be copied onto new master tapes. This procedure was funded by a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council. Rosengarten deposited his tapes with the Southern Folklife Center so “the voices and experience of Ned Cobb [“Nate Shaw” in the book] and his family...will be heard again.” Other archives have sent damaged recordings to private companies that specialize in audio-visual restoration.[33]

Archivists in South Africa discovered the original Dictabelt recordings of Nelson Mandela’s testimony at the Rivonia trial in 1964, where he spoke passionately about cherishing “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve, but, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” As one of the most famous speeches in that nation’s history, it had been reported in the newspapers and reproduced in books, but never broadcast. After four decades in storage, the Dictabelt had grown rigid and unplayable until the Sound Conservation Lab at the British Library managed to heat the rubber belt sufficiently to play it once to make a digital master. This brought the seemingly unrecoverable sound recording “back from the dead.”[34]

Digital recordings are also vulnerable. Following the devastating Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a consortium of universities in Alabama set up a server-based digital preservation network. They use a software known as LOCKSS, for “Lot of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.” The digital recordings at each university are preserved at five additional sites. If there are any signs of corruption in a file, the other five files can replace or “refresh” it. This effective system depends on collaborative partnerships among institutions, whatever the range of their financial and technical resources.[35]

Is it appropriate to edit sound recordings?

No matter how it was recorded, the master recording should never be edited. The temptation to “clean up” an interview could affect its meaning. What was said was said and should not be altered to make it seem different. Although recordings are edited and condensed for documentary purposes, the original must remain true to the actual circumstances of the interview so that researchers can have confidence that it has not been tampered with. Interviewees’ restrictions must always be honored, but if either the interviewee or the project decides—for reasons of privacy or to avoid a libel action—to close portions of the interview for a period of time, then a copy of the recording can be made with the portions in questions deleted to be used for research until the entire interview can be opened safely. Even thought the transcript has been edited to improve the meaning of the interview, the spoken word, with all its imprecisions, should remain intact as a primary record or document.

If an archives does not transcribe its interviews, what alternatives are available?

The problems of preserving recordings of unknown durability and potential obsolescence of equipment reinforce the value of transcribing for long-term preservation of oral history interviews. But transcribing is also expensive and time-consuming. If an archives lacks the funds to transcribe, plans to transcribe only selectively, or anticipates long delays before it can transcribe, then it needs to index or time code its recordings to identify the major subjects discussed on them. Researchers need guidance and should not have to listen to entire recordings to locate specific information. An index may be a simple list of topics in the order that they are mentioned on the recording, or it may break the recordings down into short intervals and list the major names and themes discussed. Automatic speech recognition technology as yet achieves only about 65 percent accuracy when dealing with dialogue, but the text it produces is searchable if not readable. Some projects have used this tool to outline their interviews.

Just as archives need to consider whether to allow researchers to photograph or photocopy all of an interview, they should have a policy on making copies of all or portions of their recordings and establish requirements for copying, quoting, publishing, posting or broadcasting excerpts.[36]

Digital Oral Archives

How has digital technology affected oral history collections?

Digital technology transformed every aspect of oral history, from research and interviewing, to transcription, preservation, and dissemination. Recordings are transferred to hard drives and servers, and interviews are also transcribed on computers. Older typescripts are scanned into electronic format, and analog tapes converted to digital, enabling the elimination of much of their background noise in the process.

Oral historians first approached personal computers as glorified typewriters. But the benefits became obvious as transcribers discovered that they could work faster, edit more easily, and no longer had to retype a “clean” copy of the transcript after editing. They could preserve transcripts electronically and send them as PDFs (portable document formats), and post them online. Back in 1980, the futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that computers would “capture an original, correct it, duplicate it, send it, and file it in what amounts to a single process. Speed increases. Costs go down.” He argued that making paper copies was a primitive use of computers that “violates their very spirit.”[37]

As the digital revolution progressed, it opened diverse possibilities for oral historians, helping them organize, manipulate, and make available their interviews and also offering solutions for many of the problems of cataloging and indexing collections. Word searching capabilities and indexing software also enabled users to search the full text of oral histories and to pull up specific names and subjects from any of the interviews in the computer.[38]

Archivists at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks were among the first to experiment with the storage of oral history interviews on CDs, a process that enabled them to include not only the recordings but also the transcripts, release forms, and related photographs and maps on the same CD. As project director William Schneider explained: “An interview with a dog musher may be accompanied by photographs of him racing the dogs, a map showing where he lives, a copy of the release form he signed at the time of the interview, and even a short article about him.” CD storage provided greater archival control over their materials and made the interviews far more accessible for research.[39]

The archivist of the U.S. Marine Corps inherited a collection of 6,000 interviews conducted in Vietnam on open-reel tape, and 3,000 for later operations, mostly on audio cassette tape. In evaluating the collection, the archivist noted that the interviews had been recorded on a variety of machines at different speeds, that there had never been a systematic program to run the tapes periodically for preservation purposes, that the tapes had not been stored under adequate temperature control, and that some of the tapes had either been misfiled or had disappeared. Approximately 2,000 of the interviews had been transcribed, while the rest had data sheets. Some had been transcribed on such old word-processing programs that current computers could no longer read the disks (which came in three sizes). The open-reel tape was still playable but showed signs of deterioration, and the archives had only a single open-reel tape deck. To gain control over the collection, the archivist started by bringing all the tapes, transcripts, disks, and data sheets together in one storage area, and making preservation copies of all open-reel tapes. Then he persuaded the Pentagon to underwrite a massive project to digitize everything.[40]

The Marine Corps archivist turned to digital recordings to prevent further loss and to provide easier reference and distribution. Once converted to digital format, the interviews could be stored on a hard drive, so long as there was sufficient space, or copied onto an archival quality CD. Backup copies were essential, and sets of the disks could be distributed to multiple locations.

Digital electronic technology led to searchable databases that permit researchers to locate specific information and to read whole transcripts online or listen to the sound recordings. Rather than sitting through the recording of an entire interview, researchers can follow topical themes throughout the collection, with more assurance of having seen all the relevant information on a specific topic, and having instant access either at the archives or on the Internet.[41]

Are digital recordings suitable for archival preservation?

New media always present preservation problems, and archivists worry about the durability of digital media over protracted periods of time. Software programs can become obsolete—or expensive if the software used was proprietary. Electronic records can be migrated to new hardware and software without appreciable loss of sound quality, but the process requires regular monitoring of new data storage technology and software programs, and the conversion of data to new formats whenever necessary.

Sound archivists expect future migration of digital sound to be efficient and automatic. They point to “Moore’s Law” as a promise that costs will continue to reduce. In 1965, the Silicon Valley pioneer Gordon Moore speculated that computing power would double every eighteen months, at the same time that computers became smaller and cheaper. His seemingly improbable prediction has held true. Presuming that it continues, digital storage density will increase while costs decrease with each recopying. As a result, archivists calculate that any medium “needs to be reliable only for the length of time that it is economically advantageous to keep the data on it.” If a digital medium is estimated to be reliable for only a few years, but storage costs can be cut in half during that time, then that medium can be judged sufficiently durable for an archives’ preservation strategy.[42]

Are there any online databases for oral history?

Search engines such as Google offer a convenient way to locate oral histories (and you can also consult the Internet resources listed in the appendix to this book). Archives have been inconsistent in cataloging their interviews in national online computer databases such as the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) or Online Catalog Library Center (OCLC). Many smaller archives and libraries have not catalogued their oral history collections at all. Published guides to oral history quickly become out-of-date.[43]

The Society of American Archivists published an oral history cataloguing manual to assist oral history projects in cataloging, so that their oral histories can be incorporated into their library or archives’ main catalogs. The regional Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA) also developed a database system that offers descriptions of projects and interviews (although not the text of interviews) within its region, “for efficient input, organizational storage, and retrieval of up-to-date information.” SOHA’s experience is a lesson in how critical the accuracy of the data is to the creation of an automated system. Those inputting information must first verify it for accuracy and consistency. Data security also needs to be established to prevent not only accidental deletions but also unauthorized tampering with the information. SOHA recommends that in choosing a system, an archives or library seek to be compatible with and link to other systems.[44]

Wayne State University’s Michigan Oral History Database Project created a model state-oriented database in 2006 to provide bibliographic access to every oral history in the state of Michigan, reasoning that identification is the first step toward preservation. The portal provides free access to institutions and individuals, who can log in, create an account, and contribute their oral history records.

The inclination of more oral history projects to post portions or full texts of their interviews on their websites has also provided some ad hoc, haphazard, but remarkably useful finding aids. Using Internet search engines, researchers have stumbled across far-flung interviews by the name of the interviewee, the subjects of the interview, and even—if the transcripts are posted in full—by the names of people, events, issues, and other key words mentioned in the interview. The online search may lead the researcher to the verbatim transcript, to the sound recording, to excerpts, or simply to a citation. Having located the transcript, the researcher can read it online, purchase a copy, borrow a transcript on interlibrary loan, or travel to the archives. With more archives posting entire transcripts online, critics have warned: “If you give your jewels away, people won’t come to an archive.” Although, web postings can serve as an incentive to draw more researchers to an archives.[45]

Can a digital audio archives substitute for transcription?

Archives that have not systematically transcribed interviews have turned to new digital technology to make their collections more accessible, especially for researchers who cannot visit the archives or do not have the time to listen to hours of recordings. The California State University at Long Beach had originally made summary sheets of its interviews, breaking them into three-minute segments to help researchers locate specific information. Director Sherna Berger Gluck explained that their intention was to allow researchers to “tap into the full richness of the orality of the interview, with its meaning derived not merely from the words uttered, but from all the nuances of pace, pitch, and performance—and even listen to what sometimes sounded like poetry.” In the past, even with summaries, researcher use was limited by the cumbersome process of running the tape to find the desired segments. The university later sponsored a Virtual Oral/Aural History Archives to make its sound recordings available online. Time-segmented summaries were assigned keywords, enabling users to find the information they sought either by reading the summaries or by entering the appropriate search term. The online version had the added advantage of photographs of the interviewees and other relevant visual materials. The archives made CD copies of the full interviews for preservation and made selected portions of the audio recordings available over the Internet. Despite the costs, the archives estimated that digitizing still amounted to less than what it would take to transcribe and edit all of its interviews.[46]

Exclusive reliance on sound recordings, however, shifts the burden of transcription to users who may wish to reproduce portions of an interview in print, and increases the chance of misinterpretation and error, since neither the interviewer nor the interviewee will have any role in reviewing the transcript. Accents, jargon, and foreign languages further complicates the issue. The Long Beach archives, for instance, contains many hours of interviews with the former residents of the Japanese fishing village on Terminal Island conducted in Japanese. The University of Alaska’s Project Jukebox, by contrast, provides recordings in the various languages of Native Alaskans along with transcriptions in English, preserving orality while extending the accessibility of the interviews.

Isn’t it risky for an archives to post complete interviews on the Internet?

Given the ease of Internet searching, oral history archivists have expressed reservations about putting interviews online. Their reasons range from the need to protect interviewees’ privacy to the danger of misuse and manipulation of sound recordings and transcripts. They seek hardware sufficient to accommodate their users while at the same time keeping the interviews well-protected from hackers. They worry that the “unmonitored access” of the Internet suggests the loss of archival control of the interviews. They question whether deeds of gift that had not anticipated electronic reproduction and distribution would permit the posting of the interviews on the Internet without the express permission of the interviewees or their next kin. Ethical questions of this nature have caused some oral historians to hesitate before proceeding into the minefield of the World Wide Web.

Having talked earnestly about returning interviews to the community, we need to ask: What constitutes the boundaries of that community? How broadly or narrowly do we want to define our audience? Did interviewees expect their life stories to remain relatively unused except by the occasional scholar, or did they hope to leave something of themselves for posterity, where their memories might be published, exhibited, and otherwise not forgotten? Given the democratic impulses of the oral history movement, it seems contradictory for oral historians not to avail themselves of the most universal and cost-effective means of mass communication and dissemination of information yet devised. “If we are to remain communicators,” Paul Thompson has warned, “we must move with the technology of communication.”[47]

Before posting interviews on a website, oral historians have usually tried to contact living interviewees. Often these individuals were glad to know they had not been forgotten and provided additional photographs to accompany the recordings and transcripts. The process offered a way of continuing the relationship. Researchers who consult interview transcripts online will want the product to resemble as much as possible the original document. Some of the early attempts at downloading oral histories did not include the original pagination. Although researchers can scan the text by word on the screen, they will need page numbers for their citations as well as to make use of the prepared indexes if they print out a copy of the interview. To avoid abuse of an interview’s copyright status, some projects have added a copyright symbol on all pages in a site.[48]

Whenever interviews deal with sensitive subjects, archivists should use discretion about posting them online and be careful to screen the interviews for statements that could be considered defamatory or libelous. Recognizing their potential liability, some archives add disclaimers to their online interviews that they cannot verify all facts; the statements made by the interviewees are their opinions. If interviewees have placed restrictions on all or part of their interviews, archivists should think twice about posting portions of interviews that are open when the rest is restricted. Have patience and wait until the restriction is lifted. Advertising the existence of interviews that are still closed is just asking for trouble.

Should interviewees be contacted before posting their interviews on the Internet?

Even though broadly written deeds of gift that assign copyright to the archives or public domain will permit the posting of interviews online, it is imperative that oral historians grapple with the ethical issue of the Internet and avoid exploitation of their interviewees. Unless the possibility was made clear to interviewees from the outset, projects should notify living interviewees before placing their interviews on the Internet (although it seems excessive to consult the next of kin, whose intentions may conflict with those of the interviewee.) At first, some elderly interviewees asked: “What’s the Internet?” Now the medium is so universally recognized that interviewees ask how soon it will be before their interviews are posted.

Projects that have relied exclusively on audio recordings or that plan to make the recordings as well as the transcriptions available online have been the most diligent about prior notification. Hearing a voice seems more personal and intrusive than simply reading their transcripts. The University of Alaska at Fairbanks, which pioneered in putting audio interviews on CD, hesitated going on the Internet before contacting each of the interviewees directly. The oral history program sent out letters to some two hundred people interviewed over the past ten years, explained the possible Internet access, included a copy of the original signed release form, and the Site Use Agreement that it would post with their interviews, requiring the user to read a statement and click a button to agree not to use the material for commercial purposes, not to repost or link to the site without permission, and to follow the Guidelines for Respecting Cultural Knowledge established by the Assembly of Alaska Native Educators and the Best Practices of the Oral History Association. The mailing revealed that some of the interviewees had died or could not be located, and of the rest, only about twenty-five people responded. Of those who responded, some favored broader exposure of their culture and community as a way of educating people; others worried about the potential for misuse, having their statements taken out of context, and some misunderstanding their culture and community. The limited response suggested to the oral historians that personal contact rather than written communications would have been more useful in contacting their interviewees.[49]

The archives at California State University at Long Beach went to similar lengths to contact the interviewees or their next of kin before putting interviews on its website. Surviving family members not only approved but provided many of the photographs that the archives used online. Still concerned about adequately safeguarding their interviewees, the archives has developed a program that would enable users to hear the streamed sound but not to be able to download the sound files from the Internet. Those who wanted copies had to request permission from the university archives, identifying how they planned to use the recording. For a small fee, the archives would prepare a CD of the requested material send it to the researcher.[50]

Oral history projects should build the Internet into their operating plans, fully informing participants of the project’s intentions and of the interviewees’ options, making sure that deeds of gift permit reproduction of the interviews, and preparing transcripts in formats convenient for downloading.

Is it necessary for a project to revise its deed of gift to put oral histories on the Internet?

Deeds of gift were originally written to grant the researcher who conducted the interviews or the archives that received them broad latitude for their eventual use, anticipating articles, books, documentaries, and exhibit materials. In those cases where the interviewees relinquished copyright and turned their interviews over to the researcher, the archives, or the public domain without restriction, then no additional agreement should be necessary, although it would be a good faith effort to notify interviewees in advance of any major change in the access to their interviews. In those cases where the interviewee has retained copyright, requires permission to cite or quote, and otherwise restricts the use of their interviews, then an additional written agreement should be negotiated specifying that portions of or all of the interview can be posted in electronic format on the Internet.

If an oral history archives redesigns its deed of gift to make sure that it covers the new technology, it should be careful not to define that technology too specifically. Even the Internet will be overtaken by unforeseen technology and will eventually pass into obsolescence. Rather than outlining particular forms of distribution, the deed of gift should grant permission for interviews to be quoted from, published, or broadcast in any medium that the archives deems appropriate.

Donated Interviews

Even if an archives does not conduct oral history itself, is it likely to receive some donated interviews?

Yes, even without seeking them out, archives are likely to receive oral histories as donations from individual researchers and community groups, or as part of a larger accession of corporate, associational, or government agency records. The oral history may be an extensive collection or a random transcript filed among other records. There are so many forms and conditions in which donated oral histories may arrive that, to exercise any archival control, an archives cannot afford to be a passive recipient. Instead, an archives should establish its own standards and work with oral historians—whether individuals or representatives of an agency—to meet those standards.

The likelihood of all archives receiving oral history donations increased exponentially after the American Historical Association (AHA) adopted its statement of principles on oral history interviewing, stipulating that “interviewers should arrange to deposit their interviews in an archival repository that is capable of both preserving the interviews and making them available for general research. Additionally, the interviewer should work with the repository in determining the necessary legal arrangements.”[51]

The historical profession was responding to the laxity with which many authors had been treating oral sources. When books include citations to “interviews in author’s possession,” other researchers will want the opportunity to examine them for verification and further research use. Through their professional associations, historians also wanted to create a greater awareness among researchers that they may have the only interview with individuals who have died. And even if the interviewee was also interviewed by another oral history program, each interviewer’s questions shed a different light on the interviewee’s experiences. Other scholars who examine an author’s oral source material may draw different conclusions from those of the original interviewer, just as researchers disagree over the meaning of written documentation.

Many academics, freelance writers, graduate advisors, and graduate students had simply never considered giving their interviews to an archives before the AHA promulgated its standards. The historian David Oshinsky conducted many interviews for his biography of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, particularly for McCarthy’s early life, about which little had been published. Although he taped most of his interviews, he did not collect any release forms because it never occurred to him to deposit them in an archives. After reading the AHA rules, Oshinsky became determined to adopt archival-quality standards. For his next book, he taped all his interviews, obtained releases, produced written transcripts, and deposited tapes and transcripts in Rutgers University library, where they have already been used by other researchers.[52]

The Columbia Oral History Research Office both conducts its own interviews and regularly receives interviews from writers who have published their books. The Walt Disney Archives conducted no formal oral history program of its own but received an extensive collection of interviews with Disney, his family, studio animators, park planners, and other employees, donated by various authors who did the interviews in the course of their research. The University of Kentucky archives estimated that nearly 80 percent of the interviews added annually to the university’s oral history collection are generated outside the archives by faculty from history, political science, anthropology, and sociology, and from graduate students and independent researchers. The archives also found that, however valuable the contributions of these “associate interviewers” their interviews often arrived untranscribed, unindexed, unabstracted, and with no legal release forms. The university archivist noted that “the preservation of personal interviews generated by historians is a two-way street. For every historian who for one reason or another fails to place his or her interviews in an archive, there is likely an archivist who does not want to add an historians’ recorded interviews and transcripts to his collections. Overcoming these biases will take the cooperation of both historians and archivists.”[53]

Archivists must avoid even the appearance of favoritism when dealing with researchers. When offered donations of interviews from a researcher, they must balance what they do against what the researcher is giving. It would be questionable for an archives to invest large amounts of its staff time and financial resources in transcribing and preserving an oral history collection if it was to be closed for an excessively long period of time to all but the original researcher. If an archives provides equipment and invests its resources in a collection of oral histories, then it should avoid open-ended agreements and seek to negotiate with the donor a reasonable time for releasing the materials for general research.

What should archives do to get some control over donated interview recordings and transcripts?

Ideally, archivists work with researchers from the onset of an oral history project, rather than coming in at the end. But when researchers appear at the archives’ door at the end of a project, carrying their interview recordings and no release forms—or having followed other guidelines—the archives needs to determine whether the material meets its standards. If the archives agrees to accession the interviews, it can provide the researcher with deeds of gift to take back to interviewees for their signatures. Again, the interviews can be restricted until the book is published.

Archivists need to publicize their willingness to serve as repositories for individual and group oral history projects, whether conducted at their university, in their community, or on subjects complimentary to their larger collections. By attracting such donations they can build their oral history holdings in the most cost-effective manner. But even more important, interviews will be “out of the desk drawers, closets, and basements” of the interviewers and made available to scholarship in general.[54]

Should an archives treat donated oral histories the same as those it commissions or conducts itself?

Donated interviews can be treated like those sponsored by the archives in terms of paperwork and filing agreements. Once archivists receive donated recordings, they should immediately make a security copy and store the originals in an environmentally controlled and secure area. In anticipation of receiving oral history donations, archives should establish guidelines for accession of oral documentation, including sample legal releases, recommended tape for long-term preservation, and other processing standards. A good model is the guideline that the National Archives and Records Administration issued for accessioning federal oral history projects.[55]

Legal Considerations

If only portions of an interview are restricted, can the rest of the interview be made available for research?

Yes, with some precautions. There is no reason to hold back the bulk of an interview for the sake of a few pages of restricted material. Remove the restricted pages and place them in a sealed envelope identified with the name of the interviewee and the date the restriction will be lifted. Insert in note in the transcript: “Pages x to y have been restricted until [date].” Or, “A portion of the interview at this point in the transcript has been restricted.” Be sure to remove and store separately any restricted material from transcripts that have been produced and stored electronically. Keep in mind that if you post the unrestricted portions online, researchers will become eager to see what has been removed.

Given the possibility of subpoenas, some archives do not announce that they even possess an oral history until the restriction has passed to avoid legal challenges. But researchers will want to know if they have seen all the relevant material and what lies beyond their research. Some will delay publication of their own work if they know that the restriction will be lifted soon. By not announcing the existence of closed interviews, the archives favors those who happen to be present when the records open, a circumstance that too often has made researchers suspicious that favoritism was being shown.

If an archives does not advertise that it had a certain interview, even though restricted, then another oral history project may interview the same person and duplicate the information. One flattered interviewee never bothered to tell the second interviewer that he had already given a lengthy life review interview. If an interview is closed, researchers may seek to interview that person themselves and would be entirely within their rights to do so. But when the interviewee is deceased, only the archival oral history will be available.

In the government, are oral histories official public records?

They can be, but not necessarily. If an interview is done as a job requirement of a government employee, such as a debriefing, it is clearly an official record and should be treated as other government records. But simply because interviewees work for the government does not mean that they automatically waive rights to their interviews. Under federal copyright laws, anyone whose words are recorded and reproduced retains copyright over the recording. If a private citizen or government employee voluntarily gives an interview to a government oral history project, they should be asked, like anyone else, to sign a deed of gift assigning their copyright in the interview to the agency’s repository and stipulating any restrictions on its use. The federal government recognizes the gift of restricted oral histories as an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). That is, researchers’ FOIA requests for transcripts do not supersede interviewee’s stipulated restrictions.[56]

Oral history is underway throughout the three branches of the federal government. Every military service has conducted oral history, as have historians at the Energy and Labor Departments, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Park Service, NASA, the CIA, and the FBI. Over the decades, they have produced oral histories in the tens of thousands, most of which are open for research. The Smithsonian Institution is an outstanding example of the diversity of oral history. The Air and Space Museum has interviewed aviation pioneers; on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the National Gallery of Art interviewed those who built and operated the gallery (and continued it as an ongoing project); the Natural History Museum has interviewed early curators who brought back specimens; the American History Museum has interviewed African Americans who migrated “from field to factory.” The Smithsonian Archives has also conducted extensive video interviews with old-time curators throughout the Smithsonian’s many museums.[57]

Is an archives liable for any potentially libelous or defamatory remarks in an oral history?

In 2005, an individual who felt himself defamed by an oral history posted on the University of California at Berkeley’s website sued the person who made the comments and also the Bancroft Library and the Regents of the University of California for republishing the remarks. Lawyers convinced the courts to remove the university from the case under California’s anti-SLAPP laws (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation), which protects individuals and institutions whose freedom of expression has been chilled by a lawsuit.[58]

Libel and defamation are false statements that can injure a person’s reputation, holding them up to public ridicule and contempt. Fortunately, the dead cannot be defamed, or else history could not be written. But should an interviewee defame a living person in an oral history, then the interviewee, interviewer, and archives could share liability for the statements. A defamatory statement would have to mention a person specifically by name, be published, and damage the person’s reputation. Courts have been more protective of average citizens than of public figures in defamation cases.

Generally, libel and defamation cases have involved mass-circulation books, newspapers, and magazines rather than archival oral histories. Although there is very little case law specifically involving oral history, no oral history archives relishes the possibility of becoming a first case, and most of them recognize that discretion is the better part of valor. Since most oral history projects cannot afford to have a lawyer read every interview for potentially libelous statements, they use their common sense instead. Confronted with a potentially libelous portion, an archives can delete the specific names or close that portion for a period of time, perhaps ten or twenty years, until the remarks are no longer controversial.[59]

If interviews or other records are closed for a seemingly vague reason, researchers may well challenge why and by whose authority such restrictions have been made. In anticipation of such questions, most archives list their own institutional restrictions in a document that researchers can read when they arrive at the archives. Such information sheets establish that the archivist has the authority to impose restrictions, if needed, to protect privacy, to guard against libel, and to meet other general criteria set by the archives’ governing board.

Must an archives release restricted interviews that have been subpoenaed?

There is no legal right to protect donor restrictions against subpoenas, especially in criminal cases, but the courts have been cautiously selective in what they ordered released. The most prominent case involved subpoenas issued to Boston College to open sealed interviews relating to “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, where interviewees talked about their culpability in a murder. Since the project had promised that the recordings and transcripts would remain sealed until the interviewee’s death, oral historians have worried about the chilling effect that this would have on future interviews. Boston College filed a motion to quash the subpoena, lost, and then appealed the verdict. Eventually, the courts reduced the relevant material to be unsealed from eighty-five full transcripts to sections of just eleven interviews.[60]

Prosecutors in Mississippi subpoenaed three sealed oral history interviews with an imperial wizard of KKK indicted for the murder of a civil rights leaders decades earlier. Despite objections from the state’s department of archives and records, the court ordered that the interviews be turned over to the district attorney. Since the defendant did not take the stand, the interviews were not used in the trial, but the incident shows the vulnerability of otherwise restricted material to subpoenas.

Archivists are responsible for honoring and protecting donor restrictions. The premature release of an oral history interview could not only embarrass the individual but could also make other interviewees more reluctant to speak candidly. Archivists therefore are faced with a legal and ethical dilemma when restricted oral histories are subpoenaed for use in a court proceeding. Among the few cases that have arisen have been some blanket requests—or “fishing expeditions”—for any and all archival materials regarding an individual, organization, or issue. Archivists and their attorneys have been able to negotiate more limited release of materials, arguing that the type of information sought can be obtained from sources other than the closed oral histories. Submitting the deeds of gift under which interviewees donated restricted interviews, archives have also invoked their “fiduciary privilege” to protect such sealed materials they hold in trust.

What if no release forms were signed?

It is not unusual for archives to contain older oral history collections lacking release forms or containing restrictions that require contacting the interviewee. After an appreciable time has elapsed, it will become difficult, if not impossible, to track down the interviewees or their heirs to secure rights and make the interviews available for research and reproduction. If you cannot locate the interviewees, then try to find the interviewers and have them sign the release as the co-producer of the interview. Document these efforts to establish that you made a good faith effort and so that your successors will not need to go through a fruitless search all over again.

For problematic cases, archivists can limit research to in-house use or make transcripts and recordings available only on request. Rather than keep the interviews perpetually unavailable, the archives might also require researchers to sign agreements that they will independently seek permission from an interviewee’s estate. This protects the archives from any legal challenges to the researcher’s use of the interview. Attorneys caution that without such indemnity, “archives could potentially be stuck defending hundreds of claims arising from third parties’ use of the material in their collection.”[61]

Public Outreach

How can an archives use oral history for public outreach?

Social media and the Internet offered archives seemingly unlimited opportunities for public outreach, and oral history provides the kind of attractive material they can highlight in blogs and tweets, and on web pages. Archivists who have been used to cataloging and describing collections in standard order have discovered that the Internet allows digitized material to be recombined virtually without affecting the original physical arrangement. The Lyndon B. Johnson Library created The LBJ Time Machine to tell the former president’s life story through multimedia archival materials. “We should let the Web do what it does best,” archivist Liza Talbot advises, “facilitate sharing and discovery through linked pages.” The project, she notes, has improved the library’s visibility and helped it compete for funding.[62]

Public programs sometimes get lost in the archival shuffle of accessioning, maintaining, and preserving collections, and dealing with researchers and reference questions. But outreach is an important function that can heighten the interest and appreciation for historical records and increase public support for libraries and archives. Oral history offers unique opportunities for reaching members of a community who might not otherwise use a library or archive. After the first contacts have been made by conducting interviews in the community, the connection is reinforced through public programs that display the finished product. Once you work in a community, however, your sources will ask, “What happened to those oral histories?” The interviews cannot just sit in the archives. Be creative in returning them to the community.[63]

In California, the San Joaquin Valley library system sponsored an oral history with first- and second-generation Japanese Americans in the valley who had lived through the Second World War. The project aimed not only to create a resource for scholars but also to influence the community’s thinking about its ethnic heritage. The collected oral histories enabled the library system to published three volumes and create a videotape (Success Through Perseverance) and a slide-tape show (Improving Library Services to Japanese-Americans in the Valley), which they publicized broadly on radio and television and in newspapers. Librarians rated the programs a great public relations success and noted that they resulted in greater utilization of the local libraries by the Japanese American patrons.[64]

Archivists also have found public outreach benefits closer to home. Many archives are housed in universities and other institutions and are supervised by a board of trustees or executive board that determines whether the archives gets more space, staff, and equipment. The members of these governing boards can be directly involved in an oral history program, making recommendations over potential interviewees, getting copies of the interviews, discussing their use in public relations, and even being interviewed themselves. This contact helps make the work of the archives more tangible and immediate to those who influence its policies and its budgets. Similar public outreach can be directed toward the administrators, staff, faculty, and students of a university, and toward management and workers in a corporation. Interviewing can connect students to their university’s history, encourage faculty to use special collections in their classes, and re-engage alumni—and potential donors. They create important relationships throughout the institution, as well as advocates for the oral history program.

Among other returns of such community awareness are the donations of photographs, manuscripts, and other memorabilia from those who have given oral histories or who have attended the public programs. Archives should not hesitate to ask oral history interviewees to consider making such gifts; most will be honored by the request and will be pleased to have family keepsakes preserved. A word of caution, however: libraries and archives need to establish and communicate their collecting policies to ensure that their public programs do not generate inappropriate gifts.

Oral histories make good subjects for press releases. Local newspapers have reprinted portions of interviews, as single articles or special supplements. Consider also using the recordings to create public service announcements for local radio and television stations. Some archives have used oral history interviews in curriculum packets for schools.[65]

Archives and historical societies have also posted oral history interviews on their websites as a “springboard” to attract users to their larger collections. The Idaho Historical Society, for instance, devoted a web page to the Smokejumping and Forest Fire Fighting oral history conducted by the one of its divisions, the Idaho Oral History Center. The project started by interviewing parachuting fire fighters who jumped from Idaho camps in the 1940s and gradually expanded it to include men and women who fought blazes across the U.S. West. The web page gave narrators’ names, some basic information about them, a link to indices to each interview, and a few sound clips. The dramatic nature of these interviews helped capture browsers’ attention and served as an advertisement for the historical society. At Virginia Tech, the university archivist developed a website about the first black students at the university. Records in the archives enabled her to identify the first black undergraduates, while the Internet helped her locate “missing” students, former faculty, staff, and alumnae, whom she interviewed. They in turn provided photographs, memorabilia, and additional information to update the site, turning it into a growing exhibition.[66]

Such public programs are fine for larger, well-funded archives, historical societies, and library systems, but how could a local library afford to do that kind of outreach?

Some oral history has been well funded, but a lot more has operated on a shoestring, using volunteers, borrowed equipment, and surviving on modest donations. Avoid the struggle of operating alone if you can partner with a university’s digital library initiative team, an agency’s IT operations, or some other available expertise.

Local libraries often house a local history collection, which is not only the local repository for community oral histories but is also the best research source for those conducting the interviews. Local librarians know the community and have a sense of who uses the facility and who does not. The librarian may not have the time to do the interviews but can coordinate volunteer interviewers, indexers, and transcribers. The librarian can also work with local students or with the state or local historical society, which may be eager to conduct oral history interviews. The library can serve as the sole repository for the interviews, or copies of the tapes and transcripts can be shared with the cooperating schools and historical societies. If guided, volunteers from the community often enjoy doing interviews and making a contribution to preserving community history. Remind them that creating the oral documentation is not an end in itself but just a first step toward the use of local oral histories in research, publications, and public programs. The best reward for volunteers is to include them in any public exhibits, performances, and receptions, where they can enjoy the product of their labor.[67]

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library in Washington, DC, sought to enhance its Washingtoniana collection with oral histories of the people, neighborhoods, institutions, and events that had fostered public understanding of the history of the District of Columbia. Interviewers were invited to register their ongoing projects with the library so that others could be informed of their activities. Registrants were asked for the name of the project; the name, address, and telephone number of the project director; a brief description of project’s focus; and an estimated date for completion. The library also agreed to accept donations of tapes and transcripts so long as they were accompanied by formal legal agreements between interviewers and interviewees releasing the donated materials to unrestricted public use, were recorded with good sound quality, and were time-indexed or transcribed. The library provided copies of sample legal release forms; promised periodic workshops and seminars on oral history for those who requested them; offered to make referrals to university oral history classes in the metropolitan area; and promoted itself as a clearinghouse for local oral history projects and bibliographic references to oral history materials that were part of its collection. This Washington library’s efforts exemplify the mutually beneficial relationship that can be established between libraries, archives, and interviewers to preserve the oral history of our time for the future

7

Teaching Oral History

At what level is oral history best used in the classroom?

Teachers have implemented oral history at every level from grade school to graduate school and in continuing and community education programs, including workshops for senior citizens. Interviewing techniques can be taught to students at all levels of ability. In secondary schools, oral history more often has been directed toward honors, gifted and talented, and advance-placement students but has demonstrated that it can motivate slow learners and otherwise indifferent students as well. Doing oral history helps students break loose from their textbooks and become their own collectors of information—and students remember best what they researched themselves.

Oral history works for teachers who, frankly, have grown tired of lecturing and want to engage their students more actively in learning. Instead of telling students what is important, oral history projects require them to find out for themselves by interviewing people and then by processing and analyzing the information gathered. Students often prove innately able to establish the necessary rapport, since many older interviewees feel a special need to make young people understand the events of the past. In many ways the ideal oral history relationship occurs when the interviewer plays student to the interviewee as teacher.[1]

It sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?

School oral history projects face limited funding and equipment, school boards that are unsympathetic to new student electives, and department chairs and colleagues who are dubious about anything outside the standard curriculum. A teacher can grow discouraged over the time and commitment that oral history requires. Some lack training and personal experience in using oral history and have no mentor to turn to for advice. Teachers complain about the difficulty of completing oral history projects within the limited confines of a semester; others complain of students who do not prepare adequately for their interviews. Teachers also recognize the need for more structured assistance to help student projects succeed.

Admittedly, oral history is no panacea for all that ails modern education, and not every student readily adapts to it. But those teachers who have used oral history offer enthusiastic assessments of its pedagogical advantages and attest that its rewards are worth the effort. Julia Letts, who set up oral history projects in several schools, reported how she often witnessed “a rapport developing between generations, watched skills being learnt, friendships made, goodwill created, not to mention the value of the interviews themselves.”[2]

Does oral history work in other classes besides history?

With “history” in its name, oral history has shown up most often in history and social studies programs; teachers can use it to study family, culture, community, and government. But interviewing has also flourished in English, journalism, drama, folklore, science, and other disciplines. The innovative Foxfire program sprang from an English composition course designed to get students to develop content and grammar skills by writing about what they saw and did. A composition or language skills class can assign students not only to conduct interviews and write descriptions of the experience but also transcribe, which is an exercise that calls for language skills in sentence structure, syntax, and punctuation.[3]

Students may never have associated their own everyday language with the standard English of textbooks and classroom assignments. One English teacher was surprised when her inner-city students complained that Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982) sounded odd and was hard to read, despite the teacher’s observation that Walker’s prose perfectly captured her students’ own “black English.” None of them, she concluded, “had ever learned how to read and write their own verbal system of communication.” An oral history project that had students recording and transcribing their own speech patterns would offer rare opportunities for self-revelation. Interview transcriptions similarly provide students a means of examining regional dialects, colloquialisms, and jargon.[4]

Civics classes are another natural venue. The American Federation of Teachers has sponsored an international Civic Voices oral history program to train teachers to enhance civics education by incorporating the power of first-person narratives in teaching core democratic concepts. At the same time, students develop a website that serves as “a memory bank of oral history interviews with social activists from around the world.” The project partnered with teachers’ unions in Colombia, Georgia, Mongolia, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Poland, and South Africa to train students to interview participants in iconic political moments over the past half century.[5]

What is Foxfire?

Familiar to mass audiences through the stage play, television movie, and series of best-selling books, Foxfire is the pioneering secondary school project that combined oral history and folklore as instructional devices. It began in 1966, when a teacher at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee high school, in an Appalachian community in Georgia, realized that his lectures were just not getting through to his students, who were deficient in language skills and uncomfortable expressing themselves in writing. “How would you like to throw away the text and start a magazine?” he asked. Soon, Foxfire proved so effective in motivating students that it spawned countless other school interviewing and journal-writing projects across the country.[6]

A typical Foxfire class lasts one semester. Before students begin interviewing, they listen to a short story read aloud and try to write down everything they heard. A sample reading of these papers easily demonstrates why the original is richer and fuller than any of the remembered versions. Then the same story is read again, slowly, with the students trying to take it down as dictation—a task they quickly find impossible. These exercises demonstrate the problems involved in listening and also make clear the need for recording interviews. But this leaves the question of how to get the story off the recording, a discussion which in turn leads to an explanation of transcribing, followed by students attempting practice transcripts. Other class sessions cover the varying sound quality of different recorders and microphones, with demonstrations on how to set up equipment properly. Foxfire classes include sessions on cameras as well, since students are encouraged to take photographs of the people they interview and to collect other items related to the subject matter.

Foxfire seeks to involve students in all phases of the oral history project. The class picks the theme of the project, whom to interview, and what questions to ask. Before going out to conduct interviews, students watch a practice in-class interview, in which someone—perhaps another teacher, a school administrator, cafeteria worker, or a parent—is invited to the class to be interviewed. The in-class interview is not a drill but an actual interview designed to impress on the students the seriousness of their responsibilities as interviewers.

In-class interviews give students the chance to analyze not only the interviewing process but also the transcription and the effects of different transcription styles on the content of the interview. Students begin to realize how easily a careless transcriber can alter the meaning of an interview. With all this in-class experience and discussion absorbed, the students finally go out to interview for themselves.[7]

Foxfire spread its message to other schools, recommending a “fieldwork enterprise” that mixes research, interviewing training, and community school relationships. A term’s project might be a slide-tape or PowerPoint presentation or a video, but quite often it has resulted in publication of a school journal. Since the publication of the first Foxfire Book, numerous schools have produced similar magazines combining oral history, folklore, and local history. Two of its offspring, in Kennebunkport, Maine, and Lebanon, Missouri, similarly made the transition from local school magazines to nationally published books: The Salt Book and Bittersweet County: Long, Long Ago, an intermediate school student magazine in Bell Gardens, California, contains interviews with local community members, while seventh graders in Northern California’s Anderson Valley published Voices of the Valley. Students with learning disabilities in Littleton, Colorado, published Aspen Glow, while the children of migrant farmworkers in Boulder produced El Aguila. Bloodlines is the student oral history journal in Holmes County, Mississippi, one of the poorest counties in the nation. In southern Maryland, Slackwater records interviews with local tobacco farmers and watermen in an effort to get students involved in the community. Increasingly, these publications have migrated to websites and have become multimedia.

Many school oral history magazines have not lasted long. Some were identified with a particular teacher who moved on, and others were eliminated by school budget cuts. One well-regarded publication was canceled when its budget allotment went to pay for the school’s heating oil. Its director bemoaned the project’s death from “administrative ineptitude.” Yet new oral history journals, newsletters, and websites continue to appear, facilitated by the greater availability of school computers.[8]

Where can a teacher get personal training in oral history?

If a teacher did not have an opportunity to take an oral history course in graduate school, courses and workshops are regularly available at universities and community colleges and in adult education programs. Between school years, summer institutes and week-long oral history workshops are conducted around the country. Historical societies whose collections contain oral history interviews often can be enlisted to help.

Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History offers “Workshops on the Web” for teachers, and the Internet provides an abundance of other online tutorials and tips for teachers. Oral history archives maintain websites that provide bibliographies, sample deeds of gift, and teaching tips about using their collections that amount to “workshops on the web.” Some provide step-by-step guides to doing oral history, along with recommendations on how to incorporate interviewing into every level of instruction. History Matters, which describes itself as a “U.S. Survey Course on the Web” offers extensive introductory material on using oral history as a teaching tool. A number of teachers have blogged about their experiences with oral history in class. The various oral history associations provide links to many of these sources, and others can be found by using any of the search engines on the web. Some of the online projects will be specific to a particular locale, which can suggest local history themes to explore. Others are located in different places around the world, but share relevant methodological and pedagogical concerns, some related to specific events or to institutions. Among education-oriented websites are the Bland County History Archives, maintained by the students at the Rocky Gap High School in Virginia, and the D.C. Everest School District Oral History Project in Wisconsin, a student volunteer project that began by interviewing Hmong immigrants from Laos and has expanded to general life experiences of the broader population during the twentieth century.[9]

The Oral History Association and its several affiliated state and regional oral history associations regularly run workshops and offer sessions aimed at teachers. They publish practical pamphlets, such as Oral History Projects in Your Classroom. Talking Gumbo: An Oral History Manual for Secondary School Teachers, a how-to guide for using oral history in history, English, and social studies classes, has a companion thirty-minute video, You’ve Got to Hear This Story, designed to teach African American students how to conduct interviews and engage in primary research, so that they can become creators of their own theories and analyze the evidence they collect.[10]

The National Council for the Social Studies produced a variety of pamphlets in its How to Do It Series, and the Teachers and Collaborative Workshop has published Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History for junior and senior high school teachers. The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage has posted online Discovering Our Delta: A Learning Guide for Community Research. Its twenty-six-minute video component follows five students from the Mississippi Delta as they do fieldwork research—largely through interviewing—on their communities. Also available on the Center’s website are useful student and teacher guides that accompany the video.[11]

These organizations recognize that overworked teachers are usually too busy preparing lessons, grading papers, and dealing with their supervisors to attend many extracurricular programs. Some have made their oral history workshops more attractive by offering certificates or qualifying as “in-service” teacher training during scheduled release time. Although these occasional workshops are usually brief and unable to cover much ground, they provide teachers with basic models for classroom projects. Teachers have also recognized oral history as a highly positive way of meeting state mandates and performing evaluations of students’ advancement.

Where can a school get oral history equipment?

Acquiring equipment on limited school budgets has always called for ingenuity. Some school audiovisual departments will have recorders, microphones, video cameras, and computers, but in general teachers can expect anything from a complete lack of equipment to a severe limitation on its availability. Poll your students to see how many can use their own recorders, smartphones, and other digital devices. Local merchants have cooperated with school projects by lending equipment. One California camera store annually lends a local high school all the equipment it needs for filming and editing its History Day media entries. Local support groups, from parent-teacher associations to alumni, should also be tapped for funds and equipment. With its objective of publishing a magazine of its interviews, the Foxfire program sent its students out to solicit contributions from local merchants and townsfolk. They listed gifts of any amount in the magazine, and each donor received a copy signed by all the students.[12]

Funding can range widely. Charles Price of the City University of New York led an oral history-community history project for Brooklyn high school students and their teachers, teaching them basic methods in oral history and sending them out to do field research. The project’s chief problem was a shortage of equipment. Despite this disadvantage, students absorbed the complexities of designing a project and interviewing, developed an interview guide, and assessed which strategies to use to get different kinds of people to tell their stories. Some managed to transcribe their interviews without any transcribing equipment. When motivated, students can often make do with what they have in remarkably creative ways.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Virginia General Assembly and Chesapeake Bay Foundation provided funding for the Northside Middle School in Norfolk to equip and send a group of eighth grade students by ferry to interview the residents of Smith Island. The project required the students to learn the islanders’ unique dialect. Teachers reported that they could cover every discipline with an oral history and that students processed and retained the information because they felt so positive about it. Their test scores were the most improved in the state of Virginia that year, proving the value of the investment.

What is the single most important ingredient for starting an oral history project in a school?

Every classroom oral history project needs a teacher who is sincerely committed to it. “It’s not all fun and games,” as Barbara Gallant, a high school teacher in Gainesville, Florida, reported. “It has to be part of the curriculum and not something extra. I don’t think you need the money to start, because I think that can be found. I do think there has to be a person who cares and wants to do it; who feels that there is some real value in it.” Gallant began supervising an oral history project at a time when federal courts had ordered racial integration of her school system. Teachers and administrators at her school felt it essential to get white and black students communicating with each other and to build stronger ties with the community. Using borrowed tape recorders, she assigned her students to interview family members about how the county had changed over the past fifty years and brought local historians and anthropologists to class to talk to the students. The project worked well—although she discovered that after a while her students grew tired of using school integration as the only subject. She subsequently had her classes branch out to other areas. Still, the interviews they conducted helped the students through a time of dramatic changes and created a useful resource for future research on their school.[13]

Oral History in Elementary and Secondary Schools

Can oral history be useful in elementary school classes?

At the elementary school level, oral history is used less for teaching subject matter than for helping students become more aware of their surroundings. Recognizing that children wonder about themselves before they begin to appreciate others, elementary school teachers have had students interview their parents on the theme, “What was I like when I was younger?” Elementary school students have collected anecdotes about their families and learned about their neighborhoods. Educators note that children “grow socially” when they interview adults.[14]

In one project, students were asked to describe the route they typically took to school. They recorded what types of buildings they passed, such as businesses, churches, and other schools. Accompanied by an adult, students interviewed someone identified with one of the buildings on their daily route. They asked shop owners why they chose the location, how long they had been doing business there, and whether most of their customers came from the local community. Drawing from such programs, the District of Columbia school system published Earth Waves, a newsletter that reported on oral history in elementary schools, offered sample projects and questions, and reproduced portions of student interviews. Fourth graders in Middlebury, Vermont, published a similar journal, called Village Green.[15]

Oral history has become a recognizable part of children’s popular culture. In the movie version of The Grinch, little Cindy Lou conducts oral histories to uncover the reasons for the Grinch’s antiholiday prejudice. The children’s book The Berenstain Bears and the Giddy Grandma recounts a school assignment in which Sister Bear must interview a member of her family. She chooses her grandmother but has second thoughts when she learns that others in her class have interviewed famous relatives. “And Gram is just...well, just Gram.” The interview, however, uncovers surprising facts about Grandma’s past as a circus bear, lures her out of retirement for a school talent show, and produces “the best oral history in the history of oral history.” For younger readers, the book’s message is that history can be found at home and that oral history can help them discover things they never knew about their own families.[16]

Young children can focus their interviews on what their parents and grandparents did when they were children. What types of games did they play when they were young? What did they ever do before television? Was their schooling different? What types of songs were popular then? How has household technology changed during their lifetimes? Children seem most comfortable interviewing grandparents—perhaps, as has been said, because they share a common enemy.

What can elementary school students take away from an oral history project?

For elementary school students, the information gathered is often less important than the experience gained. Folklorist Dale W. Johnson, who worked with fourth graders conducting interviews with “hard of hearing and cantankerous old folks” at a nursing home observed that as the students ran out of prepared questions, they began talking more directly with the seniors and “leaped cognitively” to questions on their own. The process, he concluded, improved both the students and the elders, regardless of the documentation.[17]

A Pennsylvania educational project, designed to meet academic standards for reading, writing, speaking, and listening, aimed at engaging students—beginning in the fourth grade—more fully in their surroundings. The community-oriented project taught students how to conduct interviews and encouraged them to collect artifacts related to those interviews for display at the school. Teachers found that the research was enlightening for the students, even when interviewing their family members. The students displayed what they learned in presentations in class and in the school library, culminating in an Oral History Fair, held at the school after hours with refreshments in conjunction with another event on the school calendar.

The schools’ communities represented all strata of race, religion, and income. Similarly oral history is accessible to all students, regardless of their learning abilities. Teachers reported that the process did not discriminate: “It is a can-do project for all students. Few students can go through it without being changed or enhanced.” As a measure of its success, after the fair ended none of the students discarded their exhibits. They valued the information collected, felt a sense of “ownership” of their projects, and showed pride in what they had learned.[18]

How can college students help train elementary school students in oral history?

A good model of such a partnership is Brown University’s program in which graduate students train elementary school students for an oral history of Fox Point, a community near the university’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island. The university had acquired a large photography collection of the community, so graduate students conducted interviews with current and former residents and combined the illustrations and interviews to create an exhibit that lined the halls of the local elementary school. They trained sixth grade students to serve as exhibit docents, leading tours for younger students, parents, and community members. The graduate students conducted oral history and photography workshops for fourth and fifth grade students, who drafted questions and engaged in class interviews with longshoremen, oyster factory workers, and others who shared memories of the Providence waterfront. The graduate students observed how the younger students approached their interviews “with a great sense of responsibility, sincerity, and empathy.” The project succeeded on both levels: elementary school students learned more about their community, creating and presenting exhibits, and oral history; and the graduate students developed skills in bringing together scholarly research and community interests to benefit their future careers as arts administrators and cultural workers.[19]

Do the objectives change when using oral history with middle or junior high school students?

Both the objectives and levels of sophistication in oral history advance as students move toward adolescence. For middle and junior high school students, oral history has been used more for dealing with the “affective domain,” or issues pertaining to emotions and feelings. Since adolescents are struggling with their personal identity, oral history helps refocus their attention from themselves to their families and the community in which they live. Middle and junior high school social studies curricula often emphasize local history and provide local history texts that can be the basis for doing a locally oriented oral history where students get to practice social studies “almost without realizing it.”[20]

Schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, involved sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students in a Family Ties program. Students visited the Quincy Museum and studied Eliza Susan Quincy, who throughout the nineteenth century had recorded all the furnishings and objects in the Quincy family home and had collected reminiscences of other family members. Returning home, students were asked to list what items their families counted as “treasures” and to prepare their own family inventories in album form. The albums documented the students’ families, homes, and times, with the idea that the albums could someday be passed along to their own children.

As part of this project, the museum staff helped train the students how to interview family members. The interviews assisted in creating their family inventories by helping students understand not only what the items were but also their emotional significance. Little-noticed bric-a-brac took on new meaning as mementoes of the past. For students who were first- or second-generation immigrants, family treasures were cherished reminders of a former life in a different culture. The experiment helped the students use primary source materials, gave them experience in different kinds of writing, and raised their curiosity about local, historical resources. Students completed the project with a stronger sense of being both “rooted in the past” as well as an “active part of the present.” An unexpected by-product of the class discussions was students’ increased consciousness of the different backgrounds of their classmates, and it was a result the project directors trusted would foster greater tolerance in a multicultural environment.[21]

While they were studying the civil rights movement, middle school students in Montclair, New Jersey, revealed that they were largely unaware of the efforts to desegregate their own schools a few decades earlier. In response, four teachers organized an oral history project to help students appreciate civic courage in their community. The students watched portions of the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize and read past articles from local newspapers and documents from the Board of Education. Then they conducted interviews with educators, parents, activists, and those who had been children in the local schools during the struggle for equal rights. Students learned about housing segregation, unequal school facilities, and school busing. After they completed the interviews and prepared the transcripts, the students decided to interview each other about what they had learned, a process that reveal their new awareness of “what has been” and vision of “what must be.”[22]

Would an oral history project be different at the high school level?

What especially sets oral history apart from traditional history instruction, according to high school teachers who have used it, is the requirement for students to develop greater depth of subject knowledge, from using primary and secondary source materials and other student oral histories, to prepare for their interviews. In a project designed to interview Holocaust survivors, for instance, the interviewees provided both private material and published works for the students to use for preparation.[23]

In high school, oral history tends to be more closely connected to the subject matter being taught in the classroom. Students learn the same oral history techniques but apply them to a wide range of subjects. Often the interview subjects are particularly relevant to the local region but may have national significance as well and fit into a curriculum that includes world and U.S. history. Topics that high school students have tackled include native villages of the Aleutian Islands, Japanese American relocation during the Second World War, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Three Mile Island incident, multiculturalism in Hawaii, and the changing Lower East Side of Manhattan. One high school student evaluating an oral history course reported: “It helped me understand the human causes, not just ‘the war began because’...but why it began, who was involved and most importantly—how they felt.”[24]

School administrators in Northern California’s Anderson Valley experimented with a variety of ways of incorporating their Voices of the Valley oral history project into the high school English curriculum. At first they offered it as a regular class, with students in alternating years selecting a theme and conducting the interviews and those in the following year transcribing them and producing a CD. Since that plan allowed none of the students to experience the whole project from beginning to end or receive the same learning skills, the school revised the curriculum to offer Voices of the Valley as an elective course for ninth through twelfth graders. With the valley’s large Mexican American population, the interviewing and transcribing requirements helped many students learn English. “When I got here, I didn’t know any English,” one student in the program reported. “But now that I’m doing this [project] I’m getting better at it. I know how to transcribe faster and to translate Spanish to English or English to Spanish.”[25]

How should you prepare high school students to do oral histories?

A good way to start is to have the students read other oral histories before they do their own interviews. If previous classes at the school have done interviews that are available in the school library, students can read a sampling of the best ones. Many oral history recordings and transcripts can also be accessed on the Internet, including interviews conducted by high school students. Especially useful sources are History Matters, a website maintained by George Mason University, which includes first-person narratives and oral histories; and Ordinary People Living Extraordinary Lives: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, which includes audio clips and transcripts. Since the spoken word is less formal than written text, published oral histories are usually easy to read and their stories can be gripping. Reading these oral histories stimulates classroom discussion, engages students’ interest, and gives them some of the needed background to conduct their own interviews. By reading other oral histories, students get a better idea of the type of information that interviewing can elicit, and they see that interviewees often present contradictory accounts.[26]

The class textbook can also become a research tool; it provides the broad outline and some of the specifics for the subject being studied, and sometimes bibliographies suggesting further reading. When interviewees cover information outside the scope of the text or contradict something in the text, students must weight the conflicting evidence and consider the complexity of the issue. Old magazines, newspapers, memoirs, and histories are all standard sources, but research can also include photographs, music, physical artifacts, and any number of other sources. There is a story behind most every photograph in a family photo album. The same items that provide inspiration for doing the interviews can also serve as illustrations for the transcripts, videos, exhibits, and other projects that grow out of the interviews.[27]

Pre-interview research is absolutely essential. An unprepared student is likely to conduct a poor interview and will miss most of the learning experience that oral history offers. If student interviewers have not done their homework, they will not know all the questions to ask, will not be able to assist interviewees with faulty memories, will not recognize new leads that require follow-up questions, and will neither fully understand nor appreciate what they are hearing.

Whom should students interview?

Students generally start with their own families. Oral history gives them a chance to collect more systematically the many stories they have already heard at the dinner table or at family reunions. They can interview one person in depth as a full life history or several members of the same family in a family history. Their interviews might cover many generations, since grandparents can tell stories about their own parents and grandparents. Questions can include: When did their family immigrate to America? When did they move to the state they are now living in? How long have they have they lived in their community? What wars have family members fought in (or against)? What types of jobs have they held?

But the oral history experience is enhanced when students use it to interview people whom they normally would not have met and talked with. Working with the students, teachers can suggest likely places to seek interviewees. A class working on a group project can contact the local historical society for advice about potential interviewees. Local newspapers and informed citizens, nearby colleges, senior citizens’ centers, veterans hospitals, and national organizations such as Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion are all potential sources of interviewees.[28]

Whether they interview their family, neighbors, or members of the community at large, students will discover how historical events affected people like themselves, a revelation that will expand their historical consciousness and make their classwork more meaningful. A school oral history project can also lead students to reexamine their communities and to break down the walls between the classroom and the “real world” outside.[29]

Student oral history projects can examine great national and international events and their impact on the local community—events of the magnitude of the Great Depression, the war in Vietnam, the 1970s energy crisis, the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement. Churches and other religious centers in the community, a housing development, a manufacturing plant, an event like a flood or tornado can be documented through oral history.

The humorist Garrison Keillor once wrote a spoof about students living in a housing development so new that it had no cultural heritage to document. The only local craft was that of placing boards across stacks of bricks to make bookcases. But most communities have existed long enough to have a history. Possible subjects are neighborhood organizations, civil rights groups, local charities, newspapers, radio and television stations and their personnel, as well as local entertainers. Students can even document their own school by interviewing current and past administrators, teachers, and graduates. Student oral histories have recorded local folklore, crafts, skills, trades, occupations, and customs. Students have studied local government by interviewing political candidates, office holders, and civil associations. The purpose of these interviews is to record what people and organizations did (and why), and how people, events, and practices changed over time. The result will not be simply a snapshot of how things are today but a record of how they used to be, and how and why they evolved.[30]

Students can be quite unpredictable in choosing whom to interview. One student noticed an elderly man at her local library. After introducing herself, she asked him to give her an interview for her oral history project. The man replied, “I’m honored by so charming a young lady, but...no! I don’t like publicity.” Undeterred, the student approached her subject again a week later and persuaded him to give an interview about how different their city was during his childhood.[31]

Some students have no hesitation in going to the source. They will read a name in the newspaper or a book and call or write for an interview without any trepidation. A group of students from North Carolina interviewed the eminent historian John Hope Franklin for a documentary they produced on slave spirituals as a History Day project. When asked how they came to interview Professor Franklin, they explained, “Oh, Coretta Scott King recommended that we call him.”

Other students will be too shy to go next door and interview a neighbor, and feel ill-at-ease speaking to adults. To help them overcome their shyness, teachers should encourage students to interview someone they feel comfortable with, a family member or a friend. Students may also feel more at ease if someone else, a family member or a fellow student, accompanies them. There is no reason why students should not work in teams, with one asking the questions and the other operating the recorder and perhaps taking photographs, an arrangement that helps maximize the use of the equipment. Sometimes team interviewing works when each student handles a specific set of questions, although it requires a certain degree of practice and coordination to the keep the interviewers from interrupting each other. Instead of interviewing, other students prefer preparing and editing transcripts or writing up the results. Even veteran interviewers get butterflies before starting a new interview, but the experience of doing interviews can help students build their self-confidence.[32]

Wouldn’t team interviewing complicate the process?

Yes, but various combinations have worked well. For fieldwork interviewing, Elaine Thatcher, director of the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University, has recommended having interviewers work in pairs, one with a recorder and the other with a camera, to capture the landscape that people are describing. Another advantage to having two interviewers is that one can give attention to their technical concerns with camera or recorder, while the other can ask the questions and keep the conversation going.[33]

A high school in San Francisco has students doing video oral histories in teams of four: a “lead” interviewer to ask the prepared topical questions, a “secondary” interviewer to listen carefully and ask follow-up questions, a camera operator, and a backup operator to handle the equipment and also ask follow-up questions. A trickier strategy is the “tag-team” approach, where two interviewers take turns asking questions on predetermined topics. This strategy works best with two strong interviewers who are in tune with each other.[34]

At the Digital Storytelling Project, which promotes partnerships between high school and college teachers and students, three high school teachers and their students paired with a college teacher and her writing class to collaborate on an oral history research and writing project. The project promoted collaborative learning and created connections between their schools and the local community. Assuming the role of mentors, the college students formed teams assigned to different high school classes, where they helped teach oral history research methods to high school students, assisted with research and preparation for their interviews, and worked with them on the writing component of the project. They experimented with formats: one class conducted one-on-one interviews outside of class time, another invited interviewees to the school to be interviewed by the whole class, and the third class held interviews via a team of students.[35]

What can oral history teach students about historical research in general?

A good deal of historical detective work is involved in doing oral history that can help students identify the ways in which historians operate. Interviewing turns the student into the primary historical investigators; they learn how to choose a topic, find people to interview, do the research, and prepare the questions. The more students prepare, the more they recognize what they do not know, as well as how much more they need to learn in order to ask meaningful questions—and understand the answers. Student interviewers are likely to be confronted with contradictory evidence: different people give different versions of the same event, and an interviewee’s story can differ noticeably from the textbook and other sources of information. In short, students begin to appreciate how history is collected and interpreted and perhaps even begin to think like historians themselves.[36]

Once students have done their interviews, via in-class discussions or in written papers they can analyze the varying responses and appreciate that historical events do not affect all people the same way. Not everyone stood on breadlines during the Great Depression, nor was everyone a hippie in the 1960s. Interviews with family members reveal a wide variety of economic and social circumstances, and vastly different attitudes and lifestyles. Oral history helps students learn about cause-and-effect relationships and to confront historical concepts.

Doing oral history helps students not only see firsthand what historians do but also better appreciate the jobs of journalists and other professional interviewers. Educators have found that oral history teaches students “how to learn,” as well as what to learn. Students develop problem-solving skills and come away with an understanding “that history is risky, as is any enterprise that attempts to arrive at the truth.” Writing papers about oral history experience further sharpens analytical and composition skills.[37]

More than ever before, schools study everyday life over time, looking at past several generations of immigrants, ethics, racial minorities, and women. Textbooks have struggled to keep up with these new trends, and teachers incorporate more outside materials into their classes. The historian Peter Stearns noted that high school experiments with social history had “generated enthusiasm among students who were intrigued with issues also familiar in their own lives, and some teachers, extending these same experiments, were able to move toward more sophisticated analytical training on issues of periodization or causation.” But Stearns concluded that too many school assignments continued to require merely factual research. In family history projects, students gathered information about their own families but rarely analyzed the material or tried to relate their families to the larger generalizations of family behavior in different time periods. Stearns wants high school students to go beyond the recording of facts and discover not only “how it happened” but also “what is the meaning of what happened?” They can do this only by learning how to handle various types of primary evidence, from documents and statistics to oral sources, to compare the activities, beliefs, and behaviors of their lifetime with past eras.[38]

Oral history can deal with families and communities, but can it also be used to study the issues that are covered in the social studies curriculum?

Teachers who use oral history report that it an especially powerful tool for addressing social issues such as racism, the civil rights movement, human rights, the nuclear arms race, war, and environmental issues. As a teaching device, it allows students to meet, hear from, and engage in discussion with people who have played a personal role in these social issues; it also presents students with different points of view and demonstrates the individual beliefs, opinions, and experiences that underline people’s social concerns. Students—and other researchers—can be impressed and swayed by a single strong-minded interviewee. But they need to be made aware that social issues are inherently complex and that the opinions from a single interview will not represent all sides of the issues. To obtain as complete a picture as possible, they must interview a variety of people representing different, conflicting points of view.[39]

When is the best time during the school year to engage in oral history?

The timing of an oral history project depends on many factors, from the school calendar to the subject matter being studied, and varies from project to project. Teachers try to coordinate interviewing to correspond with the study of periods from the past. Those who are interviewed might have lived through the events being studied, or their experiences could be compared to life in a much earlier era. Teachers often plan oral history projects around text schedules and holidays, whenever students may have a block of time to complete their assignments. Glenn Whitman, who regularly incorporates oral history into high school teaching, finds that the long Thanksgiving and winter holiday seasons work best because the extended breaks give students more time and flexibility to conduct their work, and “the interviewees are often generated from family dinners.”[40]

Is oral history primarily an engaging extracurricular activity, or can it help improve students’ learning skills?

Oral history provides a direct means of engaging students with the past. Approaching the fiftieth anniversary of racial integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, where federal troops had been needed to protect the first African American students, civics teachers assigned their students to interview a relative who lived through the civil rights era and learn about events that occurred decades before the students were born. More than 1,500 students became involved in the project, which resulted in a book, Beyond Central, Towards Acceptance, and a website. When asked about the benefit of the project, one teacher explained that it had started “a conversation among young kids that they would never have had.”[41]

Oral history is certainly no more than an educational accessory, but studies have shown that students respond more positively to it than to traditional methods of learning and take more from it. One analysis of the entire eleventh grade in a Baltimore County, Maryland, high school—including honors, average, and basic-ability students—compared oral history and traditional methods of instruction. Half the students considered immigration and black history using oral history, the other half studied these subjects using regular teaching methods. Tests given at the beginning and end of the four-week curriculum revealed that the oral history students at all levels of ability showed greater instructional gains than students taught by the traditional methods.

Those students using oral history felt that it had made their historical instruction more realistic. Particularly in the honors program, oral history students were more motivated to continue their learning about a topic even after the unit of study had been completed. Students appreciated oral history as a change of pace; as a highly creative activity; for making history seem more believable by associating real people with historical events; as an activity open to a great deal of input; and as a project with “a real purpose.” They also showed an appreciation for learning from fellow students rather than from their teachers.[42]

Does an oral history project have to be done by the whole class?

There are definite benefits that accrue from having all the students experience and discuss oral history, but interviewing can also be done by a single student, or a small group, as part of their own project. With the increasing popularity of cooperative learning, oral history offers ideal strategies for getting students to work together in teams (and many state performance assessments are concerned with cooperative efforts). Oral history can be a onetime project or an ongoing series of projects. Many individuals and groups of students use oral histories as part of their History Day projects.

Should a practice interview be conducted in class before students do their own interviews?

Sometimes called a “fish bowl” approach, in-class interviews offer a good way to demystify oral history for the students. The teacher can conduct an in-class interview, or one or more students might serve as the interviewers. Invite someone connected with the school, an administrator, another teacher, a support staff member, or a parent to be interviewed. Be sure to conduct the interview as seriously as possible. To be most effective, the in-class interview should be a real experience rather than playacting. As the class watches the interview, students observe how to conduct an interview and what types of questions elicit the fullest answers. They should be encouraged to ask additional questions after the initial interview is finished. Although adolescents adapt more easily than adults to using the technology of oral history, they still need experience in setting up the recorder and microphone to ensure the best sound quality.[43]

Before conducting the in-class interview, have the class as a whole plan the questions. Teachers find that students have more interest in the interview because their questions will be asked. After the interview is finished, the class can discuss the effectiveness of different questions. Which questions encouraged the interviewee to open up and talk? Which questions gathered new information? Which questions proved to be dead ends or were poorly phrased? Did the interviewer follow up on unexpected leads? Record the in-class interview, so that portions can be replayed in the discussion.[44]

As the class scrutinizes the in-class interview, it should consider whether the interviewer interrupted the answers or failed to pay attention or to follow up on information. The hardest thing to teach a student, or any interviewer for that matter, is to sit and listen to the interviewee’s answers and not be too quick to ask the next question. Too many student interviews become a long string of questions followed by short, sometimes one-sentence answers, suggesting that the questions are too narrow, not open-ended, or that the interviewer has moved on to the next question too quickly.[45]

To better prepare his students at Baylor University to be interviewers, Stephen Sloan has them first play the role of interviewees, a practice that increases their sensitivity to their narrators. Having been interviewed, students can appreciate how interviewees experience the interview. Students learned that in answering questions, interviewees underwent an internal dialogue: How do I answer that? Would that be relevant? Or too personal? They also found that interviewees picked up on signals when the interviewer was not fully attentive, fidgeting, or checking the time, signals that left the interviewees less inclined to elaborate. Then they went out to do their own interviews better prepared.[46]

What is the teacher’s responsibility for the student’s actual conduct of the interview?

Even though they probably will not accompany students to the interviews, teachers need to impress upon students the responsibilities and ethics of conducting interviews, especially in someone’s home or office. Like any other interviewer, students need to schedule an appointment in advance and then keep it. Interviewers must appear on time, act courteously, and be careful not to damage people’s property. Interviewers have an obligation to explain to their interviewees the purpose of the interview and to respect any wish they may express not to talk about certain subjects. Students should have their interviewees sign release forms. Finally, they need to remember to thank interviewees for their cooperation, either verbally or in writing, and should give them a copy of any transcript that might be made. If the school produces a magazine, exhibit, slide-tape or PowerPoint presentation, video documentary, or stage production based on the interviews, invite the interviewees to the performances or functions; doing so ties the student, the project, and the school more firmly to the community, and makes for good public relations.

Two schools in Maryland have experimented with public exhibitions of their oral histories. In Baltimore, the Loch Raven Academy features an oral history open house where its eighth grade students display their oral history projects to other students, their parents, and the community; the St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac runs an annual evening “coffeehouse” for student interviewers, their interviewees, and members of their families. At his high school, Glenn Whitman requires students to communicate their interviews to a general audience in the form of an exhibition, a one-act play, or a PowerPoint presentation, designed to celebrate the students’ work and showcase the history they uncovered.[47]

Writing for the National Educational Association, John Neuenschwander strongly recommended that students be made to realize that oral history interviewees “are not simply talking books” but require special handling. “The interviewer must always be sensitive to the interviewee’s personal stake in the interview and avoid any psychological harm.” Students, of all people, should not make their oral histories a test of older people’s memories. The interviewee may not be able to recall specific names and dates or answer other detailed factual questions, and the experience may leave them feeling depressed.[48]

Can high school students handle the stress of interviewing about traumatic events?

There are reasonable concerns about having teenagers conduct interviews with survivors of disasters or others who have stories to tell about traumatic personal experiences. Yet, well-prepared students have done surprisingly well under these circumstances. Students rarely shy away from asking probing questions about the most horrific events—even when elderly interviewees recount painful experiences from their own adolescence. When preparing to interview about traumatic events, students will need groundwork on what to expect and on how to deal with interviewees who might become emotional. Some teachers have invited trauma therapists to speak to their class in advance, helping the class appreciate the likely impact of the experience on both the interviewer and interviewee.[49]

What should you do if an interviewee uses inappropriate language?

Oral history is unpredictable, so there is always the chance that an interviewee might curse or make some slur during the course of the conversation. This is less a problem during the interview than in preparing the transcript and in meeting the standards of the school library, where the transcript will be deposited. Dealing with parents, administrators, and school boards is not the time to be doctrinaire about the sanctity of the verbatim transcript. Omit the offensive language—it does not belong in the transcript, the library, or on the website. If necessary, use brackets to indicate that a characterization or an expletive was deleted.[50]

Should students process the interviews as well as conduct them?

Interviewing is only one step in teaching through oral history. While the interview is still fresh in their minds, students should review the entire recording to make sure it recorded properly and to prepare a summary of the remarks. Students can distribute these summaries to the class, relating their experiences and playing a portion of their recording. The class can analyze the sound quality of the recording, the types of questions asked, the quality of the content, the way the student opened and closed the interview, any distorted or slanted material, and how engaged the interviewer and the interviewee were in the interview. Some teachers ask students to review and evaluate each other’s interviews.[51]

Transcription is arduous work, but it is not beyond the capabilities of most high school students. Students should attempt to transcribe at least a portion of their interviews, an exercise that will allow them to consider the amount of interpretation involved in converting spoken words into written form. Do people speak in full sentences or fragments? How do they determine punctuation and paragraphs? Does the transcript accurately reflect both what was spoken and the way it was spoken? How do transcripts deal with words that are spoken differently from the way they are written? What meanings are expressed when people use slang and street talk? The decisions that go into creating a transcript will force students to reexamine both the spoken and written word, and help them develop their own writing skills. The completed transcripts can be included in student portfolios—in those schools that assess and grade portfolios of student writing as a substitute for examinations.

How closely should the teacher monitor each student’s interviews?

Teachers need to supervise individual students closely as they begin their projects. As useful and motivating an experience as oral history can be, without appropriate preparation it can be a total failure. Even well-prepared students will feel apprehensive about conducting interviews. Throughout the course, the teacher should return to discussions of interviewing techniques, remind them to keep their minds focused, provide useful suggestions, and reinforce the lessons. After the students have done their first interviews, the teacher should try to meet with each one individually to review at least a portion of their interviews. Students will be anxious to know how well they performed and will need guidance on what they did right, and what needs improvement, before they do their next interviews.[52]

How should student interviews be evaluated?

No two interviews will be alike, but all interviews depend on the interviewer’s skills, which can be graded. In monitoring the interviews, consider whether the student really engaged in an informed dialogue or merely read scripted questions. Did the questions elicit thoughtful rather than perfunctory lines of inquiry? Did the interview collect useful information? It becomes clear after listening to a few recordings or reviewing a few transcripts how much the preparation, interview technique, and demeanor invoked a responsive chord in the interviewee.

From long experience in using oral history in the classroom, Frank Fonsino devised criteria that teachers can use to evaluate student interviews. These include:

1. What was the topic or focus of the interview?

2. Does the introduction to the recording provide sufficient information for the listener?

3. Does the interviewer use leading questions or make biased comments?

4. How capable was the interviewing style?

5. How good was the sound quality of the recording?

6. What is the historical value of the interview?[53]

When the class is over, what should be done with the completed oral histories?

The recordings and transcripts should be given to the school library. If the interviews are of particularly good quality and deal with the community, consider giving copies to the local public library as well. Collected oral histories in a nearby library will provide a valuable resource not only for future students preparing to do their own interviews but also for researchers interested in the community’s history. Since oral history is often conducted with the elderly, they may no longer be alive when others seek to interview them, and the students’ interviews could be the only record they left. The librarian may prefer not to receive the poorer examples, but students will value their work all the more if they know it will be permanently preserved in a library collection.[54]

Consider creating a website to promote the oral history projects. School projects have posted transcripts of their interviews along with photographs, essays, audio excerpts, and video podcasts. Students at the South Kingsport, Rhode Island, high school conducted interviews on The Whole World Was Watching: An Oral History of 1968, and What Did You Do During the War, Grandma?, on women and World War II. Nearby Brown University’s Scholarly Technology Group helped the high students display the interview transcripts and audio recordings on the university’s website. High school students in Richfield, Utah, similarly interviewed community residents about their experiences during the Great Depression, which were posted on the New Deal Network.[55]

Some projects also use oral history to produce creative drama. A high school teacher in Oregon teamed with a community administrator to design an oral history project for students studying American history. Students worked in groups to interview seniors at a community center, discuss what they learned, and turn the interviews into short stage presentations on topics from the Great Depression to World War II. The experience taught the students about the complexity of history, multiple perspectives, and human struggle, providing depth to the issues they were studying. It also engaged them in an exercise in teamwork. The elders they interviewed appreciated the interaction with students and the chance to share their memories, and enjoyed watching the dramas they created.[56]

Radio documentaries have resulted from a partnership between the University High School and the local public radio station in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Each year the students conduct interviews at the station on some aspect of the community, from quilting to farming, and from Holocaust survivors to World War II prisoners of war. Next they determine how to organize the interviews into a cohesive narrative. Their mission, as one student described it, is to link the stories of people “whose lives were connected in ways that we could only see after reading through them, carefully cutting the blocks of stories apart, and then piecing them back together again.” The station broadcasts the completed documentary for the students and the community to hear.[57]

How much instruction will students need in making their interviews ready for presentation?

Today’s students may be “digital natives” who grew up in the digital era and who can be fearless about trying new equipment, but teachers should not assume that they know what they are doing. High school teacher Ken Woodward assigned his students to turn their oral history interviews into three- to four-minute documentaries. Working in teams, the students had to write scripts and plan the distribution of images to correspond with clips from the interviews. At first, the students proved themselves “surprisingly oblivious” to production values. Despite the training they had received in the use of audio-editing programs, and despite having worked hard on their projects, they turned in “assembled mash-ups of didactically boring and flatly delivered introductions to weirdly arbitrary cuts.” Woodward realized that he had underestimated the complexity of introducing students to the intricacies of producing a good documentary. He altered the course to have students listen to and evaluate professionally produced radio broadcasts, set more specific standards (such as time limits for each cut), and worked with the students on how to read a script more naturally. Adding video doubled the necessary preproduction planning. The effort was worth it, however, in challenging students to process their research and present their work in ways that will appeal to audiences.[58]

Many high school students participate in National History Day contests. How have they used oral history in their entries?

National History Day is not a specific date, but a series of contests held on the local, state, and national level that provide opportunities to see what students from schools across the nation are capable of doing. Modeled after science fairs, History Day contests are held in most states and several territories for sixth to twelfth grade students. Annually, more than a half million students and thousands of teachers participate in local and state contests, and the winners advance to national competition. Students do projects, media presentations, papers, and dramatic performances based around a common theme (“Change and Continuity,” “Debate and Diplomacy,” “Rights and Responsibilities in History”). About a third of the entries each year contain some use of oral history interviews.

Judges at History Day competitions have viewed some memorable projects based on oral history. Students from Asheville, North Carolina, videoed an interview with the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was living in their community. Students in El Dorado, Kansas, discovered that their town had once housed a camp for German prisoners of war during the Second World War, and they interviewed one of the former prisoners who had returned to live in the town after the war. Elementary and secondary school students in Toms River, New Jersey, interviewed shopkeepers to document the rise and fall of their Main Street. One junior high school student from Philadelphia studied the history of a chemical plant where his father worked, basing much of his information on interviews. The student made an appointment with the company vice president for public relations but told the man he seemed “too young” to be interviewed for a history project. The vice president located a ninety-year-old retired employee, who agreed to be interviewed, and whose answers indeed gave the project a long historical perspective.

Two students from Billings, Missouri, produced a slide-tape show, “Like Losing a Member of the Family,” recounting the story of a century-old general store, The Mercantile, which had been demolished to make way for a convenience store. The students conducted a dozen interviews with people who had worked or shopped in the store, collecting their memories of Saturday shopping days, fires, depressions, bankruptcies, celebrations, and other memories to produce a touching tribute to a small-town institution that had fallen victim to the forces of modernization. They used photographs, newspaper ads, and other items submitted by their interviewees that captured the store as a patriotically decorated backdrop for parades from World Wars I and II and other town celebrations; indeed the store had long been witness to all of the town’s daily business. The project won first prize in the senior media division, and the town’s public library planned to accession the slide-tape show into its local history collection. “Our media presentation began as a local library project, hopefully to leave some record of the building when it was gone,” the students reported. “But between our project’s beginning and ending we have made so many new friends among the elderly in our town, and learned so much more about the history of the community that our research has seemed more fun than chore.”[59]

History Day students have interviewed Japanese Americans who were relocated and interred during World War II, and civil rights demonstrators of the 1950s and ’60s. They most often interview people in their own communities but have also interviewed over the phone, compensating for their lack of travel funds. When a high school student in South Carolina sought to interview Rosa Parks about her role in the Montgomery bus boycott, Parks agreed but stipulated that the student and other members of his school history club read her autobiography before the interview.[60]

How supportive of oral history projects are school administrators?

Since oral history lies outside the standard curriculum, some administrators look upon it with suspicion, questioning the amount of class time necessary to prepare for, conduct, and process the interviews. It is advisable to submit a proposal to the school administration before starting an oral history project. The proposal should detail the project’s objectives and methods of evaluation and indicate how oral history supports the regular curriculum and how it develops skills and teaches computer literacy. Buttress your case with manuals and published articles on oral history in the classroom. School administrators are also attracted by the argument that oral history projects can benefit the school’s public relations with the community, both through the collection and the exhibition of the collected interviews and memorabilia.[61]

Oral History in Undergraduate and Graduate Education

How widely is oral history taught in colleges and universities?

Some universities have established master’s degree programs in oral history. More commonly, oral history is a component of broader programs in public history, museum studies, or new media.[62] The exact number of college-level oral history methodology courses is difficult to measure, since course offerings have fluctuated and appear in different departments. Oral history may be offered as a separate course or as part of larger methodology courses that deal with conducting research and analyzing historical sources or that address theoretical issues of history and memory. Most applied and public history programs include an oral history component. Anthropology and other social sciences offer their own forms of instruction in fieldwork interviewing. Oral history is as likely to appear in the course offerings of library schools, journalism departments, or American studies programs as in history departments.

Courses in oral history tend to be offered more consistently at colleges and universities with established oral history archives. Directors of the oral history archives often teach the course, and class projects contribute to the larger oral history collection. In schools without oral history archives, finding departments and teachers interested in oral history is usually more difficult than signing up students.

Community colleges have also found oral history highly applicable for adult education or transitional studies between secondary school and the university. Conducting and processing interviews can develop and tap skills at all levels, even for those students approaching English as a second language. Classroom discussions can draw not only from the substance of the interview but also from the many styles of speaking.

Some newly established universities with student bodies drawn largely from working-class, immigrant communities have incorporated oral history into their curriculum at the start. The California State University at Monterey, with many students of Mexican heritage, requires all its undergraduates to take an oral history course. One project was centered on the theme “First in My Family to Go to College,” which offered much of the student body as potential interviewees. Sweden’s Malmö University likewise built a history curriculum that would be relevant to both the region’s traditional inhabitants and its many newcomers. After taking the basic methodological courses, students at Malmö do research projects based on primary sources, which must include biographical material based on personal interviews. Since a large share of the history students at Malmö intend to teach in primary and secondary schools, officials reasonably assume that many will utilize their oral history training in the classroom.[63]

What is the relationship between university-based oral history archives and teaching?

In some cases oral history archives have been involved in teaching methodology courses on campus, while in other cases the collection of oral history goes on entirely separately from the academics. The Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was based from its inception in the history department rather than the library and engaged history faculty and students in its projects. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, in her seminar on women’s history, had students conduct oral histories with three generations of women in their families, which helped put their own lives into historical context. She uses personal perspective to enrich “and sometimes contradict” popular views of history.[64]

By contrast, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at the University of California, Berkeley, originated and operated for three decades entirely independently of any academic department. But beginning with the appointment of a new director in 2001, ROHO aimed to integrate its work into the university’s teaching and research missions. In addition to offering undergraduate classes, ROHO also runs an Advanced Oral History Institute for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and independent scholars, which is aimed at strengthening their ability to conduct research-focused interviews, to incorporate oral histories into teaching, and to weigh interviews as historical evidence. Eager to raise its academic profile, ROHO seeks graduate students to work with its oral history programs to develop research topics that result in dissertations.[65]

Are methods courses in interviewing really necessary? Isn’t it better for students to learn simply by going out and doing interviews?

The historian Graham Smith agrees that “reading about how to record and use personal testimony is a rather poor substitute for actually doing it,” but he points out that all the preliminary research necessary to conduct serious interviews encourages students “to expend a great deal of more thought about research processes” than they would normally invest in their studies.[66] Disciplines that employ fieldwork have periodically debated whether to teach interviewing as a methods course or to just send students out to experiment for themselves. Some argue that since all field situations will be different, students need to learn on their own and that the only methods necessary are “sensitivity and creativity.” Others concede that fieldwork requires more than simply mastering a textbook but contend that students still have to prepare themselves to do it right. Even though oral history interviewing is best learned by doing, students can learn much in the classroom, both before and after conducting their interviews.

The anthropologist John Forrest believes that before students go out to interview, they need to learn about the complexity of human interaction. In his methods course, he stipulated that “students had to care about what they were documenting” because their projects would take them into other people’s lives. “If they were insensitive they knew that at best they would end up with no data, and at worst they would have hurt a fellow human.” Finding subjects that genuinely mattered to them also helped motivate the students and made it less necessary for the instructor to “drone on about why fieldwork and data collection are important, or to show how good data leads on to appropriate social theory.”[67]

The social sciences have been more consistent than the humanities in teaching fieldwork methodology. It undoubtedly is safe to assume that the majority of history undergraduates and graduate students who use interviews as part of their research have never taken an oral history course. Interviews are done seat-of-the-pants style—sometimes recorded, more often captured in handwritten notes only; usually devoid of deeds of gift; and almost never conducted with the thought of depositing the completed interviews in an archives. Such interviews can still generate valuable information, despite needless mistakes, improper planning, and unnecessarily limiting procedures. The chief problem is that few graduate advisors have had any training in oral history; they assume that anyone can interview and do not hold their students’ oral sources to the same documentation standards as their written ones.[68]

Graduate-level courses in oral history deal more with theory and methodology than do undergraduate courses. The growing literature in the field has increased the amount of background reading for these courses; although most students do interviews, some classes have permitted students to write papers on theory and interpretation in lieu of interviewing. Some theoretical literature could also be introduced into undergraduate courses; the historian James Hoopes has observed that college students “should have a more ambitious goal than the Foxfire students’ objectives of merely collecting information on customs, folklore, and habits.” College students should be better able to interpret the material they collect, to place it in historical context, and to apply theory to their fieldwork interviewing.[69]

What problems are encountered in teaching oral history in undergraduate college classes?

Instructors find that their biggest problem is the uneven ability and experience of their students. Although it is true that students at every learning level can benefit from doing oral history, teachers who seek to develop an oral history as a research methodology prefer students with some training in a particular area of study, such as ethnic, labor, cultural, economic history, or the social sciences. Students who lack such backgrounds often feel frustrated over the demands placed upon them. They discover that oral history is a tool for study, not an end in itself, and that there is more to the process than just interviewing someone. In both the research before the interview and the interpretation afterward, they must be able to place the material in its larger social or historical context. Some instructors have recommended offering oral history classes only as advanced electives—or, at the minimum, requiring students to have taken the basic survey classes in history—to ensure some control over students’ levels of preparation.[70]

Some teachers worry that unless properly monitored, oral history projects often amount to little more than a conversation and a paper. At Indiana University Southwest, A. Glenn Crothers required survey course students to conduct oral history to heighten their understanding of how the broader historical events they study actually affected their community, and to appreciate how historians use primary and secondary sources and move from evidence to interpretation. Crothers used advanced history majors to tutor those with little prior preparation in history, and he further pairs students in two-member interviewing teams where they can mentor each other and share the burdens of transcription. Project reports led him to conclude that oral history made “a profound impression” on the first-year students, whose knowledge of history and of the community was clearly enriched, and also on the advanced students who gained “concrete experience as teachers and public historians.”[71]

Some students will be unduly nervous about conducting their first interview. Sandy Polishuk dealt with this by breaking her class into pairs and having the students interview each other, switch positions, and then report back to the class. If students are still uncomfortable, she recommends they interview someone they know on some focused subject of their choice. Once the ice is broken, they will find the experience far less intimidating.[72]

In her oral history classes at Villanova, Mary Schweitzer found that the hardest part of the process was getting students to weigh evidence and apply historical interpretation. Students assumed that their assignment was simply to collect a variety of opinions and string them together into an interesting story. Schweitzer warns students not to take all evidence at face value. As researchers, they need to analyze the varying perspectives of the witnesses, consider conflicting viewpoints, and fit first-person observations together with other forms of evidence. By expanding the interviewing process to include interpretation, students began to “think about the particularity and generality of all experience.”[73]

Can listening skills be taught?

Beyond preliminary research, the most important quality that any interviewer can bring to an interview is an ability to listen carefully and respond when some new and unexpected information surfaces. When Martha Norkunas directed an African American oral history project at the University of Texas, she read transcripts and found that the students had failed to ask thoughtful follow-up questions or to pursue a topic fully. She encouraged students to conduct re-interviews to see how they could modify their listening habits, better engage with interviewees, and actually hear their stories. She also asked students to keep “reflexive listening journals” about their experiences listening to sad and joyous stories, conducting structured and unstructured interviews, observing body language, and even to try conducting interviews blindfolded—so that they had no visual cues. Through these exercises, students developed an appreciation that listening was an active, not a passive skill, and to become more aware of their bad habits, such as interrupting interviewees before they had finished a thought. As one student responded: “This listening exercise did, in fact, help me to realize that interrupting is not only cutting in and talking when someone else is speaking, interrupting can be far less blatant. Someone who is speaking could be done with a sentence and even be amid a short pause but still not be finished with his/her thought....Sometimes the person is searching for the right words, or has more to say but doesn’t immediately know where to begin expressing it.”[74]

How should a college course on oral history be structured?

Structure and objectives will depend on the department in which oral history is taught and on whether it is an undergraduate- or graduate-level course. Library science courses, for instance, will focus more on the use of interviews in research libraries and archives; on developing standards for the acquisition and preservation of oral history materials; on integrating oral history materials into library and archival collections; and on using automated databases for the storage, retrieval, and cataloging of interviews. In other departments, oral history courses may concentrate more on the methodological literature of oral history, on designing and running oral history projects; or on the techniques of interviewing and the content and analysis of the interviews.

Since much supervision and review of student work will be required, it is advisable to keep classes small and manageable. Students may need help in finding people to interview, especially if the campus is geographically or culturally detached from the surrounding community. Because they operate best in a practical, “hands-on” manner, oral history classes should be taught as seminars or laboratories rather than in lecture halls.[75]

Consider having the students monitor their own progress by maintaining a log in which they make regular notes on their impressions of the course, their readings, their interview objectives and preparations, and their observations of the actual interview situations. What unexpected leads and information developed? Did the interviews differ from what they expected? How did they rate themselves as interviewers, and did they feel they improved over time? Students might submit these logs at the end of the term for extra credit.

Regardless of the discipline in which oral history or fieldwork interviewing is taught, students should be introduced to the use of oral techniques in other fields, from folklore to anthropology and social psychology. They should understand the different interview standards and objectives in different fields. Consider inviting some guest lecturers from other disciplines to discuss how they use interviews in their research. Similarly, oral history courses often study the most common forms of interviews that students have watched on television or read in newspapers and magazines, requiring them to monitor the interviewing style of media interviewers.

Review the literature in the field—particularly dealing with the ethical responsibilities of interviewing—familiarize the students with the equipment and plan for practice interview sessions in the classroom. If the students plan to interview around a common theme, have them discuss the questions that might be asked of all interviewees, to provide for comparisons, and to balance the detail and complexity of individual stories with generalizations about the historical experience. Since experiences vary so widely from interview to interview, students should be required to interview more than one person. (When one instructor discovered that his students were conducting short interviews as a means of reducing the amount of transcribing they had to do, he set a three-hour minimum for interviews.)[76]

After students have conducted their interviews, they should compose a brief paper not only about the interview and the subject covered, but also the interviewee’s place in local, regional, and national events. Students also should be required to transcribe at least portions of their interviews. Students are usually interested in the interview itself and impatient when learning the techniques of interviewing and processing interviews. It is imperative, however, to stress that poorly conducted interviews seriously undermine the end product—the information gathered by interview that the students hope to use themselves and to leave behind as an archival legacy.[77]

Finally, students should be encouraged to analyze the type of information generated by oral history, the interviewer-interviewee relationship, and the validity of oral sources versus written sources. They should consider the ways in which oral history can be integrated into the larger historiographies of the subject matter, as well as the ultimate uses of oral history in research, publication, and public presentation. More and more oral history classes also include discussion of video interviews.

Can oral history be incorporated into classes other than methodology?

In her seminar on women’s history at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jacqueline Dowd Hall had students conduct oral histories with three generations of women in their families. Such personal perspectives enrich “and sometimes contradict” popular views of history, as well as help students put their own lives in a larger historical context. At Kent State University, Renata Prescott used oral history interviews to examine the impact of the Vietnam War on her students’ families. Their experiences demonstrate the dual value of oral history both as a teaching tool and as a source of historical content. As historians have widened their investigations beyond the public arena, oral history has helped students grapple with the more private spheres of family and community.[78]

Early on, women’s studies programs incorporated oral history into their curricula. At the University of Massachusetts at Boston, for instance, the women’s studies program had students conduct interviews with individuals outside the university about sex-role stereotyping, women’s roles in the workplace, family relationships, and women’s movement organizations. Summaries of these interviews formed the basis of class discussions. Many of the students had known surprisingly little about their mothers’ lives and began to reexamine and appreciate the strength of other “unnoticed, unrewarded female relatives.” Women’s history programs at Boston University and Simmons College also provided useful generational studies, requiring students to interview two or more women in the same family, such as mother and daughter or an aunt and niece. These interviews show cultural change over time, most notable in the case of immigrant families. One student was astonished to learn that her Irish-Catholic grandmother had been a vociferous supporter of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. In another set of interviews, a father stated that he and his wife had as many children as “God had sent them,” while the mother admitted using a diaphragm. Women students reported realizing the source of many of their own ideas and beliefs when they interviewed family members.[79]

College oral history classes have seized on developing events within their own communities as subjects for student projects. When school integration became an issue in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, nearby George Washington University launched an oral history. The first stage in the project was compiling newspaper clippings on the issue to prepare students to interview school officials, parents, and teachers. As it developed, the project uncovered a story that was far more complex than the newspaper reports had suggested. The students discovered, for instance, that the initiative for the most original element in the integration plan had come from teachers at the school rather than from the school board. The interviews also revealed that, although men held most of the formal leadership positions in the various organizations involved, women had been most active in the grassroots movement, “ringing doorbells, making phone calls, and using their organizational know-how to promote their respective causes.” The transcripts of the interviews were deposited at the university library, where they became instructional material for courses in political science and education.[80]

What’s been the impact of digital technology on teaching oral history?

Digital technology has not only opened new opportunities for conducting and disseminating oral history but also for the way it can be taught. Rina Benmayor, who offers a course on Oral History and Community Memory at California State University Monterey Bay, has found that the availability of oral history collections on the Internet enables her students to view full transcripts or listen to entire recordings of interviews from various projects as a tool for engaging them in critical analysis. Students have also presented their work in the form of PowerPoint slide shows, integrating audio and video clips from their interviews with other texts and illustrations, all of which can produce a dynamic presentation of critical ideas to the class. These presentations can lead to good group discussions and encourage the students to challenge each other’s interpretations. Beyond tapping online sources, oral history classes and workshops have been taught online in distance-learning classes as well.[81]

Students can also learn much from reviewing other oral history websites. At the University of Texas School of Journalism, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez has her students analyze different oral history sites and address basic questions as:

•  Who is being interviewed and what is the basic central idea?

•  Who does the interviewing?

•  Are there audio/visual recordings?

•  How does the site demonstrate its findings?

•  Does it feature actual interviews?

•  Can you tell how effectively the project accomplishes [its] missions/goals?

•  What do you like/not about the site?

•  What challenges do you think they might have?

She finds that once students begin to compare different sites, they develop ideas about what they want to do themselves. However, she encourages them not to concentrate solely on the best-funded collections, since “there are dozens of smaller, excellent ones that would also be fascinating.”[82]

Would a college be a suitable subject for an oral history?

Students, faculty, and alumni have participated in recording the histories of their schools, often in connection with school anniversaries. For the University of Kentucky oral history project, interviews have been conducted with former and current presidents, administrators, faculty, and graduates. Interviews on the subject of campus life and history conducted by students from Bryn Mawr to Stanford have been compiled not only as archival collections but also as highly profitable books and videos marketed to alumnae. The North Carolina State Student Leadership Initiative uses oral history to connect students to their university’s history.[83]

When Northern Virginia Community College reached its twentieth anniversary, five historians in the system began interviewing those who had started the community college system, and those who had built it, taught in it, and attended its first classes. They published twenty-seven interviews with these “prime movers” and pioneers. “At the end of our labors as oral historians, some of us working within the methods of this subdiscipline for the first time, we have come to feel great pride in what we have been privileged to compile—this history of our college—as well as renewed pride in the college itself,” they concluded. “We often felt ourselves in the presence of that admixture of pragmatism and idealism characteristic of so many of our once and current colleagues who have stamped these traits onto our colleges.” The recordings and transcripts were housed at one of the college’s library, where they would form the nucleus of a research collection on the institution’s beginnings. Some of the interviews have also been posted on the college websites.[84]

Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, founded as Roberts College in 1863 as the first American college outside of the United States, was transferred to the Turkish government as a state university in 1971, after which its history department underwent a major reorganization. Thirty years later the department began an oral history project to document the surviving “founders,” along with the second and third generations of faculty who followed. These interviews documented the original and evolving philosophies that shaped the department’s development and recorded how larger events in Turkey had influenced academic life. Although initially designed to commemorate an anniversary, the oral history unexpectedly provided a beneficial self-analysis, and the department has used the interviews in evaluating the curricula, methods of teaching, and standards of historical research; and for charting its future development.[85]

Doing oral history of one’s college or university is not always a celebratory practice. In May 1968, when student demonstrators took over Columbia University, the Columbia Oral History Research Office hired three advanced fellows from the School of Journalism to interview students, faculty, administrators, and mediators. Within a month’s time they had collected more than 1,500 pages of testimony. Interviewers from Cornell University conducted oral histories connected with the killings of two Jackson State University students by Mississippi state police very shortly after the incident. Cornell similarly conducted interviews related to the dramatic 1968 demonstrations at its own campus.[86]

One project even sought to examine the “everyday narratives” that scholars construct as teachers and mentors. They interviewed students and teachers to dispel myths and render visible the personal sides of the professorate.[87]

What about expanding that kind of inquiry into the surrounding community?

The old “town and gown” relationship between a university and its neighbors is ripe for oral history exploration. Brown University’s graduate program in public humanities developed the Fox Point Oral History Project to examine the neighborhood along the university’s border, which had undergone gentrification after years as a working-class waterfront community populated by immigrants. The stately renovated houses in the area display bronze plaques establishing their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dates of origin, but there is no historic memory of the “living history” of more recent years. Recognizing that the lives of Fox Point residents had been altered by economic changes, city planners, and other forces, the project aimed to capture changes that occurred during the last seventy years through recorded life history interviews with those who have memories of community life. Brown students sought out older Fox Point residents and business owners to inquire about their stories and collect their photographs; the students also created a website and produced a cell phone audio tour that tapped the interviews from the collection. Beyond its educational rewards, the project helped heal the sometimes frayed relations between the university and its neighbors.[88]

When Hurricane Sandy devastated the New Jersey coast, Abigail Perkiss, a professor at Kean University, designed an upper-level undergraduate seminar on conducting oral histories of three hard-hit communities in nearby Bayshore. Aiming to “situate the story of Sandy within the broader history of the relationship between natural disasters and the communities they impact,” the students attended community meetings, conducted interviews, and shot photographs and videos of the storm damage—some cases included their own homes and neighborhoods.[89]

Ultimately, what do undergraduates get out of taking oral history courses?

Undergraduates take oral history for any number of reasons, usually because they sound interesting and easy. Once enrolled, they find the subject much more complex than they imagined. Oral history challenges their preconceived notions and makes them rethink how they research and analyze.

One prelaw student in an oral history class chose a topic on the impact of judges on the law, assuming that it was “a very easy way to get a good grade.” Nothing came easy, however. The busy lawyers he interviewed kept taking phone calls during sessions, disrupting their answers, which strained his efforts to build rapport. Some answered precisely and briefly, quibbled over words, or evaded his questions. A circuit judge insisted on having his three rather obnoxious law clerks sit in on the interview. Despite these obstacles, the student collected valuable perspectives. What surprised him most was how often their answers disagreed with his written research. From his interviews, the student concluded that “the way a practitioner looks at the corpus of law differs greatly from the way a scholar investigates the law,” a finding he suspected was true of other fields as well.[90]

It helps students to get away from the campus and into the community to ask people for information. One student at the University of California, Berkeley, was studying Latino culture in Richmond, California, before, during, and after the industrial boom years of World War II. He found a longtime barber who agreed to be interviewed but only at his shop. The student spent four days recording his reminiscences, and left the recorder running while the barber bantered with fellow Mexican American customers who shared their own recollections, expanding his understanding of the community, which enhanced his thesis.[91]

What is the difference between an oral history class and a workshop?

Time, essentially. A class might extend over a fourteen-week semester; a workshop might last for only a single day. Many state and regional oral history organizations hold annual and semiannual workshops to serve as introductions for those just beginning and as refresher courses for those in midcareer. When oral history projects begin, they often seek an experienced oral historian to conduct a workshop to train volunteer interviewers and processors to ensure consistency in their product.

What role does oral history play in continuing education programs?

The Appalachian-based Highlander Research and Education Center has pioneered a style of participatory group learning for adults. Their economics education curriculum taught community members how to assess community needs and resources to begin community-based development. Education began with the students’ own experiences, and with oral histories of other members of the community, “to analyze their past development history and family employment histories, to understand the economic changes which they had experienced. Asking questions of grandparents, parents and peers about their work and means of survival, and then charting those responses became a way of understanding broad economic changes through people’s own experiences.”[92]

Oral history courses are offered in adult education programs and as summer institutes. People take such continuing education courses to aid them in changing careers, refreshing their knowledge, doing freelance interviewing, or interviewing family members or longtime community residents. A variety of such courses are publicized in the newsletters of the Oral History Association and its many state and regional affiliates.

Some of the most active oral historians are those who came to the field as a second career, often after raising families or retiring early, sometimes simply because they were looking for something interesting to do. Some study interview techniques and return to conduct oral histories within their previous profession. Others shift during a career, such as librarians and archivists seeking training to start or continue an oral history collection within their institution. If you want to do oral history, it is never too late to get some formal training.

Should doing oral history be counted for tenure review?

Considering all the time and effort that goes into planning, conducting, and preserving oral histories, practitioners have argued that universities should count them along with publications in awarding tenure. Oral historians have advocated this, arguing that interviews are not “just collecting” but are a coproduction that requires research and interpretation. Once completed and transcribed, the interviews are usually deposited in an archives and made available to all scholars, beyond the interviewer. A published collection of oral history might not resemble a monograph, but it would be a mistake for academic colleagues not to recognize the scholarly contributions that went into compiling and interpreting the material or in creating the oral history archive.[93]

Similar issues have arisen when scholars sought to have online publications and public history projects counted in their tenure reviews, often meeting resistance from more traditional academics. One report on public history recommended strongly that those seeking tenure be careful to provide clear documentation of the ways in which their work qualifies as scholarship in the eyes of the historical profession, that they should work with their department to establish the criteria by which they will be evaluated, and that faculty should negotiate to adjust their workload distribution and expectations to better reflect the nature of their scholarship.[94]

Institutional Review Boards

What are institutional review boards, and why do they want to review oral history proposals?

Academics around the world face increasing ethical scrutiny of any research that deals with human subjects. In some nations there are research ethics boards, research ethics committees, or human research ethics committees. In the United States, there are institutional review boards (IRBs), which date back to the 1980s, although most oral historians did not encounter them for another decade.

American IRBs grew out of the public outrage following revelations of a forty-year syphilis experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama, where researchers had allowed a curable disease to go untreated for some of the participants. In 1979 The Belmont Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research recommended rules to govern federally funded research involving human subjects based on three basic principles: respect for people’s ability to make decisions about their own behavior; beneficence, or the minimizing of harm and maximizing of benefits from research projects; and justice, as in the equitable selection of research subjects. Colleges and universities that received federal funds were required to establish institutional review boards to review faculty and student research protocols and make sure they complied with the federal code. At first these regulations applied only to medical and behavioral science research funded by federal agencies that specifically subscribed to them, such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, but not the National Endowment for the Humanities.[95]

Given that IRBs were created to police and prevent serious harm to an individual’s physical and mental health, it seems puzzling that they should divert their attention to the social sciences and humanities, where interviews pose far less risks—if any at all. That escalation began in 1991 when a revision of the federal regulations broadened the definition of human subject research to include any “interaction with living individuals.” Reasoning that research standards should not differ simply because of a project’s source of funding, government officials encouraged universities to regulate all research, regardless of whether it received federal funding—and warned that an entire campus could lose all federal funding if any research involving human interaction failed to undergo review. Universities wanted to protect human subjects but also wanted to protect themselves, and campus IRBs stepped up their vigilance accordingly. They turned first to the social sciences, where quantitative methods most closely resembled scientific research. Peculiar situations developed on team interviewing projects, with the sociologists and anthropologists on the team submitting their interviewing protocols to the campus IRB, while the historians went ahead interviewing without review, unaware of the very existence of the review boards.[96]

In a stunning move in 1995, the University of Delaware declined to accept a doctoral dissertation that its history department had approved until the graduate student obtained retroactive exemption from the IRB for interviews she had conducted. Other graduate students in the department had used oral history before without incident, and the history department had no prior notice of any IRB requirements. The university then announced a compulsory review of all faculty and student research conducted with human participants, regardless of the discipline or source of funding. After some anxious moments, the graduate student received her exemption and her degree. Graduate students in general are most vulnerable to review, since their work will eventually be read at the graduate level, where IRBs are generally located, and their degrees can be withheld pending compliance.[97]

Since IRBs devote their primary attention to biomedical research, they naturally recruit most of their board members from the sciences. A few larger universities have established separate IRBs to deal with other forms of research, to which they appointed members from the social sciences and humanities, but most college campuses have only a single board (some have none). Board members trained in scientific methodologies assumed that everyone used the same research practices, such as standard questionnaires that record anonymous interviewees for quantitative analysis, rather than the qualitative, free-flowing, open-ended interviews that oral historians conduct. The result was to deny oral historians true peer review.

IRBs regularly return research proposals for further fine-tuning before authorization. In the process they have asked oral historians to submit a list of questions they intended to ask and rejected questions that might place the interviewees in an embarrassing light. Boards have recommended—even insisted—that interviewees be anonymous. Graduate students have been told not to ask certain questions—including such “invasive” questions as asking about a mother’s maiden name (so much for using an oral history for biographical purposes). One student met with resistance for naming the scholars in her field whom she had interviewed. Another was asked to sign an agreement that all her research data would be destroyed within five years to protect privacy. She had to remind the board that the whole point of doing oral history was to preserve the interviews for posterity.

IRBs have tried to dissuade researchers from asking questions that might invoke painful memories about traumatic events. Yet oral history frequently deals with sorrowful recollections—about the Holocaust, wartime experiences, floods and other disasters—events in which interviewees have suffered grievous losses. Confronting these memories can have a cathartic effect, and interviewees will often express gratitude for the opportunity to tell their personal stories, even after the most emotional sessions. Oral history is not an adversarial form of interviewing, although it does require asking the difficult and sometimes embarrassing questions. Responses will range from direct to evasive and denial, providing further areas for analysis. Interviewers need to be free to pursue any line of inquiry that interviewees are willing to discuss.

Review boards have also cautioned interviewers against asking questions about illegal activity—even civil rights activists, who remain proud of the civil disobedience that led to their arrests. At their most illogical extent, some boards tried to require researchers to obtain permission from third parties who were mentioned during an interview, and some urged archivists to require researchers to apply for IRB clearance just to read oral history transcripts or listen to the recordings in their collections.

Burdening research proposals with unfeasible or inappropriate requests has disrupted and prolonged the research. Some projects were simply abandoned. For years, one teacher had arranged for her college students to work in partnership with local high school students to conduct community-based oral histories, until her IRB asked for certification that all participants in research activities were over the age of eighteen. The board was mistaken on several accounts: most IRBs have exempted from review classroom projects that are designed to be pedagogical, and federal regulations governing human subject research are concerned only with the subjects and say nothing about the age of the researchers. Boards have also expected faculty advisors who supervise theses and dissertations using oral histories to take a standardized test on research ethics—despite its painfully clear orientation toward pharmacology.[98]

Does the federal government require IRB review of oral history projects?

The U.S. government does not mandate review of oral history projects, although initially there was confusion over whether such interviewing fell within the parameters of “human subject research.” Because oral historians believe that people have a right to be identified with their own stories and that researchers have a right to verify their sources, they regarded many IRB requirements as inapplicable to their work and questioned whether this really was what the federal Office of Human Research Protection’s (OHRP) rules were intended to govern. In 2002, delegates from the Oral History Association and the American Historical Association met with the staff of the OHRP to determine whether oral history actually fell under the federal definition of research that needed to be regulated.

The oral historians argued that their professional associations had already set high standards for the ethical treatment of interviewees. The director of the OHRP criticized those principles and standards for not addressing “research,” but the oral historians remonstrated that research lay at the heart of those standards. It soon became clear that the two sides were defining “research” differently. OHRP officials explained that they meant the type of “generalizable knowledge” gathered by questionnaires with anonymous individuals, for which any notes on individuals would be destroyed once the survey was completed. Whenever asked for an example, the OHRP officials invariably cited blood samples. The oral historians, by contrast, were talking about people who had provided their informed consent to give recorded interviews. This revelation prompted the drafting of a policy statement that recognized oral history as an entirely different form of research than what the federal agencies intended to regulate. The OHRP concurred with the policy statement, edited its final version, and encouraged the AHA and OHA to disseminate it.

The policy statement concluded that oral history should be exempt from IRB review because it does not conform to the regulatory definition of research as seeking “generalizable knowledge”—historians “do not reach for generalizable principles of historical or social development; nor do they seek underlying principles or laws of nature that have predictive value and can be applied to other circumstances for the purpose of controlling outcomes.” In other words, they recognized the difference between conducting oral history and collecting blood samples.[99]

Does this mean that oral history is not research?

One IRB informed an oral historian that her project was exempt from review because “oral history is not research.” That board had misunderstood the OHRP’s explanation that oral history is a different form of research than what federal rules intend to govern. After the oral historian stopped being annoyed over the mislabeling, she appreciated being ignored by her campus review board.[100]

Some oral historians have argued that their interviews do indeed contribute to generalizable knowledge, even if the process does not exactly fit the scientific definition. Scholars working on the history of medicine or in the social sciences have worried about their institutional standing and their ability to obtain grants. Concern has also been expressed that “by agreeing that oral history cannot be defined as research in terms used by granting bodies, oral historians acquiesce to a subordinate position in the hierarchy of scholarship.” This view argues that “admitting lack of rigor and scholarly impact” would marginalize oral history in the eyes of university administrators and granting organizations, which some judge as a “far greater risk to the current development and future health of this field than a few overreaching IRBs.” Those suffering from such status anxiety should feel free to submit their projects for review.[101]

So why are oral histories still being reviewed by IRBs?

The response from universities has been mixed. Several leading institutions developed model agreements that allow oral historians to avoid interference from IRBs unless their projects fall within the parameters of the generalizable research IRBs were meant to regulate. Columbia University, for instance, agreed to exclude most oral history from IRB review on the grounds that “oral history interviews that only document specific historic events or the experiences of individuals or communities over different time periods would not constitute ‘human subject research’ as they would not support or lead to the development of a hypothesis in a manner that would have predictive value. The collection of such information, like journalism, is generally considered to be a biography, documentary, or a historical research of the individual’s life or experience; or of historical events.”[102]

Other universities, however, extend autonomy to their IRBs, which continue to insist on reviewing oral history proposals. The most vulnerable within the academic community—graduate students and untenured faculty—run the risk of being penalized if they fail to comply. While some academic oral history programs have been able to develop good relations with many IRBs, gaining blanket exemptions, other have found that what the IRB has given, it can take away. It has not unusual for new personnel to revoke policies set by their predecessors, sending the oral historians back to square one.

In general, IRBs are risk averse. They design regulations to protect research subjects from medical and psychological harm, and to protect their universities from lawsuits or bad publicity. If capriciously enforced, these worthy ends can undermine legitimate research. Meanwhile, interviews conducted by independent scholars, government historians, elementary and secondary school teachers, and others outside colleges and universities are not subject to review. When the federal Office of Human Research Protection conducted its own oral histories, it needed no prior approval from an IRB.

If an IRB insists on reviewing oral history, what options are available?

The conundrum for university-based oral historians is whether to fight or to collaborate with the IRB; another alternative is to reason with its members. Oral historians have pointed out that federal regulations specifically exempted certain categories of research from any review: Information that is already on the public record, such as newspaper articles and official documents; interviews with political candidates and elected or appointed public officials; and interviews that do not place identifiable individuals “at risk of criminal or civil liability” or damage their “financial standing, employment, or reputation.” These broad categories cover most oral history research, yet many IRBs still require that projects file for review anyhow, reasoning that the board rather than the researcher should determine whether the project is exempt. If not exempted entirely, boards will often provide expedited review that entails less delay and does not require annual review. Expedited review usually involves having the chair or the IRB or an experienced reviewer, designated by the chairperson, examine the proposed oral history project, rather than having the full board conduct the review. Oral historians who follow the OHA’s best practices should be able to qualify for exemption, since the guidelines exceed the federal regulations.[103]

Teachers have gained exemption for interviews conducted for pedagogical reasons rather than for research. IRBs have given blanket exemptions for students’ assignments that include classroom review procedures for interviews and informed consent forms. University-based oral history archives have also been able to establish IRB-approved standard protocols for interviewing that eliminate the need to seek separate clearance for individual interviews.

Faculty members who conduct and teach oral history should volunteer to serve on their campus IRBs. Valerie Janesick served three years on an IRB and found herself the only active qualitative researcher, let alone oral historian, on the eleven-member board. She made it her mission to reduce the unreasonable demands and excessive delays the IRB had inflicted on her graduate students’ research. “Avoid caving in,” she recommends to oral historians who are dealing with IRBs. “Persistence is critical.”[104]

Can IRB rulings be appealed?

No formal appeals process exists, but oral historians who have confronted unreasonable rulings have successfully managed to have those rulings modified or reversed. Students who feel that an IRB was excessively restrictive or applied inappropriate standards to their work should enlist graduate advisors and department chairs to help explain oral history methodology, and its safeguards, to the IRB’s members or compliance officer. A little rational discussion goes a long way.

Those who have stood up to their review boards recommend that researchers not be docile but assert their professional expertise against unreasonable demands. At the minimum, researchers should demand peer review. Someone on the IRB should have at least minimum expertise in oral history if they intend to regulate it, whether they have conducted an interview, attended a workshop, or read an oral history manual. Without such basic credentials, having a medical or psychological specialist review interviews in the humanities makes as much sense as having a historian or social scientist set standards for medical procedures. If no one on the IRB meets these criteria, then the researcher should request a departmental review as a substitute.[105]

If a board’s policies continue to inhibit free inquiry, appeal can be made to the university official (usually the president or provost) who is specifically responsible for enforcing federal regulations on the campus. If all else fails, report the problem to the Office for Human Research Protection in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

No matter how well-intentioned, IRBs run the risk of becoming modern versions of Anthony Comstock, the overzealous postal inspector who a century ago crusaded against pornography, prostitution, gambling, and other “traps for the young.” While protecting home and family and defending decency were noble missions, Comstock’s inability to distinguish between pornography and art, or obscenity and science led him to ban books on sexual primers for newlyweds and human anatomy, attempt to shut down the Art Students League for displaying pictures of nudes, and denounce George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession as depraved. Shaw retaliated by labeling American censorship as “Comstockery.”

Comstock frightened university administrators. When he spoke at Princeton in 1888, the university draped a red velvet garment over its nude statute of “The Gladiator” to avoid offending him—and had to hire the local fire department to later undrape it. Comstock’s biographer, Anna Bates, was drawn to the subject as a feminist historian who assumed that pornography degraded all women and should be illegal. Yet in grappling with Comstock’s motivations, she changed her mind. “Now, I see that although some obscenity does insult women, laws that define women according to their biological composition and ascribe their social roles accordingly have historically done far more harm to women than pornographic pictures,” she wrote. “During the ten some-odd years I worked on this project, I grew increasingly committed to free speech, which I consider a liberty above price.”[106]

Oral historians stand committed to free speech and critical inquiry. Good intentions alone are insufficient for effective regulation. Discernment and common sense are equally essential ingredients for protecting human subjects without imposing censorship. By concentrating on the protection of human subjects from actual physical and mental harm, rather than from the benign interaction of interviews, IRBs can best steer clear of further “Comstockery.”

8

Presenting Oral History

After the interviewing is done, how can oral histories best be put to use?

Oral history started out by creating archives that authors could use in writing their books and articles, without much appreciation for the value of the sound recordings. With time, creative presentation and distribution of oral history has flourished and new uses for sound and video recordings, and transcripts have emerged. A half century after the establishment of the first oral history archives, an oral historian surveyed the types of “products” coming out of their work. She was looking for broad categories of traditional and innovative historical and interpretive works, and collected the following list:

1. Books (histories, biographies, poetry, and published transcripts).

2. Storytelling, audio books, and CDs.

3. Movies in various formats.

4. Training videos and books.

5. Museum and multimedia exhibits, and art installations.

6. Cultural preservation and heritage projects.

7. Driving audio tours.

8. Radio programs.

9. Educational material for children and teachers.

10. Theatrical works (plays, operas, drama, and comedy).

11. Dance choreography.

12. Internet websites.

13. Legal briefs and other law-related documentation.[1]

As the list indicates, the options for using oral history interviews have grown remarkably varied, limited chiefly by imagination and financial resources. Previous chapters have discussed the creation of oral history archives, the use of oral history for scholarly research, and the production of video documentaries. What follows are additional uses that recognize the accessibility of oral history—literally the words of the people—and the ease with which oral history interviews can be used in a number of arenas: in public presentations, in community and family history projects, in performances, on the Internet, and even for therapeutic purposes. They address the long-held concern of oral historians of needing to share the interviews with the communities that gave them.[2]

Oral History Websites

What advantages does the Internet offer oral historians?

The Internet opened worldwide possibilities for sharing and advertising oral history interviews, not only as transcripts but also as audio and video recordings. Rather than trek to distant archives, researchers can access interviews from their own locations, search by word or key terms, and link to related collections. Families and communities can view their own oral histories. Students can learn interviewing techniques by examining other interviews. Archives can save costs by eliminating the publication of catalogs and other printed finding aids that grow dated.

Despite all these advantages, oral historians initially approached the Internet with some trepidation. Despite their dependence on technology, oral historians tend to consider technological innovations cautiously. In adopting new equipment, they seek assurances of its reliability, durability, and affordability. Archivists are especially concerned with the long-term preservation of the records and recordings. Established oral history projects that have invested a great deal in older technology shudder at the expense of transferal to the new, including the cost of staff retraining. Oral historians question whether new technology will influence the interview process, hinder the development of rapport and candor, and turn interviews into a form of public performance. The first interviewers worried whether tape recorders inhibited interviewees from speaking freely. Later, they became concerned that video would induce interviewees to play to the camera. More recently, they have to ponder the consequences of posting interviews on the Internet. There is always the danger that the medium will become the message, affecting the selection of people interviewed and the type of responses collected. Paul Thompson speculated that the digital revolution might make oral history “a different animal” but then argued that “we need all these different animals” to get more people to read and use our interviews. In fact, digital technology has attracted a new generation of oral historians ready to experiment with its endless possibilities.[3]

Among the pioneers in using oral history in the new medium were Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Josh Brown, who incorporated reminiscences into an e-book, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (1993). It combined audio and film clips, 600 pictures, and 5,000 pages of text with computer-based search features to help students see and hear the history they were studying. Although the project began with the late nineteenth century, they discovered that some of the earliest oral histories had been conducted with people who grew up in the 1880s and 1890s. They also found that some projects had not saved their recordings, and the sound quality of other tapes was not reproducible, but the authors of Who Built America? nevertheless were able to collect sufficient first-person recollections to accompany the photographs and written documentation. Users of their e-book could actually hear the sounds of history, through oral history, music, and newsreels. “Our larger motivation in experimenting with this new technology has been toward democratizing historical understanding,” the authors explained. The e-book turned users into “active participants in the process of constructing historical interpretations rather than merely passive consumers of historical ‘facts.’”[4]

At the same time, the National Park Service partnered with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to create Project Jukebox, for installation in a workstation at the remote Yukon-Charley National Preserve in Alaska. Called “jukeboxes” because users select recordings from an automated system of stacked compact disks, it allowed computer searching and retrieval of information. Project Jukebox offered oral histories of those who had lived, fished, hunted, and worked in the Yukon-Charley Preserve. Visitors to the park, local students, and new park rangers used the workstations to select topics and pull up recordings, transcripts, and illustrations at their own speed and to follow their own interests. The opening screen provided a general map of the area, from which viewers could click on specific areas and listen to portions of the interviews relating to those sites. When interviewees spoke in native languages, English translations were available on-screen.[5]

These innovations demonstrated to oral historians that digital technology could solve the problem of making interviews more readily accessible. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Internet had become universally available, and people recognized that it would create “a new way of thinking and viewing the world.” Students often mastered the new digital technology more readily than adults and led the way in developing creative applications. Schools found creating websites an inexpensive, effective, and attractive way of publishing the results of student oral history projects. Recordings were converted from analog to digital form and posted along with catalogs of the collections. New projects got underway with Internet-access as a built-in goal. Oral history organizations at the local, national, and international level found the Internet an ideal means of networking and communication. All of this stimulated new discussions of the legal and ethical ramifications of the new medium as well as of its creative uses.[6]

What sort of oral history is available online?

Around the world, oral history collections created websites, whether long-established archives to brand-new projects, large and well-funded or small, shoestring operations, among them high schools, religious, and community groups. Presidential libraries, faced with decisions about what to digitize among the mountains of records in their holdings, turned first to their oral history transcripts, as more manageable, self-contained, and appealing to the broadest audience of users. When the Washington Press Club Foundation sponsored interviews with pioneering women journalists, it planned from the start to post them on its website if the interviewees agreed. The pioneering oral history archives at Columbia, Berkeley, and UCLA went online along with university and community college archives from Honolulu to Chapel Hill.

The Library of Congress initiated the American Memory Project, one of the largest and most ambitious efforts to digitize research materials. Among the collections available online through the American Memory Project are the WPA Federal Writers’ Project Life Stories, most notably its many interviews with former slaves. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation have used the Internet for worldwide dissemination of their materials. Working with Brown University, sophomores at the South Kingsport high school in Providence, Rhode Island, turned a school project into a web page on “The Whole World Was Watching: An Oral History of 1968” and “What Did You Do During the War, Grandma?”

Many of these oral history websites have an educational objective. The United Indian Traders Association, whose members run trading posts on American Indian reservations, underwrote efforts by the Northern Arizona University to conduct interviews on the history of trade relations and cultural interactions in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. From the start, they intended it to be an Internet site. “Traders: Voices from the Trading Post” contains transcripts and short audio clips of the traders and the Native Americans who trade with them, tribal leaders, attorneys, accountants, sales personnel, artisans, and trading post employees. Placing the collection on the Internet made it available to public school teachers throughout the region and elsewhere, with an accompanying teachers guide and lesson plans.[7]

When the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at Berkeley documented the history of the campus Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, the project built a digital archive of interviews with the movement’s leaders, participants, and witnesses, paying particular attention to areas that had not been covered in depth before, such as the participation of women and minority students, faculty-student relationships, legal counsel, and the press. ROHO made the interviews available on its website together with an extensive archives of newsletters, newspaper and journal articles, leaflets, speeches, minutes of meetings, and other supporting evidence.[8]

The Internet blurred international borders. Researchers can virtually visit the British Library’s National Sound Archive, read interviews from the Imperial War Museum in London, keep up with the work of the Jamaica Memory Bank, check the Oral History and Folklore Collection at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, or the Sound Recordings in the National Archives of Singapore, all without visas, passports, and airline tickets. They can also keep contact with others who share similar interests on a daily basis via the oral history list serv, H-OralHist. Sponsored by the Oral History Association, H-OralHist provides an international interactive forum for anyone interested in using or doing oral history. Users pose questions, provide solutions, and share experiences, research interests, current projects, teaching methods, and the latest literature. They regularly post announcements of conferences, fellowships, and jobs. (Subscription to H-OralHist is free and can be obtained by sending an e-mail to listserv@h-net.msu.edu with the following text: SUBSCRIBE H-ORALHIST, first name, last name, and affiliation.)[9]

Should an oral history project have a website?

Websites are the equivalent of self-publication. They can include catalogs, interview transcripts and recordings, illustrations, podcasts, social media, blogs, and comments. These sites have multiplied steadily and moved oral history beyond simply preservation and access for research. Websites became a vehicle for mass presentation to public audiences. Beginners can build on their institution’s information technology resources or partner with a university or other large organization. Students in computer labs can be recruited to design web pages and input information.[10]

Start by thinking seriously about the audience you seek to attract and the material you want to provide them. Be careful not to overwhelm your users. Projects will want to create attractive web pages that are easily navigated. Rather than a long list of interviews, develop some subthemes around common events or chronology that will help users navigate the site. Creating a website has convinced some projects to move from audio recordings to video, since video provides a more powerful and appealing presentation that attracts more viewers. Do not overload the site with video clips, however. High definition video can consume an inordinate amount of storage space. Besides, most visitors will rarely watch more than a few minutes of a video.

Should all interviews be posted online?

The general public regularly asks for audio and video, but they generally prefer short segments. By contrast, researchers want full-text access to all available documentation. There are a number of reasons that an oral history project may choose not to post all its interviews. Issues of copyright and personal privacy may be at stake, and the staff time needed to scan and upload collections may be prohibitive. Sometimes, interviews are too sensitive, interviewees too much at risk, or language too blue to post for general access. Whether for reasons of copyright, cost, or concern over retaining control over their collections, some archives have adopted mixed programs of making interviews selectively available on the Internet and requiring that researchers purchase CDs or use PDF (portable document format) versions of the text.

Sampling interviews on websites can serve as an advertisement for the wealth of resources in an oral history collection. Before the Columbia Oral History Office, the oldest and largest oral history archives, made any of its interviews available on the Internet, it issued a CD called Stories from the Collection: Columbia University Oral History Research Office, which included highlights of a half century of interviews, ranging from Justice Thurgood Marshall discussing his appointment to the Supreme Court to Fred Astair discussing his Hollywood dancing career. Over time, Columbia was able to dip back into its vast archives to launch a “Notable New Yorkers” website, featuring interviews with key figures in publishing, politics, philanthropy, and the cultural life of New York City. The site includes 12,000 pages of transcripts and 180 hours of audio recordings dating back to 1955.[11]

Projects that post excerpts rather than entire interviews have made it a collaborative exercise by asking their interviewees: “What stories would you like to show the world?”

If the audio and video are put on the website, is there still a need to make transcriptions?

Digital advocates have celebrated the ability of the Internet to return “orality” to oral history, by letting viewers connect faces and voices to the recorded stories. There are indexing strategies for audio and video that permit users to find the specific portions of an interview that deal with the issues they seek. In Canada, the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling has applied new digital tools to create searchable databases for its video interviews. The Australian Generations oral history project relies on timed summaries linked to audio files to avoid transcription costs and retain the “oral and performative elements” of the interviews.[12]

California State University, Long Beach, created a Virtual Oral/Aural History Archives website with the 350 interviews in its collection, covering topics ranging from labor and community history to music. Users can access the material by comprehensive keyword index, by specific segments, and by browsing the entire collection. The site provides only audio recordings without transcriptions.

Although digital advances have deemphasized transcripts, they have not replaced them. Grasping what is said is still a matter of interpretation, and preparing a transcript at least gives the interviewee a chance to participate in the process. Some individuals speak with accents, some speak in native languages, and some are just difficult to understand.

In reviewing websites, Linda Shopes has noted that people can “grasp the meaning of the written text more efficiently than they can listen to and absorb the spoken word.” An index can take users to a specific interview segment, but will they “skim” the audio recording and not listen to what precedes and follows that segment? She also questioned whether users would take the time to transcribe lengthy quotes to use in their own writing. These factors favor posting transcripts to accompany the recordings—a feature that also benefits the hearing impaired.[13]

What kind of oral history guidance is available online?

For those seeking models for their own interviews, there is nothing better than reading online transcripts. Quite a few oral history websites also provide helpful advice—especially for students and teachers—on everything from interviewing tips to sample deeds of gift.

The place to start is Oral History in the Digital Age, an Internet source of abundant information about the standards for digital recording for archivists, librarians, museum curators, historians, folklorists, linguists, videographers, anthropologists, and teachers. Recognizing that no simple set of “best practices” can cover all digital projects, the site is filled with specific recommendation on how to best do oral history in a digital environment, from the varying sound qualities of different microphones to the catastrophic consequences of not mastering one’s equipment. The website also offers essays on legal and ethical issues, periodic blogs, and a series of “Thinking Big” interviews with experts in the field. Since it cannot anticipate future technological developments, the site advises oral historians to construct their projects in such a way that they can adapt to the inevitable changes that will come.[14]

Specifically designed to help middle school and high school students conduct oral histories in their communities, Discovering Our Delta provides online learning guides for both students and teachers. An accompanying video that follows five students from the Mississippi Delta as they conduct research on their communities must be ordered through the site, but the student and teacher guides are available online. They provide tips for locating community members to interview, preparing for the interviews, transcribing the recorded interviews, interpreting the gathered material, and a sample letter to parents of participating students explaining the project and its procedures.[15] A related site, Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students (CARTS), carries information on upcoming oral history summer institutes for teachers and links to other educational guides for using interviewing and fieldwork to explore communities and traditions.[16]

History Matters, which describes itself as a “U.S. Survey Course on the Web,” provides a teacher syllabus using oral history, information about online resources, interactive exercises, talking history forums, and online assignments. Created by the American Social History Project/Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, History Matters offers itself as a starting point for history students to explore the web and as a storehouse of teaching resources grounded in the latest scholarship, including an annotated guide to websites. The site offers Linda Shopes’s helpful essay and guide, “What Is Oral History?” which includes information on other oral history websites and “tips for evaluating oral history online.”[17]

In 2001 the U.S. Congress voted to authorize the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to organize a veterans oral history project. Its sponsors intended the project to be a “living memorial” to all war veterans from World War I to the Persian Gulf, along with civilian volunteers and war industry. With more than nineteen million war veterans still living in the United States (then including 3,000 from World War I), there was an abundance of potential interviewees. The project encouraged the public to conduct the interviews and submit them to the Folklife Center. To coordinate these efforts and improve the standards of interviewing, the Center sponsored workshops and guides, including the booklet Helpful Guidelines for Conducting and Preserving Interviews and Other Project Materials. The project directors saw their task to be as much about “process” as “product,” making sure that people of all ages participated in the program and that the public learned about wartime, veterans, and oral history as a methodology for better understanding their culture and society. Those using the collection have ranged from graduate students writing theses to documentary makers and individuals doing family research. The popular success of the Veterans History Project prompted Congress in 2009 to authorize the Library of Congress to conduct a civil rights oral history project, surveying existing collections and conducting new interviews with people who had been active in the civil rights movement.[18]

In 1987, the British Library began collecting National Life Stories, “to record first-hand experiences of as a wide a cross-section of present-day society as possible.” The Library has conducted lengthy recorded interviews—usually between ten and fifteen hours—of the life and times of “the eminent and the ordinary.” These interviews range from pastry chefs to postal workers and poets. Its first project, “City Lives,” recorded the life stories of bankers and brokers in London’s financial district, known as “The City.” Other projects included “The Living Memory of the Jewish Community,” “Artists’ Lives,” “Lives in Steel,” “Book Trade Lives,” and “Food: From Source to Salespoint.” An ever-growing number of the interviews have been posted on the British Library Sounds website.[19]

Many oral history associations—international, national, and regional—maintain websites to announce meetings and workshops and to provide guidance for members. These sites further the networking efforts of oral historians, from academics to freelancers, to maintain contact, share information, and keep current with new developments in oral history.

What new developments have emerged from digital technology?

New media gave oral historians the opportunity to rethink their audio and video recordings and have also created some spin-offs, such as digital storytelling. The Montreal Life Stories project asked the question: “How do we include a wider circle in the conversation?” They encouraged digital storytelling as the act of narrating oneself through multimedia. The project blends still photographs with narratives to create “short, evocative, and informational multimedia pieces.” The BBC’s Capture Wales digital storytelling project sent a bus to gather hundreds of stories that were then posted online. Digital storytelling workshops were held to preview the stories that people wanted to tell and to take them through the steps of recording their voices and selecting images to illustrate the stories. The workshops end with a screening of the story.[20]

Podcasts, YouTube videos, and other “mini-documentaries” have proliferated. The Fresno Historical Society’s Our Voices Oral History Project created five-minute clips from its WWII Oral History Project. They also produced educational materials, photo exhibits, and original plays, in an attempt to reach all of their many constituencies: “academics, general population, our veterans and their loved ones, and students.”[21] The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta partnered with CNN videographers and producers to develop the Freedom Mosaic website, which features recent interviews with those involved in civil rights and human rights. The website was developed by a professional design firm, with the idea of departing from the standard archives-oriented civil rights website, in order to appeal to younger users.[22]

Community History

What exactly is “community history,” and how does oral history apply to it?

A community can be defined loosely as a group of individuals who share a common identity, whether based on location, racial or ethnic group, religion, organizational affiliation, or occupation. Obviously, communities differ considerably. One group may be fiercely proud of its collective identity, and another needs to be convinced that its heritage is worth preserving. Oral historians have helped broaden traditional notions of what constitutes a community’s history by looking not only at its political and institutional structures but also at its economic development and the ethnic and occupational composition of its population. Some oral history projects have tried to preserve lost communities, conducting interviews about buildings that were demolished or institutions that disappeared in all respects except in people’s memories.[23]

Residents of the rural, mountain community of Ivanhoe, Virginia, initiated an oral history project to help save their rapidly disappearing history and revitalize their community. Their “participatory research” project combined outside researchers, educators, grassroots community groups, and community members, who collectively designed the project and analyzed the results. Their “history group” of volunteers interviewed people at the post office, in the Civil League office, on the street, and in stores, collecting, transcribing, and editing fifty-three interviews and gathering over 800 photographs. Project director Helen Lewis noted that through the process of gathering its history, “Ivanhoe has looked to its elders and has carefully recorded times past, seeking lessons from traditions which may be creatively applied to present realities.”[24]

Oral history can also capture a specific time or event in a community’s history. War veterans and others who lived in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, during the Second World War were interviewed for Small Town America in World War II, a project that explored how worldwide events affected a town far removed from the battlefronts. The townsmen fought in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific, while some of the women joined the military as support troops. Others stayed home to run war industries or were rejected by the military for medical reasons. Oral historian Ronald Marcello had grown up in Wrightsville and went back to record the experiences of a cross-section of the community, whose first-hand accounts revealed how the war had changed their lives and impacted the town.[25]

Oil drilling brought about economic upheaval in several Wyoming towns, including Evanston, where the local county museum interviewed residents who had lived through the boom-and-bust experience. That included the mayor, city council members, county commissioners, oilfield workers, teachers, students, and the local newspaper editor. They fashioned the interviews into an exhibit that reminded viewers that history was more than the pioneer years they had been used to studying, gave some validation to those who had lived through the recent boom times, and brought a new audience to the museum. The University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center conducted interviews in three other boom towns, uncovering substantial tension between those who promoted mineral development and those who wanted to preserve the natural environment. “We’re holding our cowboy hats in one hand and our fist full of dollars in the other,” said one interviewee. “We’ll be asking ourselves, ‘Were we better off?’”[26]

Oral history works just as well in urban environments. In inner-city Philadelphia, Temple University developed the Discovering Community History Project to encourage residents of different neighborhoods to document their pasts through oral history, manuscripts, and photographs. The project staff wanted to aid and encourage neighborhood residents to do the work for themselves. They started with a slide show to introduce the project to the community but discovered that merely stating the importance of the community’s heritage was not very convincing. Neighbors initially hesitated to share memories and photographs they believed outsiders would consider commonplace. Slowly over time, and after repeated staff visits, residents eventually came to realize how their community looked to the outside, and how they could contribute to recording its history.

Temple’s experience demonstrated that such projects cannot expect the same response from every community. The most significant differences in neighborhood response to the project were based on neither race nor class but on the neighborhood’s recent history and demographics—that is, on whether it was stable, declining, or undergoing gentrification. The project achieved its greatest successes in those neighborhoods with strong community organizations—civic associations, clubs, churches and synagogues, especially those that cared for the elderly—that were willing to take charge of contacting potential interviewers and interviewees, “assigning tasks, checking up, and following through.” Communities that lacked organizations with such clout, or where community associations were distracted by more pressing concerns, proved the hardest to convince of the merits of oral history.[27]

Noting that people who live in the same area can actually be quite distant from each other, the D.C. Community Humanities Council sponsored the City Lights Program to bring scholars, storytellers, and other performers to senior citizens living in public housing to talk about their common culture and history. At the predominantly African American Potomac Gardens, these discussions focused on religious traditions, migration from the South to the city, work as domestics, living through the Depression, and the Washington riots of 1968. The elderly residents of Potomac Gardens had attended school at a time when, except for references to slavery, black people did not exist in the history textbooks, which gave them little sense of having contributed anything worthwhile to society. The City Lights Program emphasized how important their experiences were, and how much they had in common with each other. “We were strangers before,” said Thelma Russell, a member of the community. “Now we understand that our common ground is the African American heritage that we share.”

Senior citizens at Potomac Gardens collected the stories of their struggles and accomplishments to leave a record for their descendants. Supported by a Humanities Council grant, they conducted a door-to-door survey in their building and collected data about the residents. Drawing from this information, they scheduled weekly meetings, focusing each week on a different birthplace and encouraging residents to share their personal memorabilia and stories of home and migration. With the assistance of the local historical society, the seniors learned how to interview each other. A local video production company recorded the interviews, from which they produced a documentary video, In Search of Common Ground. A curator from the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum helped residents develop an exhibit from their project. Both the video and the exhibit were displayed at schools, public housing sites, and other neighborhood organizations throughout the city and will be preserved as a legacy for the future. “We may not be rich,” Thelma Russell concluded, “but we are rich in history.”[28]

How has oral history been used to aid historic preservation?

Preservationists have tapped the memories of still-living informants to reconstruct the material culture of the past—furnishings, tools, structures, vehicles, and many other physical objects—and to determine how these items were used, by whom, and how they fit into the broader social and economic patterns of the community. Oral history has helped gather the details of day-to-day life in historic buildings—to re-create period furnishings and decorations—through interviews with those who visited the house during the era in question, often when it was associated with a particular family or prominent individual. Their memories bring color to the black-and-white photographs of the past and provide context for otherwise sketchy and incomplete documentary evidence.

In seeking to save San Diego’s older architecture during a period of massive redevelopment, the Downtown San Diego Project found gaps in the official records that only oral history could fill. Project members interviewed construction crews and demolition company employees to determine the extent to which bulldozers and backhoes had penetrated certain areas. The California Office of Historic Preservation called for interviews with the state’s architects and engineers and advocated interviews with those in the building trades, those who established the utility networks, transportation planners, bridge builders, and officials of the development agencies in local government.[29]

On the national level, the National Historical Preservation Act of 1966 required federal agencies to consider how such federally funded projects as highway construction, dams, reservoirs, airports, and parks affect local cultural resources. To carry out this mandate, culture resource management (CRM) teams have applied the insights of archaeology, architectural history, folklore, and oral history to urban planning, resource conservation, public works projects, and commercial development. While archaeologists were working on a CRM crew in Irion County, Texas, they uncovered hundreds of what appeared to be prehistoric petroglyphs in a limestone outcropping. But they also found the carved name of Burt Smalley, dated 1921; by then, Smalley was deceased. The mystery was solved through oral history interviews with surviving family members and old-timers in the community. These interviews developed a portrait of a recluse who spent his life carving petroglyphs in the rocks near his ranch.

Oral history interviews have helped CRM projects locate unmarked gravesites and abandoned farmhouses, as well as the otherwise unrecorded names of sharecroppers. Interviews have helped reconstruct farmers’ living patterns, including the layout of yards and houses, gardens, fields, wells, barns, and privies. “Oral history can turn a prairie foundation into Hansford County’s one-room Palo Duro Schoolhouse,” noted Dan Utley, an oral historian who works with CRM teams. “Oral history can transform seemingly unrelated artifacts—a Model T transmission, a scatter of bricks, and welded metal barrels—into an irrigation system used to pump Concho River water up a steep bank and across a ravine to what was a parched cotton field in the 1950s.[30]

There are times when oral history may be all that’s left of a community. In Chicago, Audrey Petty and a team of interviewers tracked down those who had lived in the city’s now-demolished public housing projects. Defunded by government and allowed to deteriorate, the projects were viewed from the outside by the mayor as “Godawful buildings” whose problems of violence and crime could only be solved by razing. By contrast, the residents recounted how, despite all the problems, the housing projects had once been filled with support networks of neighbors who had been “like family.” Their interviews spoke from the inside of public housing, unit by unit, floor by floor. In Frankfort, Kentucky, Jim Wallace conducted interviews with the former residents of Crawfish Bottom, a low-lying swampy area along the banks of the Kentucky River, just below the capitol. The state government viewed the place as poor, violent, and unsanitary, and bulldozed it to make way for new state office buildings. The oral evidence Wallace collected revealed a much more vibrant neighborhood than suspected, one that had been poorly served by the state and that was demolished against the wishes of its residents. A generation later his interviews helped another historian reconstruct the history of Crawfish Bottom, recovering a lost community.[31]

Does it matter whether the interviewer in a community project is an “outsider”?

When Alessandro Portelli, a professor from Italy, conducted interviews in Harlan County, Kentucky, deep within Appalachia, he worried that locals might resent him as an outsider. He was surprised to find little negative reaction. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he did not know much and was not in a position “to teach anybody anything.” One of his interviewees added, “I’ll tell you something else that makes a lot of difference. You’re not from the United States. You are not from New York or you are not from Chicago or you are not from Louisville and you are not from Lexington or Knoxville.” The locals appreciated that he was neither trying to influence them nor acting condescending toward them. “All you’re doing is trying to gather a little knowledge or get people to tell you stories, and they don’t resent that.”[32]

Just as the race and gender of the interviewer and interviewee may affect the interview, whether the interviewer comes from the subject community will influence what is said. The Temple Discovering Community History Project found that its best interviews often came from enthusiastic amateurs in the community. Because “spontaneity and candor naturally extended between friends, neighbors and people of the same background,” it was easier for those insiders to establish rapport. But with thorough research, persistent effort, and the right personality, interviewers from outside a community can also build the kind of rapport that facilitates interviewing. In fact, all oral historians constantly find themselves shifting between the roles of “insider-outsider, historian-listener, participant-observer, minority-majority, student-teacher, apprentice-mentor.” What is important is that interviewers become conscious of these varying relationships and how they influence the interviews. Those who have engaged in extensive fieldwork interviewing in communities in which they are outsiders strongly recommend that interviewers keep a journal of their impressions of the community and their changing relations within it.[33]

Won’t a community only volunteer information that will make it look good?

Communities naturally seek to preserve and present their best image. Interviewers often find themselves being steered toward those who tell “success” stories; they must attempt to record the dissatisfied as well. Interviewers also need to avoid being seduced by the democratic impulses of oral history to just “let people speak for themselves.” Unquestioned and unchallenged memory can veer toward nostalgia. The oral historian’s job is not to celebrate the past but to explore and document its diversity and complexity.[34]

At the same time, people’s privacy becomes an issue when recording a community’s oral history. Interviewers must consider what right they have to raise questions that embarrass the community, especially if they are outsiders who will not remain there to live with the consequences. When dealing with a community’s denial or a difficult or traumatic event or issue, interviewers ask challenging questions and then give people an opportunity to respond, but they must also honor interviewees’ refusal to address certain issues. Clearly, it is essential to interview as broadly as possible. Some people cannot or will not reflect on painful issues of the past, but others have just as strong an impulse to bring the same issues out into the open.

Stories and opinions within a community will probably vary widely. When oral historians try to determine which versions are more reliable, they seek patterns—another reason to interview more than one type of person in a community. Rather than simplifying the past, oral historians complicate the history by collecting counterevidence and challenging simple answers. The picture of the community that emerges from the interviews is thus most likely to be neither all good nor all bad. Oral historians need to lay out the controversies in an honest way, explaining to the community the structure of a project and the nature of residents’ roles in it.

Sometimes the stories that exhibit planners want to tell are not the ones the public wants to hear. An exhibit needs to balance responsiveness to one’s audience and to one’s craft. The community, having provided information, should be included in its presentation in order to retain some ownership of the story. Museum curators report that oral historians seem better at creating this kind of collaborative history than other scholars, “both out of practical necessity and personal conviction.”[35]

What if the community will not cooperate at all?

Interviewers usually assume that the community will be pleased, flattered, and empowered by being the focus of an oral history project. But some communities want no attention and consider any project suspicious and intrusive.

In New York City, the public historian Joe Doyle studied the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. Situated along the Hudson River docks, Chelsea had a history as a longshoremen’s and seamen’s community. During the 1940s the Longshoremen’s Union had expelled its Communist members, badly splitting the neighborhood. Then, during the 1950s, newspapers published lurid exposés of organized crime on the waterfront. A “code of silence” developed in the neighborhood, and Chelsea residents would not talk to the police or to outsiders. In later years the neighborhood residents had no desire to reminisce about those troubled years. “As for talking at the present time to young historians eager for ‘oral history,’ it still does not quite sit right with old-timers,” Doyle concluded. Uncomfortable with its history, the National Maritime Union destroyed all its noncurrent records; nor were its members interested in re-creating those records through oral testimony. Far more willing to talk about the past were the members of the Marine Workers Historical Association, many of them battle-scarred “Reds” who had been ejected from the union. Pragmatically aiming his project toward the most cooperative segment of the community, Doyle shifted the focus of his interviews to the Communist Party on the waterfront. But even that subject was still so sensitive that people had second thoughts about speaking on the record. When Doyle organized an “oral history day” for residents, none of the invited speakers appeared. Doyle then gave the oral history a “breathing space” of two years, after which he opened a second round of public meetings. By that time some of the tensions and opposition to studying waterfront history had begun to decrease. His persistence even encouraged local Longshoreman’s Union officials to speak more openly. Doyle’s experiences suggest that interviewers facing uncooperative communities need to give them time rather than to give up on their projects.[36]

Communities that have been exploited in the past may object to losing control of the planning and disposition of the interviews. This has been particularly true with Native American, First Nation, and Aboriginal communities, whose traditional stories, even when told in the present tense, represent multigenerational rather than firsthand individual memories. Stories told might involve myths and legends that have significance to the tribe, and, as such, they may not fit the standard interviewing format. Oral historians should take special care that the recording and preserving of these stories follow tribal protocols.[37]

Can community oral history contribute to community action?

Major flooding of the Ouse River in Sussex, England, in 2006, devastated towns along its banks and prompted Sussex University’s Centre for Continuing Education to organize the Ouse Project to help local residents get involved in the environmental decisions that would affect their community. They interviewed farmers about past land use and agricultural methods, integrating their observations with ecological research into present-day habitats to demonstrate how land use around the river might be managed to alleviate flooding in the future. By incorporating oral histories, the Ouse Project produced a substantial amount of information that would not have been assembled otherwise and added a human element to an ecological survey. One farmer, for example, identified the local river authority’s poor management techniques as responsible for considerable damage along stretches of the riverbank. The Ouse Project “not only engaged with the local communities; it harvested their energy” and made sure their voices would be heard in long-range planning.[38]

How do you return community oral history to the community?

A project’s immediate goal may simply be to record the recollections of key members of a community, but it should consider long-term objectives as well. The ultimate goal may be a book, play, exhibit, documentary, or website that depicts the patterns and themes of importance to the community.

Websites have turned community oral history projects into “living documents,” a source of both information and civic pride. Interviews with community leaders and members can be interspersed with maps, photographs, documents, walking tours, travel destinations, and related links. Providing an online location that can be consulted at any time also restores a sense of “ownership” of the project to the community itself. Communities are not fixed in time but fluid entities that change with generations, economics, and cultural developments. The interviews can capture a community at a particular time in its history or return the voices of those who once lived there but left. The Fox Point Oral Histories in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, include interviews with those who were replaced by gentrification, as well as those who held on during periods of upheaval.[39]

Excerpts from oral histories can also be published in local newspapers or broadcast over local radio stations or community-access television channels. The oral historian Charles Hardy produced a series of radio programs, Goin’ North: Tales of the Great Migration, based on interviews with African Americans who left their homes in the South to relocate in the City of Brotherly Love. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a special education supplement to serve as a companion to the series and to encourage listeners—particularly students—to collect similar information about their own families. Journalism students at the University of Texas and the U.S. Latinos and Latina WWII Oral History Project, working in collaboration with the San Antonio Express-News, have published a tabloid newspaper, Narratives, that includes student articles and interview excerpts drawn from the project. Available both on paper and online, Narratives offers its interviewees “a wonderful way of sharing their stories with a broader audience.”[40]

Community oral historians have found outlets for their work in brochures distributed by the local chamber of commerce to promote the area and as source material for secondary social studies classes studying local history. Oral history has been incorporated into exhibits, walking tours, and dramatic productions. Popular oral history exhibits drawn from the community have encouraged many people to visit museums that they had never before entered, although they had lived in the area all their lives. But often the challenge is to display the material in places where people will actually see it. As eager as they are to participate, local history societies or museums may not attract many viewers. Instead, consider displaying the exhibit at a shopping mall, senior citizens’ center, public library, school, union hall, church, or civic organization to reach a broader cross-section of the community. Find out where people congregate in the community and put your exhibit there. Hold a reception to show the exhibit, invite the interviewees, and allow the rest of the community to view the product.[41]

In Idaho, a county museum director used oral history to catch the attention of the area’s schoolchildren and to attract them to the museum. She conducted interviews on women’s rural life and the roles in the country during the early decades of the twentieth century and turned the interviews into a forty-five-minute presentation that combined a slide show, period music, museum props, and a narration by a character in costume. The production traveled to every school in the county, as well as to many senior citizens’ organizations.[42]

The Montana Historical Society encouraged the collection of historical materials on Montana’s many women’s clubs by producing a booklet, Molders and Shakers: Montana Women as Community Builders: An Oral History Sampler and Guide that detailed how clubs could collect their histories through club records, minute books, financial records, yearbooks, luncheon programs, newspaper clippings, and craftwork. From these archives, interviewers from the clubs could gain a better sense of what topics to cover and what questions to ask in club oral histories. Molders and Shakers urged club members to be imaginative in getting the stories generated from the oral histories back to the community, recommending that the clubs consider publishing newspaper articles drawn from the interviews, creating a booklet on the club’s history featuring excerpts from the interviews and accompanying photographs, or producing slide-tape shows with interview excerpts as narration. The oral histories were incorporated into lesson plans on women’s experiences for local history classes. Transcripts also provided scripts for readers’ theaters—club members presenting dramatic readings of the interviews. Molders and Shakers reminded women’s club members that the results of oral history can be shared with the club’s membership or made more widely available as a public program in a community center.[43]

The Friends of Patapsco Valley and Heritage Greenway, near Baltimore, Maryland, organized a traveling exhibit of an oral history project to display in local galleries and libraries. The project conducted oral histories in four small towns in the valley, while a photographer took portraits from which framed museum-quality prints were made. The exhibit was mounted in various local galleries and libraries, with excerpts from the oral histories accompanying each portrait. An excerpt of audio recording was played between two rocking chairs, while a mural created from one of the prints served as a backdrop. At some “narrative stage events,” the interviewer publicly drew out stories from those previously interviewed. At others, a script based on the interviews was performed. The combination provided depth and texture. Scriptwriter Sally Voris reported, “They have been performed in the galleries while the exhibits have been on display so that people can see the images, read the text, hear the stories and see them enacted.”[44]

What role does oral history play in folklife festivals?

A staple of folklife festivals, oral histories have been conducted before audiences: interviewees tell their story, play their music, or demonstrate their craft. In 1981, with little in the way of funds, staff, or publicity, the Center for Southern Folklore turned a previously commercial crafts festival, the Sorghum Days Folk Festival, into a folklife festival by arranging for people to demonstrate their techniques and talk about their lives and work. The festival brought together white and black crafts workers and presented the differences and similarities in their heritage; it drew large and appreciative audiences of local residents and out-of-town visitors. Similarly, the Mid-South Folklife Festival invited blues musicians to perform and then to participate in oral history workshops, where they were interviewed by professional historians, and to discuss how the conditions of the rural, segregated South influenced their music.

Oral history has been prominently featured at the Smithsonian Institution’s annual folklife festivals on the Mall. One event in the mid 1980s blended generations as well as races and genders by bringing together sleeping-car porters and airline stewardesses to compare their jobs before an audience that had never before fully appreciated what went into their work. The festival celebrated the bicentennial of the White House by inviting White House workers, from stone cutters to table setters, to reflect on their careers and the many occupants of the White House whom they had served. Their behind-the-scenes testimony was supported by photographs, menus, and other memorabilia, which the Smithsonian recorded in a video documentary, Workers in the White House.[45]

At women’s music festivals, Bonnie Morris developed the role of “festival anthropologist,” taping not only the music but also the talks that took place between acts. She collected what she felt represented the essence of festival culture: “speeches, impromptu announcements, and tributes from the stage.” She sought the performers’ permission and found them delighted to learn that she had recorded the festivals.[46]

Family Interviewing

Can oral history be used to collect family history?

There always seems to be at least one relative who retains the family lore, who can identify every obscure photo in the family album, and who corresponds with far-flung kin. Or there is a family member with an interesting past that we have always wanted to ask about. They make logical candidates to interview, but somehow no one has gotten around to it. Suddenly they are gone, taking with them all that unrecorded family history. Christopher Columbus’s son Fernando admitted to a hazy knowledge of his father’s early life and voyages, “for he died before I made so bold as to ask him about such things; or to speak more truly, at the time such ideas were farthest from my boyish mind.”[47]

The traditional means of tracing one’s family tree through census reports, city directories, and ship manifests can be supplemented with the recorded memories of living relatives. Older family members are repositories of stories about their childhood and of stories their parents and grandparents told them about the family’s past, about immigration, about former residences, and about changes in the family name over time. Family culinary history can also be a popular theme, with older generations passing along food traditions and recipes. They often feel a responsibility for preserving the family traditions for following generations—who are not always appreciative or responsive. Grandparents are usually willing to talk, but their children and grandchildren, feeling they have heard these stories too often before, have never taken the trouble to record them. Then, too, it is hard to admit that older relatives will not always be around to be interviewed later.

Families can do their own interviews—a number of useful guidebooks include sample questions—or they can hire professional interviewers. Many family interviewing services have developed; they conduct interviews and produce tapes, CDs, transcripts, videotapes, and book-length family histories. The interviews become family keepsakes to be passed along, and copies can be given to alma maters, church libraries, or local public libraries.[48]

Is doing a family oral history any different from doing other oral histories?

To get a good interview, family oral histories should follow the same standards and procedures that apply to any other oral history. Prepare a family history questionnaire that includes some standard questions to ask all the family members to be interviewed as well as specific questions for each interviewee. Even for a family interview a legal release is advisable, so that the tapes and transcripts might someday be deposited in a suitable library.

Family oral histories need not be just a series of anecdotes. They can tell not only the “who” and “what” in a family but the “why” as well—the motives and attitudes that research in traditional genealogical sources would not necessarily bring to light. Sometimes the interviews provide clues that lead the interested family researcher to other sources of family documentation, such as the name of a town where family members once lived, or the location of a cemetery where birth and death dates appear on tombstones, dates that in turn help in locating newspaper obituaries. Traditional sources of family history provide preliminary research for the interviews. Family Bibles often contain dates of births, deaths, and marriages. In addition, school diplomas, letters, and local newspaper clippings provide basic information about family members.

Families reflect their times and communities. Questions can be directed at family life during the Depression, the Second World War, the cold war, the turbulent 1960s, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movements, and other sociohistorical periods. Family interviewers pursuing such questions should familiarize themselves with some of the history of these larger events, perhaps through reading basic history textbooks; such preparation generates questions to ask and frames the interviewee’s story against a larger backdrop.

Do not limit your family history to a simple collection of pleasant memories. Family pasts may include stories of feuds or deaths that may be painful to revisit but are important for understanding family relationships. Some family members may be reluctant to dredge up unhappy memories, and others will want to use the interviews to settle a few scores.[49]

When Corinne Krause interviewed three generations of ethnic American women in Pittsburgh, she found that grandmothers, mothers, and daughters offered dissimilar versions of the same family’s shared history. Their stories suggest how family members experience the same events and react to the same individuals in different ways, depending on their age, attitudes, and expectations. Krause recorded the conflicts between generations, but she also tracked their deep bonds and persistent values. She conducted her initial round of interviews during the 1970s, a time when the granddaughters were in open rebellion against old traditional family ways. When she returned a decade later, most of the grandmothers had died and their granddaughters had married and had their own children, in whom they were trying to instill the traditional values of their families.[50]

Bill Fletcher, whose book Recording Your Family Roots offers a multitude of sample questions to ask family members, has noted that the geographic spread and mobility of modern society has led to less frequent interaction between the generations of many families. Grandchildren often see grandparents only on holidays or during vacations and other limited encounters. Fletcher views taping an oral history as an excuse “to talk across the generational lines.” Similarly, Linda Shopes has argued that doing family oral history “can be the impetus for developing and deepening relationships with other family members. Even more important, it can enhance one’s own sense of identity.”[51]

Will my family oral history be of any use to anyone outside my family?

Yes, because family history is part of popular culture and has become a subject of scholarly study. Researchers are increasingly interested in the lives of everyday people and open to looking at family oral histories for valuable information. The details a family wants from oral history interviews—treasured stories, data on births, deaths, weddings, divorces, graduations, jobs, and trips—are the same subjects that social historians now study.

Oral history can record a family’s daily pattern of living, how the household was organized, how the family spent money, who sat where at the dining table, and what types of meals were served. Since these topics are common to all families, researchers use data from one family to compare with others as they compile aggregates from which to make generalizations about social patterns. “From classroom projects for family efforts to large research projects, the possibilities for such family history are endless,” the historian Carl Ryant noted. “What is required is a greater scholarly sensitivity to the possibilities of oral history and family history. This should result not only in more extensive scholarly analysis of existing data but also better quality data being generated for future analysis.[52]

Therapeutic Uses of Oral History

What therapeutic value do the elderly get from recording their oral histories?

Near the end of his life, the journalist Henry Fairlie commented that “in growing old, one has a stocked attic in which to rummage and the still passing show and pageant of life to observe, not only at a more leisurely pace, but with the convincing satisfaction and interest of having lived through many of the changes, even from their beginnings, that have brought us from there to here.” The object of oral history interviews with elderly people is to collect their recollections for the record, but the elderly themselves also gain something from the process. Aristotle observed that the elderly “are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering.” Some in a family may scoff that older relatives are “living in the past,” but as the gerontologist Robert Butler noted, elderly people naturally pass through a period of life review. As people take stock of their lives, they may reveal information that they have long suppressed, even from their families.[53]

Oral historians often comment on the eagerness with which many older people agree to be interviewed. The elderly seem to return to their youth while talking about it. They act more animated and treat their knowledgeable interviewer as a contemporary. Their children and grandchildren have heard snatches of these stories for so long that they no longer ask them about them; the interviewee’s closest friends may be deceased. The folklorist Patrick Mullen thought that it was “as if elderly persons are waiting for someone to come along and ask for the stories, and the folklorist had better be a good listener.” Henry Glassie also noted that “old tellers of tales are not astray in a wilderness of nostalgia...They fill a crucial role in their community. They preserve its wisdom, settle its disputes, create its entertainment, speak its culture. Without them, local people would have no way to discover themselves.”[54]

Those involved in reminiscence therapy have observed an increase in self-esteem among the nursing home residents who participated and some overt changes in body language. One therapist noted that during the early sessions her interviewee sat hunched in his wheelchair, his head hanging low and displaying almost no eye contact as he spoke. As they continued to meet, the interviewee felt increasing confidence in his ability to recall memories and some assurance that she would listen to him. “His back became more upright, he focused his eyes on those of his listener and his face became much more animated.” She found such changes in body language typical in both men and women who participated in the therapy sessions and that the process brought older people out of their shells.[55]

Nursing homes have encouraged and sometimes hired oral historians to record the life stories of their residents. Some conduct “Reminiscence Groups” in which residents talk about various issues from their pasts, publishing highlights in their newsletters. The Larksfield Place retirement community in Wichita, Kansas, established an oral history program in cooperation with Wichita State University and Emporia State University to collect life stories and encourage residents to use those interviews as starting points for other autobiographical projects. The Parker Jewish Geriatric Institute in New Hyde Park, New York, videotaped interviews with its residents. These interviews provided families with “a lasting record of treasured stories” but also had therapeutic value for the storytellers, who came away from the experience feeling more positive about themselves and their lives. “It reaffirms for them that their lives were valuable and productive,” concluded Edith Shapiro, the institute’s director of therapeutic recreation.[56]

For others, the experience of being interviewed for an oral history stimulates a cathartic release of long-pent-up emotions. Ronald Marcello has interviewed hundreds of Americans who were prisoners of war during the Second World War. “One byproduct has been some therapeutic value for the men,” said Marcello. Many had been encouraged by their wives and children to participate in the taping. “Some say to me, ‘I wouldn’t have talked to you about this in 1946. The scars were too recent.’” Yet oral historians should keep in mind that the recall of painful memories can have traumatic as well as therapeutic effects. Those who have interviewed Holocaust victims, for instance, report that some interviewees express a duty to leave a record for future generations but that doing the interviews triggered recurring nightmares.[57]

Are there any special considerations for interviewing in nursing homes?

Nursing homes have been described as places “where biography ends,” since the residents so often have no knowledge of their neighbors’ past lives before they became old and infirm. Yet when Tracy Kidder researched his book Old Friends, he was always welcomed because older people enjoyed having someone to talk with. “Old people have nothing to do but try to make meaning out of their lives,” he concluded.[58]

A video interviewer who works in nursing homes has suggested that the interviewer try to put the person in a comfortable setting, “preferably a favorite place—with soft, flattering light.” As a starting place for her interviews, she usually asks about such enjoyable family occasions as weddings and bar mitzvahs to give the interviewee a chance to introduce all the characters of the story “in a celebratory manner.”

Those working with the elderly recommend asking about a particular events or occasion more than once. The chances are that the second time the question is asked it will receive a more thorough answer, since the interviewee will have had time to remember it more vividly. Memory cues become increasingly useful with older interviewees. Sometimes an old photograph or song will bring back the past to them. Photo albums are even more helpful, since they are usually arranged in chronological order. A company in Madison, Wisconsin, called Bi-Folkal Productions sells “reminiscence resources” to nursing homes and libraries. The company produces a dozen different kits that use slides, tapes of sing-alongs, poetry, and photographs and are based on topics like pets, summertime, train rides, and the Depression. The company reasoned, for instance, that playing radio clips from a particular time would elicit memories that no question could ever tap.

The American Association of Retired People (AARP) has acknowledged the therapeutic value of oral history and storytelling among the elderly and established its own reminiscences program to train interviewees. AARP also publishes a guide to help volunteers elicit life stories. In Minneapolis, the Retired Senior Volunteers Program did oral histories of local senior citizens on such subjects as desegregating hotels and restaurants in the city, wartime experiences, and caring for the hungry and homeless. The project was cosponsored by a local radio station, which edited the tapes for weekly broadcast and then deposited them at the Minnesota Historical Society.[59]

Is there therapeutic value in oral history for anyone other than the elderly?

Any group that has gone through a troublesome common experience can benefit from documenting impressions and memories through oral history interviews. The Women Miners Project has recorded the lives of women coal miners, many of whom are still young or middle-aged women. They began collecting interviews during the 1980s, a period of crisis for women miners because jobs were disappearing rapidly and the miners’ union was battling for survival. Many of the women had been thrown into indefinite unemployment and faced a bleak economic future.

During a particularly difficult period, the women miners were able to use the oral history program “as a means of emotional support.” The project developed an exhibit out of the personal collections, writings, artwork, and other historical materials related to women miners and conducted videotaped interviews. According to Marat Moore, the project’s director, the interviews helped establish “an affirming context” for the women miners: “Our questions involve how we have fared, do we go on from here, and whatever happened to affirmative action in mining and other high-skilled, high-paying industries.”[60]

Northwestern University Medical School instituted an oral history of AIDS patients to learn how hospital personnel could care for them more effectively. Interviews with nurses and other AIDS caregivers at the medical school and associated clinics identified the characteristics, values, training, and behavior needed to treat AIDS patients. Interviewers reported that interviewees frequently commented that the project made them stop and reflect for the first time on what they do in response to having AIDS. Social workers at the Durham, North Carolina, Early Intervention Clinic, conducted a similar oral history project with HIV-positive men to help them “give form and meaning” to their past and to leave a record to help others grappling with issues of sex and drugs.[61]

Realizing that the AIDS crisis in Africa was leaving a staggering number of orphans, deprived of the emotional support of parents whose memories were fading, the School of Theology at the University of Natal established the Memory Box Project, which encouraged ailing parents to record their life stories “as a way of keeping alive the family’s memories.” Project directors posited that children who knew their roots would grow more resilient. For each family interviewed, the project created a box that could be decorated with photos and drawings and that would contain the recorded family stories to help the child cope with the loss of parents and retain their family identities. The surviving caregivers were asked to preserve the Memory Boxes and update them from time to time as new events occurred. In the event of loss or misappropriation, the project retained copies of the interviews but limited their access only to family members. Researchers would require family permission to consult the interviews.[62]

Can oral history be conducted with those with mental disabilities?

People diagnosed with mental illness or developmental issues were once believed to be incapable of articulating their personal histories in a recognizable form. Michael Angrosino conducted a project on the history of “deinstitutionalization,” a policy that brought patients out of the old state hospitals and back into the community. That story had been told by mental health professionals and other caregivers but not by the clients. Those with mental disabilities were not only willing to talk but the project also had a therapeutic effect: “the clients, who were used to being talked at rather than engaged in conversation and who were familiar with the interrogatory style of the clinical interview, experienced a kind of liberation in being encouraged to tell their own stories in their own way at their own pace.”[63]

Some who are no longer institutionalized became homeless and have since participated in oral history projects. The process of recording interviews with the homeless, conducted by the Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project, required the interviewers to spend time hanging out in parks and on street corners to develop relationships and build trust, so that interviewers would be seen as independent from social services organizations. Not wanting to invade the little privacy that the homeless had, the interviewers decided that rather than ask only about personal life stories, they would give them a chance to talk about changes in the city during their lifetimes. They asked about the causes of homelessness and the transformation of the city during deindustrialization. As a result, Dan Kerr reported, the interviewees “shared their life histories as they came up within the course of their discussion of more public issues.” The project videotaped the interviews and then showed them in homeless shelters and soup kitchens and the like, where they became popular attractions.[64]

How has oral history been applied to end-of-life care?

Those who have conducted oral histories with the terminally ill report that beyond the historical benefits, the interviews help patients find meaning in their life stories and give them a sense of leaving a legacy for their families. The interviews get them talking about living rather than dying. In medical facilities, interviewing helps build social relations between patients and caregivers. The interviews allow people to talk at length about their lives to an empathetic listener, but since patients may be emotionally vulnerable, interviewers need to proceed carefully when discussing painful memories. Even when oral historians are not conducting the interviews, they have sometimes partnered with local regional hospice groups to provide training for their social workers who will hear the patients’ stories.[65]

Museums and Historic Sites

How has the use of oral history influenced museum exhibits?

While preparing an exhibit on immigrants and migrants in Michigan, an oral historian who conducted interviews for the Michigan Historical Museum recommended that the exhibit designer also visit the interviewees to collect photographs and other documents from them. At first, the designer resisted, arguing that he just took whatever artifacts came in and incorporated them into an exhibit. But the oral historian insisted: “You have to meet these people. You have to hear their stories.” The designer relented. Inspired by the meetings he held, he realized that the best way to mount the exhibit would be to “feature a handful of people and create vignettes of their home or their work life.”[66]

Historical museums are sensitive to “the vanishing act of the past.” In the words of the historian Joyce Appleby, “people, buildings and institutions disappear swiftly, first from sight and then from memory, taking along with them the sights, smells, sensibilities and styles that distinguish a time and a place.” Historical exhibitions therefore serve as retrieval operations that arrange and explain the items and images in a manner that will “evoke a lost context” for the museum visitor. All too commonly in the past, historical museums were dimly lit halls, seemingly designed for nothing more than the veneration of objects, which were grouped together without much sense of how people had used them. Lights could be low since there were few captions to read. Museums are better illuminated now, allowing visitors to read longer, more informative captions for items that are woven together to tell a story of a time, place, event, or people. “History is not the old walking plow but the person who walked behind it,” as one museum curator asserted. Many historical museums have incorporated oral history tapes and excerpts from transcripts into their exhibits, which allow visitors to hear the voices of the people who used the objects on display or lived through the events depicted. Interviews not only enhance a museum’s displays and exhibits but also provide material for public talks and media presentations.[67]

The deindustrialization of the American Rust Belt has generated a number of industrial heritage museums that use oral historians to capture the memories of workers, whether from the preunion era or the heyday of unionization. The labor historian James B. Lane recommended that interviews focus on a wide range of attitudinal studies “about such matters as safety conditions and ecological standards, labor organizing and union-management relations, workplace folktales and corporate customs, and the bureaucratization process in both unions and businesses.” Oral historians need to interview not only employees and employers but competitors and customers, and the topics covered should include the machinery, the foremen, and the relationships between workers, especially in industries that have grown obsolete.[68]

Nearly every museum in the vast Smithsonian complex has collected oral history interviews and integrated them into their exhibits. From the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum to the National Air and Space Museum, interviews are displayed to visitors in audio and visual form and as part of the text of exhibits. The National Museum of American History has long collected and displayed artifacts of American advertising. In the 1980s it realized that its collection consisted of newspaper advertisements, trade cards, tearsheets, and other static objects but that it had no representations from modern multimedia advertising campaigns. The Smithsonian did interviews with executives of BBD&O (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) to collect memories and obtain films of television advertisements, jingles, and other memorabilia relating to its “Pepsi Generation” ad campaign—interviews that revealed how much of the campaign was spontaneous, not planned. Created as an archival collection, with descriptive brochures and finding aids, the taped interviews and television commercials became part of an audiovisual exhibit at the museum. Historians, archivists, and curators working on the project discovered that they had not only created new material for scholarly research and museum use but also had “established a healthy working relationship between a private corporation and a public research institution. This relationship went beyond financial support, in that employees of the company identified and contacted potential interviewees and encouraged their cooperation.”[69]

As befitting a museum devoted to journalism, Washington DC’s “Newseum” makes much use of interviews, including a studio where live interviews with news makers and news reporters take place regularly. One floor features traditional museum items, from Tom Paine’s writing desk to Edward R. Murrow’s microphone. On the floor below, visitors can film their own news broadcasts and can “question” prominent journalists, appropriate portions of whose prerecorded interviews are replayed on computer screens. The variety of options has different generational appeals. Older visitors tend to linger longer in the museum-like News History Gallery, while younger students crowd the interactive videos below.[70]

Popular features at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans are the oral history stations integrated throughout its exhibits. Visitors press a button to hear a soldier’s narrative about landing on the beaches of Normandy, along with photographs of the landing and other artifacts.[71]

Computers assist in tailoring the museum-going experience to individual needs and interests. At Ellis Island in New York harbor, oral historians conducted over 1,600 interviews with immigrants who had been processed there, along with military and civilian personnel who worked there. Many of the exhibits incorporated extracts from the interviews, as did a documentary film and theatrical performance. The museum also makes the audio recordings and transcripts accessible online in its Oral History Listening Room, where visitors can accession interviews by the name of the interviewee, country of origin, ship of passage, or the year of arrival in America. Visitors seeking information about a relative, or about the common experiences of others who migrated about the same time from the same region, can call up the appropriate audio recordings and transcripts to hear and read separately or simultaneously.[72]

What are the problems of using oral history in museum displays?

Museum curators use oral history to “bridge the gap between representation and reality.” Oral history can be inserted as sound or video played at stations throughout an exhibit, or transcripts can be excerpted in captions and other text to inform visitors. Some exhibits incorporate interviews in documentaries shown in small theaters, usually before or after the exhibit; others intersperse the oral history material throughout the collection on various monitors and interactive videos. Since usually only a fraction of the interviews can be used, selection, editing, and brevity of remarks are all-important. As David Lance has noted, such displays are “most effective when they combine a variety of speakers and a range of subject content in short and pithy juxtaposition.”[73]

Curators believe that it is important for visitors to understand that individual opinions expressed in the interviews may not be held by the majority—a concept that confuses people who expect museums as sources of factual information. To distinguish between the subjectivity of the speakers and the objectivity of the curatorial text, some museums have printed quotations in different typeface and have made sure that the speaker’s names follow their words.[74]

The extensive use of audio and visual playback machines can escalate the costs of mounting an exhibit, and there is always the risk that machines will break down. It can be a depressing experience to walk through an exhibit with darkened gaps in its presentation owing to malfunctioning machines. Too often the equipment has been “adapted for exhibition purposes rather than designed for it” and breaks down because of the strain of continuous playback. Showing documentary films and video with sound or having audio broadcasts requires a careful positioning of speakers “and a fairly elaborate arrangement of equipment and wiring that takes careful planning and craftsmanship to conceal.” Using loudspeakers so that all may hear can be distracting; listening to repeated playback of the same recording becomes unnerving, and many museums have opted to use headsets for individual listening. Recorded tours that are played individually can also include oral history excerpts.[75]

Without some specifically designated space for audio and video oral history within an exhibit, curators have learned from experience that visitors will not spend much time on any single exhibit element. So they often edit interviews into thirty-, sixty-, or ninety-second segments. Curators have also observed that visitors react differently to interviews shown in a secluded alcove—which they view only briefly—to those shown on a theater screen, where they will spend more time, especially if they can sit down.[76]

What advantage does oral history offer museums in dealing with controversial subjects?

The cultural wars of recent years spilled over to the once quiet world of historical museums. An explosion of bad publicity followed the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum mounting of an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the military plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Veterans’ organizations protested against it in the media and on Capitol Hill. The veterans and the curators of the exhibit had starkly different ways of analyzing and explaining the same event. One side argued that dropping the bomb ended the war with Japan without American troops having to invade, while the other side saw Hiroshima as the dawn of the age of nuclear anxiety. The result of their battle was an unhappy compromise in which the museum exhibited parts of the plane with a minimum of explanatory text and a prominently placed apology from the Secretary of the Smithsonian. Some visitors felt profoundly moved by seeing the plane and considering the destruction that it caused, but many others found it possible to view the fuselage as an artifact of aviation without pondering its role in the atomic age.[77]

After Enola Gay, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History attempted to take no side at all in an aptly titled exhibit Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Dialogue on American Sweatshops, 1820–Present. Curators sought to diffuse criticism by offering evidence and letting visitors draw their own conclusions. But when the exhibit opened, the Washington Post commented that it “treads the line between hot-button advocacy and cold, precise historical facts. Outrage, which should be the heartbeat of the show about human exploitation and illegality, is present only in the weighty collection of details.”[78]

Oral history offers a middle way between these two poles. Institutions like the Newseum, which bills itself as the “only interactive museum of news,” and the U.S. Holocaust Museum have relied successfully on audio and videotaped narratives and interactive computers to engage their visitors. This approach allows a museum to offer multiple viewpoints in different voices. Interactive technology makes it possible for museum-goers to “ask questions” of those who participated in historic events: interviews are videotaped and edited so that the interviewee can answer a series of preselected questions offered on the screen. By incorporating multiple voices, the exhibits teach the public that history may be interpreted in different ways. Rather than the authoritative, and sometimes condescending, single voice of the historian/curator lecturing the visitor on what it all means, the mélange of voices of participants and commentators can argue with each other to re-create the complexity of the past. The Enola Gay’s curators could have spared themselves much grief by including the voices of both the military veterans and the antinuclear activists, as well as diverse scholars in the field, to frame the exhibit as a debate rather than to try to settle the issue themselves.[79]

Has oral history caused exhibit planners to rethink their interpretations?

When Parks Canada planned to celebrate the gold rush, a seminal event in Canadian history, it wanted to make sure that the story of the gold rush pioneers did not omit the “Indian side.” But the Chilkoot Trail Oral History Project ran into resistance from the Carcross-Tagish tribe. After an extended set of interviews, the project anthropologist and a tribal elder stopped to relax at a lakeshore. The anthropologist found a stone hammer nearby and showed it to the elder as proof of the historic Aboriginal presence in the area. The elder casually threw it back into the bushes and said, “What have I been telling you all week?” The Carcross-Tagish similarly discarded Parks Canada’s objectives, maintaining that there was no “Indian side” to the gold rush stampede, but simply “an annoying but brief interruption of their ongoing lives.” Instead, they used the project to reiterate their claims to ownership of the land, to challenge the national understanding of the Chilkoot Trail, and “to begin negotiating a relationship with Parks Canada that might benefit both.” Parks Canada eventually incorporated the Carcross-Tagish view into its public interpretation for visitors to the trail, and the project—although it failed in its original objectives—became “an important stepping stone in the development of a positive working relationship between the First Nation and Parks Canada.”[80]

How has oral history been incorporated into audiowalks and heritage tourism?

“History is on the move,” Simon Bradley has observed. “It has left the halls of academia and the libraries and the museums and has taken to the streets.” Using smartphone technology to package and present oral histories and use them for tours and landmark identifications, various “soundwalks” have been created. They generally include short clips from interviews so that the voices of those who lived and worked in an area can help walkers see the connections between the present and the past. Some audiowalks use MP3 downloads, and some use GPS positioning to break down fixed linear routes and avoid the need for maps.

The popularity of iPods and iPhones and MP3 downloads have expanded the opportunities for audiowalk tours using oral history. Audiowalks merge public history, local history, and oral history. Listeners get an oral history-based narrative at various points along a designated walk. Announcers may be used to provide context, but most oral history-based projects prefer to use edited clips and speak through other voices.[81]

As the web migrates to tablets and smartphones, it is transforming areas into “living museums.” By using mobile apps, museums and historian societies have generated audio tour playlists based on users’ preferences. The voices take the place of pins on a map to guide people through the area, creating a montage of sounds and memories. The best audio tours combine appropriate research, illustrations, and recordings to help those outside a community see it from an insider’s perspective.

Kentucky heritage-based tours, such as the Country Music Highway, provide oral history excerpts at each stop on the tour. There are also neighborhood tours that people can check out of local public libraries. Operating systems tend to become obsolete quickly in the digital era, and tours have evolved from cassettes to CDs to cell phones to QR (Quick Response) codes. Scanning QR codes posted on exhibit cases or in the windows of historic buildings with a smartphone app, visitors can access additional information about a location, hear and see interview excerpts, and get links to websites. Oklahoma State University developed a “Where Your Story Begins” walking tour exhibit for homecoming, using QR codes to connect to interview excerpts. They learned to keep the clips short since downloading video or extensive audio can carry an unexpectedly high cost for the phone service, depending on people’s data plans.

As urban and rural landscapes change, oral history interviews record people’s memories of the way things once were. In Great Britain, the Rescue Geography project captured memories of places that were undergoing redevelopment, such as a highway being built through the neighborhood. The Museum of London also funded audio trails that explored two strikingly different parts of the river Thames. Drifting described the pastoral nature of the riverbank near Hampton Court Palace, while Dockers told the story of an industrial stretch of the river near Greenwich. These “memoryscapes” included an hour of oral history testimony that reflected the changing nature of the areas. Those walking the trail could pick up a mobile device—a Walkman or iPod—from a library or tourist information center, or download the recordings on their own phones, and then follow a walking map. Listeners agreed that the original voices gave the recordings more authenticity than listening to an announcer reading a script. The recordings could sustain the walkers’ interest for several hours, more time than they might spend on recordings in museums.[82]

Drawing from oral histories, the Baltimore ’68 Driving Tour directed visitors to places connected to the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. The interviews recorded multiple sides of the story—the looter and the looted, the clergy and the National Guard, the politicians and the citizens—without taking sides. Those going on the tour can still see much of the original damage; the area was never redeveloped. “What makes this tour so valuable,” Jessica Elfenebin explains, “is putting hard information—exactly where and when fires were started, rocks were thrown, windows were broken—to familiar taken-for granted scenes of devastation.”[83]

Radio and Television

How has oral history been used in radio broadcasts?

Since both involve recorded human speech, oral history is “custom built for radio,” according to David Dunaway, an oral historian who has produced radio documentaries. Radio production is less costly than producing video documentaries, and radio studios operate in all kinds of communities throughout the nation, from inner cities to rural counties, and on the campuses of many universities. The growth of national and local radio stations has especially stimulated interest in producing and broadcasting historical documentaries over the radio, and funding agencies have underwritten some ambitious projects. “The craft of radio production rises to art in the hands of someone fashioning a program from disparate interviews, ambient noise, and historical recordings such as speeches and old radio broadcasts,” Dunaway notes. “By juxtaposing these elements the expert producer creates a textural tapestry of sound, complete with the built-in punctuation of pauses and music.”[84]

Oral history-based radio broadcasts have included Living Atlanta, an urban history of Atlanta, Georgia; First-Person America, reminiscences of the Great Depression; New Yorkers at Work: Oral Histories of Life, Labor, and Industry; and the life and times of New York City’s colorful mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The University of Alabama funded an oral history of Alabama blacks who worked as coal and iron ore miners, sharecroppers, union organizers, domestics, teachers, ministers, lawyers, and small-business operators. Focusing on Birmingham, Alabama, which in the 1920s had the largest black population of any major U.S. city, the project resulted in a dozen half-hour radio programs, Working Lives, that were broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR).[85]

The Blues Archives at the University of Mississippi worked with Media Production International of Memphis, Tennessee, to produce The Original Down Home Blues Show, a regular NPR series. The program combines blues music and interviews with the musicians. Each interviewee is asked to select the records played on the show, a practice that the producers feel reveals “a deeper insight into their sense of memory of place and time.” Recognizing that music is their livelihood, and that blues is a particularly marketable form of oral history, the producers feel a moral obligation not only to secure the rights of interviewees for their copyrighted material but also to pay them a fee for their contributions to the show. In return, such programs provide outstanding publicity for oral history archives and stimulate use of its own collection.[86]

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? a thirteen-hour, twenty-six part radio series about the civil rights movement, was broadcast over Public Radio International in 1997. Initiated by the Southern Regional Council, an Atlanta-based civil rights organization, the programs contained more than 250 reflective voices of blacks and whites from five southern cities: Atlanta, Little Rock, Jackson, Montgomery and Columbia. “What makes it work well is the medium itself,” wrote Alan Bunce, a reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor. The television series Eyes on the Prize had already covered much of the same territory. “Yet by revisiting the story on the radio, through the reminiscences of people who have lived through the history, without seeing the speakers, you are able to experience the individuals in a special way—to savor the tone of voice, to sense the emotional meaning.”[87]

The oral historian Gene Preuss was a high school student working at his hometown radio station when it launched a weekly oral history program. The station manager, an old newsman, interviewed older residents of the community about changes around them, firsts, and local traditions. “I found the interviews fascinating, and listened to every single one of these programs for almost three years, almost 120 different programs!” he commented. Preuss credited the program with convincing him to change his college major to history and his use of oral history in his work. Years later he noted that the radio station was still doing interviews, some 1,000 of them, and was working with the town’s archive to preserve them.[88]

Are oral history interviews heavily edited for broadcast?

Uncut interviews rarely go on the air. Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, who broadcast on NPR as the Kitchen Sisters, take what they call “an oral history approach to interviewing,” conducting long interviews that may go on for several hours, exploring many different avenues of thought and experience. But after they conduct the interviews they edit them furiously, whittling them into highly composed programs, a process they call “writing with other people’s words.” The Kitchen Sisters promise never to alter the spirit or the intent of what was said to them, “but we do cut the hell out of them.”[89]

A media producer’s first need is to cull the collection. A two-hour program might include an hour and a half of recorded interviews, out of a collection of dozens of hours. From her experience, Siobhán McHugh advises that media producers are looking for “facts and feeling” and will be drawn to the voices most “laden with emotional nuance.” The producer then tries to weave the voices together into a unified and compelling narrative, and a montage of sounds. It is important to maintain “editorial integrity” by not taking the quotes out of context, but some documentary makers take dramatic license and even use actors to re-create dialogue. In return, oral history acquires enhanced aesthetic appeal and greater public impact. There is an affinity between radio and oral history because they share a concern for the oral and aural characteristics of a narrative. Oral history may include strong feelings and emotions that will resonate with radio listeners. “If well crafted as storytelling through sound,” posits McHugh, “oral history on radio can be elevated to an art form that can move, inform, and delight its audience. It achieves one of the discipline’s defining aims to connect past and present lives.”[90]

If radio and oral history are so compatible, why has there not been more oral history on the radio?

Oral history archivists express disappointment that radio producers do not make greater use of their collections as raw material for documentaries. More often trained as journalists than historians, and working under tight deadlines and budget constraints, radio producers may be loath to spend the time needed to review long archival tapes. Too often they find the sound quality of archival recordings inadequate for broadcast use (although poor sound quality on analog tapes can be enhanced digitally). Radio documentary producers may find it easier simply to do their own interviewing, using broadcast studio equipment and asking questions specific to the project—an alternative that is possible, of course, only if there are survivors left to interview.[91]

To expand use of their collections, oral historians need to recognize the differences between their type of interviewing and radio interviewing and to try, when possible, to accommodate radio’s needs. “Radio producers work with action, sensation, emotion, and audio presence as their palette, the oral historian with objectivity and verisimilitude,” David Dunaway has argued. “Both pursue truth on different roads.” Oral historians must improve the sound quality of their recording and preserve them under optimal archival conditions for future use. Radio producers pick and choose from many different interviews, editing and rearranging them, adding music and sound effects, and rarely using more than a fraction of a single interview. Interviews therefore need to be abstracted or indexed for easy retrieval. Oral historians can work with radio producers to identify the most colorful dialogue, revealing anecdotes, emotional interludes, and those moments of verbal eloquence that can give spark to a documentary. Interviewers can also explain the themes and historical framework of the interviews. They need to take some care that the rights of the interviewees are protected and that in the editing and excerpting of the interviews for broadcast, the meaning is not distorted, and the interviewees are not held up to ridicule.[92]

The StoryCorps model has inspired more oral history projects to produce creative audio shorts from their interviews, which they offer to interested Internet or radio broadcasters. The Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Initiative has established a Radio Syndication Program for distribution. Since local broadcasters are usually unfamiliar with the interviews, such pieces rarely get to air on commercial or mainstream radio. “That is why we offer these stories at no cost to such markets, but with a creative commons copyright understanding,” Kevin Farkas explains. “We hope that in some way our content can fill their public issues or community-based programming needs.[93]

Performance

What explains the impulse to turn oral history interviews into performances?

Although it seems conversational, oral history is often more stylized. Interviews reveal many performance aspects, from the way interviewees tell their stories to the use of words, pauses, silences, gestures, and facial expressions. People giving an interview put themselves on display for an immediate audience—the interviewer—and for posterity. As a result, Lynn Abrams has observed, “they are conscious of the need to perform and thus they may moderate their language, adjust dialect or accent, elaborate stories, and so on.” The staging of oral history seems a natural extension of this creative spirit, and it is a short step from a live interview to a live performance.[94]

Performance aspects further reflect the multidisciplinary nature of oral history, drawing interest from those in anthropology, sociology, art history, public history, and performance studies. All of these disciplines have found ways to use interviews to engage audiences.

The artistic use of oral history is usually elaborately planned, although at times it can emerge spontaneously, without premeditation. The composer David Toop created The Body Evident from the digital recordings of his talks with the artist and theorist John Latham. Toop simply wanted to record an interview exploring Latham’s theories in his own voice, but, after listening to the recording, he realized that he had collected both an “oral and aural history of an artist, his ideas, their context, and my relationship to all those elements.” He developed a museum installation “derived entirely from his speech, vocal sounds, pauses, breathing, moments when he banged the table for emphasis, room sound, and ambient sound from the street.” He called this a “sound event” that could be sensed but not written down.[95]

If an oral history project has already resulted in a book, what is the advantage of trying to turn it into a stage production?

Oral historians want to return their material to the community from which it came, but they recognize that the community may never read their books and articles. The six authors who collaborated on the highly acclaimed book Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987) recognized that, as a university press publication, it reached a predominantly academic audience. They had collected the life stories of the mill workers, then processed, edited, interpreted, and published them; but the authors wanted to do even more to “keep the stories alive and keep history ongoing.” Recognizing how much interviews involve storytelling, and that those stories were already in a sense a performance, the speech communications department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered an independent study course in which eleven undergraduates read through the interview transcripts and pulled characters and dialogue from the book to produce a script. In 1988 they took the play to many mill towns throughout North and South Carolina. The producers observed that audiences, seeing their own lives performed on stage, responded instinctively, “imitating what was going on and talking about it.” At the end of each performance, the cast would talk with the audience, who contributed additional stories and argued with the cast over interpretation, keeping alive the collaborative process between history and performance.[96]

In Baltimore and St. Paul, groups have used oral histories to produce stage plays about local history for local audiences. The Baltimore Voices oral history was initiated in 1978 to explore and present in popular forms the social history of Baltimore’s six oldest neighborhoods. A team of professional historians, graduate students, and community historians interviewed over 200 people, transcribed the interviews, and divided them into such common topics as family, neighborhoods, ethnicity, religion, work, income, wages and expenditures, education, immigration, race, prejudice, and the Great Depression. From these, they produced hundreds of one-page stories, with different ethnic groups, broken down by neighborhoods. The Baltimore Theatre Project organized these excerpts into a play, also named Baltimore Voices (1981), which was presented in the various Baltimore neighborhoods and videotaped as a documentary. The same year the Baltimore Voices project started, the St. Paul History Theatre produced the first in a series of oral history-based plays. In the 1970s and 1980s its repertoire included The Deadly Decades, dealing with the effects of Prohibition on the city; You Can’t Get to Heaven through the U.S.A., about Swedish and Italian immigrants; We Win or Bust, about a railroad strike; and Nina! Madam to a Saintly City, the story of police corruption and a famous operator of a local bordello. The playwright Arthur Miller turned Studs Terkel’s oral history Working into a stage play, An American Clock (1982).[97]

In the 1990s students at Cuyahoga Community College conducted oral histories in ethnic and minority neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, from which The People of Cleveland: Building Community was drawn. Accompanying dialogue from the life histories were slides and music and dance performances. The People of Cleveland played to more than one hundred audiences in churches, schools, and neighborhood organizations. Another play, Growing Up and Growing Old, drew from interviews about life cycles and sought to overcome negative stereotypes of the elderly. The Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii mixed interviews with 1940s swing music in its “living history performances” of An Era of Change: Oral Histories of Civilians in World War II Hawaii, for presentation at libraries and senior citizens centers.[98]

After conducting interviews with inmates at a correctional facility, Alicia Rouverol compiled them into a script that was performed by the prisoners. In both the interviews and performances, the inmates struggled with the issues in their lives that had led them to incarceration and gave performances to at-risk youths as object lessons. The oral histories encouraged self-reflection and served as “one of the few venues for creative expression available to the inmates.”[99]

The John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which lost more than a hundred of its students, faculty, and alumni in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, conducted interviews with a cross-section of New Yorkers caught in the chaos of the collapse of the World Trade towers. Drawing from forty of those interviews with police, firefighters, emergency personnel and citizen bystanders, they prepared What Happened? The September 11th Testimony Project, a ninety-minute, one-act documentary drama designed to be performed with a cast from six to fifteen actors. Offering the script for commemorative performances, project directors described it as “a collective narrative that follows events and personal experiences from early that beautiful morning through impact, escape, rescue and recovery, grieving, and reflection on how our lives have changed.”[100]

The director of drama at a local school collected documentation for a “musical documentary play” about the town, called All Change, performed as a series of plays—the largest had a cast of ninety-eight. Although they also used the interviews in a radio documentary and books, it was the play that attracted local audiences—“and there were requests wanting to know how to do it.”[101]

How has oral history been used to document dance?

When his friends and colleagues in San Francisco’s dance community began dying of AIDS, dancer-choreographer Jeff Friedman created the LEGACY oral history program to preserve their memories and their dance routines. Since life involves a great deal of “physicality,” Friedman was sure that some form of performance reenactment was possible. He pointed to Michael Bennett’s Broadway musical A Chorus Line, which was based on workshop interviews with dancers and the resentment they expressed over how they had been treated in musical theater. The dancers thus became creative collaborators, although more through their personal stories rather than their movements. LEGACY combined both story and motion.

Many oral historians pay little attention to nonverbal forms of communication, but dancers told their stories with their bodies. Friedman videoed both the interview and the dance, starting with those most at risk because of illness or age. “As a dancer and choreographer deeply invested in oral history practice,” he explained, “I am concerned with how the body helps create meaning within the process of making history.”[102]

Kent State University commissioned Mark Taylor to choreograph Witness, a dance performance to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the shooting of four people on its campus by the National Guard during demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1970. Taylor interviewed four people in the town and at the university about their experiences: an eyewitness, a newspaper reporter, a student’s parent, and a professor. The recorded and transcribed interviews became the basis for both the script and the dance in the performance.[103]

Dance education has similarly incorporated oral history. Dance students at Brigham Young University, for instance, interviewed family members about a difficult passage in their lives and then converted those stories into performances.[104]

Is there a relationship between poetry and oral history?

The lyricism of the spoken word and the personalities that delivered them have long inspired poets. There is often a similarity between poetry and oral history transcripts, especially when the words of the interview are reproduced in short bursts. Transcripts that are structured to show the poetic nature of the narrative bring the emotional feelings being expressed to the forefront. Those who have used this format argue that a poetic rendering of the transcript does not change its meaning but elevates elements of the language and facilitates analysis.[105]

The poet Kwame Dawes recorded interviews with African American elders from South Carolina and then used them as inspiration for his poetry in Wisteria: Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country (2005). Dawes did not want his poems to be read as transcriptions of oral history and instead called them an artistic adaptation of the original monologues. His poetry also described the experience, for instance, a woman’s “scent of wisteria, / thick with the nausea of nostalgia / fills the closed-in room” as she begins to “lean into the microphone, / smile at the turning tape.”[106]

What is Reminiscence Theatre?

Reminiscence Theatre in Great Britain involves a therapeutic use of reminiscence for dementia care. In group sessions or individual interviews, elders share their memories around some theme of social or historical significance with the director and actors. Their stories are transcribed and stored, and then turned into plays. Interviewees are invited to attend rehearsals and to direct the actors in scenes based on their experience, both to ensure their involvement and the production’s authenticity. The cast follows each performance with an informal discussion with the audience, providing an opportunity for further sharing of memories. Instead of making the audience travel to see the performance, the plays are put on at senior citizens’ clubs, day centers, community centers, nursing homes, and hospitals. Performances are accompanied by a book of stories and photographs, collected from the interviewees during the research period. Sold inexpensively (thanks to grants and subsidies), they help audience members keep reminiscing after the production.[107]

Are actors necessary for staging oral histories?

Not necessarily. History museums have turned their visitors into performers by asking them to read from oral histories. The Seattle Museum of History and Technology drew its inspiration from the Laramie Project, where actors had conducted oral histories about the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, and then presented their findings in a stage presentation. The Seattle Museum followed this pattern by staging a play, Verbatim, based on its own oral history collections. After each production, members of the audience were eager to tell their own related stories, which made the curators wonder if they should give the audience a chance to become performers. They created an experimental Speaking of Seattle program, drawn from the area’s workplace experiences and developed a set of “readers’ theater scripts” from the interviews. Museum visitors participated in role playing by reading from the scripts, a process that helped them better grasp local history. Since some of those who read the stories of others became anxious to tell their own stores, the curators also began conducting impromptu oral histories. “An oral history readers’ theater offers a magical chance to step into someone else’s shoes and begin to walk outward from oneself,” concluded curator Lorraine McConaghy. “That’s the value of the retellings.”[108]

From the most remote rural territories to inner-city neighborhoods, in audio and video recordings, over the Internet, on radio and on stage, in museums and community centers, oral history has proven to be a multifaceted tool, usable in a seemingly limitless number of ways, in many disciplines. Beyond their immediate purposes, oral historians seek to leave a better historical record, to preserve what would otherwise be lost or more obscure. In a sense, oral history has turned upside down George Santayana’s famous dictum that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Now oral historians are making sure that those who can remember the past must repeat it for the record.[109]

Appendix 1: Principles and Best Practices for Oral History of the Oral History Association

Introduction

Oral history refers both to a method of recording and preserving oral testimony and to the product of that process. It begins with an audio or video recording of a first person account made by an interviewer with an interviewee (also referred to as narrator), both of whom have the conscious intention of creating a permanent record to contribute to an understanding of the past. A verbal document, the oral history, results from this process and is preserved and made available in different forms to other users, researchers, and the public. A critical approach to the oral testimony and interpretations are necessary in the use of oral history.

The Oral History Association encourages individuals and institutions involved with the creation and preservation of oral histories to uphold certain principles, professional and technical standards, and obligations. These include commitments to the narrators, to standards of scholarship for history and related disciplines, and to the preservation of the interviews and related materials for current and future users.

Recognizing that a clear and concise guide can be useful to all practitioners of oral history, the Oral History Association has since 1968 published a series of statements aimed at outlining a set of principles and obligations for all those who use this methodology.

Building on those earlier documents, but representing changes in an evolving field, the OHA now offers General Principles for Oral History and Best Practices for Oral History as summaries of the organization’s most important principles and best practices for the pre-interview preparation, the conduct of the interview, and the preservation and use of oral histories. These documents are not intended to be an inclusive primer on oral history; for that there are numerous manuals, guidebooks, and theoretical discussions. For the readers’ convenience, a bibliography of resources is provided online at the Oral History Association website.

General Principles for Oral History

Oral history is distinguished from other forms of interviews by its content and extent. Oral history interviews seek an in-depth account of personal experience and reflections, with sufficient time allowed for the narrators to give their story the fullness they desire. The content of oral history interviews is grounded in reflections on the past as opposed to commentary on purely contemporary events.

Oral historians inform narrators about the nature and purpose of oral history interviewing in general and of their interview specifically. Oral historians insure that narrators voluntarily give their consent to be interviewed and understand that they can withdraw from the interview or refuse to answer a question at any time. Narrators may give this consent by signing a consent form or by recording an oral statement of consent prior to the interview. All interviews are conducted in accord with the stated aims and within the parameters of the consent.

Interviewees hold the copyright to their interviews until and unless they transfer those rights to an individual or institution. This is done by the interviewee signing a release form or in exceptional circumstances recording an oral statement to the same effect. Interviewers must ensure that narrators understand the extent of their rights to the interview and the request that those rights be yielded to a repository or other party, as well as their right to put restrictions on the use of the material. All use and dissemination of the interview content must follow any restrictions the narrator places upon it.

Oral historians respect the narrators as well as the integrity of the research. Interviewers are obliged to ask historically significant questions, reflecting careful preparation for the interview and understanding of the issues to be addressed. Interviewers must also respect the narrators’ equal authority in the interviews and honor their right to respond to questions in their own style and language. In the use of interviews, oral historians strive for intellectual honesty and the best application of the skills of their discipline, while avoiding stereotypes, misrepresentations, or manipulations of the narrators’ words.

Because of the importance of context and identity in shaping the content of an oral history narrative, it is the practice in oral history for narrators to be identified by name. There may be some exceptional circumstances when anonymity is appropriate, and this should be negotiated in advance with the narrator as part of the informed consent process.

Oral history interviews are historical documents that are preserved and made accessible to future researchers and members of the public. This preservation and access may take a variety of forms, reflecting changes in technology. But, in choosing a repository or form, oral historians consider how best to preserve the original recording and any transcripts made of it and to protect the accessibility and usability of the interview. The plan for preservation and access, including any possible dissemination through the web or other media, is stated in the informed consent process and on release forms.

In keeping with the goal of long term preservation and access, oral historians should use the best recording equipment available within the limits of their financial resources.

Interviewers must take care to avoid making promises that cannot be met, such as guarantees of control over interpretation and presentation of the interviews beyond the scope of restrictions stated in informed consent/release forms, suggestions of material benefit outside the control of the interviewer, or assurances of an open-ended relationship between the narrator and oral historian.

Best Practices for Oral History

Pre-Interview

1. Whether conducting their own research or developing an institutional project, first time interviewers and others involved in oral history projects should seek training to prepare themselves for all stages of the oral history process.

2. In the early stages of preparation, interviewers should make contact with an appropriate repository that has the capacity to preserve the oral histories and make them accessible to the public.

3. Oral historians or others responsible for planning the oral history project should choose potential narrators based on the relevance of their experiences to the subject at hand.

4. To prepare to ask informed questions, interviewers should conduct background research on the person, topic, and larger context in both primary and secondary sources.

5. When ready to contact a possible narrator, oral historians should send via regular mail or email an introductory letter outlining the general focus and purpose of the interview, and then follow-up with either a phone call or a return email. In projects involving groups in which literacy is not the norm, or when other conditions make it appropriate, participation may be solicited via face to face meetings.

6. After securing the narrator’s agreement to be interviewed, the interviewer should schedule a non-recorded meeting. This pre-interview session will allow an exchange of information between interviewer and narrator on possible questions/topics, reasons for conducting the interview, the process that will be involved, and the need for informed consent and legal release forms. During pre-interview discussion the interviewer should make sure that the narrator understands:

* oral history’s purposes and procedures in general and of the proposed interview’s aims and anticipated uses.

* his or her rights to the interviews including editing, access restrictions, copyrights, prior use, royalties, and the expected disposition and dissemination of all forms of the record, including the potential distribution electronically or on-line.

* that his or her recording(s) will remain confidential until he or she has given permission via a signed legal release.

7. Oral historians should use the best digital recording equipment within their means to reproduce the narrator’s voice accurately and, if appropriate, other sounds as well as visual images. Before the interview, interviewers should become familiar with the equipment and be knowledgeable about its function.

8. Interviewers should prepare an outline of interview topics and questions to use as a guide to the recorded dialogue.

Interview

1. Unless part of the oral history process includes gathering soundscapes, historically significant sound events, or ambient noise, the interview should be conducted in a quiet room with minimal background noises and possible distractions.

2. The interviewer should record a “lead” at the beginning of each session to help focus his or her and the narrator’s thoughts to each session’s goals. The “lead” should consist of, at least, the names of narrator and interviewer, day and year of session, interview’s location, and proposed subject of the recording.

3. Both parties should agree to the approximate length of the interview in advance. The interviewer is responsible for assessing whether the narrator is becoming tired and at that point should ask if the latter wishes to continue. Although most interviews last about two hours, if the narrator wishes to continue those wishes should be honored, if possible.

4. Along with asking creative and probing questions and listening to the answers to ask better follow-up questions, the interviewer should keep the following items in mind:

•  interviews should be conducted in accord with any prior agreements made with narrator, which should be documented for the record.

•  interviewers should work to achieve a balance between the objectives of the project and the perspectives of the interviewees. Interviewers should fully explore all appropriate areas of inquiry with interviewees and not be satisfied with superficial responses. At the same time, they should encourage narrators to respond to questions in their own style and language and to address issues that reflect their concerns.

•  interviewers must respect the rights of interviewees to refuse to discuss certain subjects, to restrict access to the interview, or, under certain circumstances, to choose anonymity. Interviewers should clearly explain these options to all interviewees.

•  interviewers should attempt to extend the inquiry beyond the specific focus of the project to create as complete a record as possible for the benefit of others.

•  in recognition of the importance of oral history to an understanding of the past and of the cost and effort involved, interviewers and interviewees should mutually strive to record candid information of lasting value.

5. The interviewer should secure a release form, by which the narrator transfers his or her rights to the interview to the repository or designated body, signed after each recording session or at the end of the last interview with the narrator.

Post-Interview

1. Interviewers, sponsoring institutions, and institutions charged with the preservation of oral history interviews should understand that appropriate care and storage of original recordings begins immediately after their creation.

2. Interviewers should document their preparation and methods, including the circumstances of the interviews and provide that information to whatever repository will be preserving and providing access to the interview.

3. Information deemed relevant for the interpretation of the oral history by future users, such as photographs, documents, or other records should be collected, and archivists should make clear to users the availability and connection of these materials to the recorded interview.

4. The recordings of the interviews should be stored, processed, refreshed and accessed according to established archival standards designated for the media format used. Whenever possible, all efforts should be made to preserve electronic files in formats that are cross platform and nonproprietary. Finally, the obsolescence of all media formats should be assumed and planned for.

5. In order to augment the accessibility of the interview, repositories should make transcriptions, indexes, time tags, detailed descriptions or other written guides to the contents.

6. Institutions charged with the preservation and access of oral history interviews should honor the stipulations of prior agreements made with the interviewers or sponsoring institutions including restrictions on access and methods of distribution.

7. The repository should comply to the extent to which it is aware with the letter and spirit of the interviewee’s agreement with the interviewer and sponsoring institution. If written documentation such as consent and release forms does not exist then the institution should make a good faith effort to contact interviewees regarding their intent. When media become available that did not exist at the time of the interview, those working with oral history should carefully assess the applicability of the release to the new formats and proceed—or not—accordingly.

8. All those who use oral history interviews should strive for intellectual honesty and the best application of the skills of their discipline. They should avoid stereotypes, misrepresentations, and manipulations of the narrator’s words. This includes foremost striving to retain the integrity of the narrator’s perspective, recognizing the subjectivity of the interview, and interpreting and contextualizing the narrative according to the professional standards of the applicable scholarly disciplines. Finally, if a project deals with community history, the interviewer should be sensitive to the community, taking care not to reinforce thoughtless stereotypes. Interviewers should strive to make the interviews accessible to the community and where appropriate to include representatives of the community in public programs or presentations of the oral history material.

Appendix 2: Sample Legal Release Forms

Sample Deed of Gift

[From John A. Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law (2003)]

I, [name of interviewee] of [address], herein permanently give, convey, and assign to [name of archive, program or individual], which is currently in possession of my interview (or oral memoir) consisting of [description]. In so doing I understand that my interview (or oral memoir) will be made available to researchers and may be quoted from, published or broadcast in any medium that the [archive, program or individual] shall deem appropriate.

In making this gift I fully understand that I am conveying all legal title and literary property rights which I have or may be deemed to have in my interview (or oral memoir) as well as my rights, title and interest in any copyright which may be secured under the laws now or later in force and effect in the United States of America. My conveyance of copyright encompasses the exclusive rights of: reproduction, distribution, preparation of derivative works, public performance, public display as well as all renewals and extensions.

I, [agent for the duly appointed representative of] accept the interview (or oral memoir) of [name of interviewee] for inclusion into the [archive or program].

___________________

___________________

Signature of Donor

Signature of Agent/Representative

_____________________________

Date

Deed of Gift for Heirs of Interviewee

[From John Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law (2009)]

In accordance with the willing participation of [name of interviewee] in the [name of oral history project or program] on [date], in which he/she voluntarily gave to the [name of receiving group or individual] an interview (or oral memoir) in the form of [number of tapes or transcripts], I/we, [names] as legal heir or heirs, herein do permanently give, convey and assign same to [name of archive, program, or interviewer]. In doing so, I/we understand that [name of interviewee]’s interview (or oral memoir) will be made available to researchers and may be quoted from, published and broadcast in any medium that [the archive, program or individual] shall deem appropriate.

I/we further acknowledge in making this gift that I/we are conveying all legal title and literary property rights which I/we as heir/heirs to [name of interviewee]’s interview (or oral memoir) as well as all rights, title, and interest in any copyright which may be secured now or under the laws later in force and effect in the United States of America. My/our conveyance of copyright encompasses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, preparation of derivative works, public performances, public display as well as all renewals and extensions.

I, [name], agent for or duly appointed representative of [the archive, program or individual], accept the interview (or oral memoir) with [name of interviewee] for inclusion into the [archive or program].

___________________

___________________

Signature of Agent/Representative

Signature of Heir/Heirs

_____________________________

Date

Deed of Gift for Interviewers as Joint Authors

[From John Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 2009]

I, [name of interviewer], who served as an interviewer for the [name of project or sponsoring program or archive] and who conducted an interview or interviews with [name of interviewee] on or about [date] for which no legal releases were executed, do herein permanently give, convey and assign to [name of program or archive]. In doing so I understand that the interview (or oral memoir) with [name of interviewee] will be made available to researchers and may be quoted from, published or broadcast in any medium that the [name of program or archive] shall deem appropriate.

In making this gift I fully understand that I am conveying all legal title and literary property rights which I have or may be deemed to have in this interview or interviews (or oral memoir) as well as all my right, title and interest as joint author in any copyright which may be secured under the laws now or later in force and effect in the United States of America. My conveyance of copyright encompasses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, preparation of derivative works, public performance, public display as well as all renewals and extensions.

I, [name], agent for or duly appointed representative of [the archive or program], accept the interview (or oral memoir) with [name of interviewee] for inclusion into [the archive or program].

___________________

___________________

Signature of Interviewer

Signature of Agent/Representative

_____________________________

Date

Deed of Gift to the Public Domain

[Senate Historical Office]

I, [name of interviewee], do hereby give to the [archives or organization] the recordings and transcripts of my interviews conducted on [dates].

I authorize the [archives or organization] to use the recordings and transcripts in such a manner as may best serve the educational and historical objectives of their oral history program.

In making this gift, I voluntarily convey ownership of the recordings and transcripts to the public domain.

___________________

___________________

Agent of Receiving Organization

Donor

_____________________________

_____________________________

Date

Date

Interviewee Release Form for Schools

[From Glenn Whitmann, Dialogue with the Past: Engagin Students & Meeting Standards Through Oral History (2004)]

I, [name of interviewee], hereby give and grant to [name of school] the absolute and unqualified right to the use of my oral history memoir conducted by [name of interviewer] on [dates]. I understand that the purpose of this project is to collect audio- and video-taped oral histories of firsthand memories of a particular period or event in history as part of the [name of project, if any].

I understand that these interviews (tapes and transcripts) will be deposited in the [name of school] library and archives for the use of future students, educators, and researchers. Responsibility for reproduction, distribution, display, and the creation of derivative works will be at the discretion of the librarian, archivist, and/or project coordinator. I also understand that the tapes and transcripts may be used in public presentations including, but not limited to, audio and visual documentaries, slide-tape presentations, exhibits, articles, public performance, or presentation on the World Wide Web at the project’s website, or successor technologies.

In making this contract, I understand that I am conveying to the [name of school] library and archives all legal title and literary property rights that I have or may be deemed to have in my interview as well as my right, title, and interest in any copyright related to this oral history interview that may be secured under the laws now or later in force and effect in the United States of America. This gift, however, does not preclude any use that I myself want to make of the information in these transcripts and recordings.

I herein warrant that I have not assigned or in any manner encumbered or impaired any of the aforementioned rights in my oral memoir. The only conditions that I place on this unrestricted gift are:

1. ___________

2. ___________

3. ___________

___________________

___________________

Signature of Interviewee/Donor

Address

__________________

__________________

Type or Print Name

Date

Notes

Chapter 1

1. Charles T. Morrissey grappled persuasively with the definition of oral history in his essays, “Why Call It ‘Oral History’? Searching for Early Usage of a Generic Term,” Oral History Review 8 (1980), 20–48; introduction to Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1984), xix–xxiii; and “Beyond Oral Evidence: Speaking (Con)strictly about Oral History,” Archival Issues, 17 (November 2, 1992), 89–94.

2. See the Principles and Best Practices of the Oral History Association, which are reprinted as Appendix 1 in this volume.

3. William W. Moss, “Oral History: What Is It and Where Did It Come From?” in The Past Meets the Present: Essays on Oral History, ed., David Stricklin and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988) 5; The History of Herodotus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 41, 75, 109; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin, 1972), 48. See also William W. Moss and Peter C. Mazikana, Archives, Oral History and Oral Tradition: A RAMP [Records and Archives Management Programme] Study (Paris: UNESCO, 1986), 2.

4. Iván Jaksíc, “Oral History in the Americas,” Journal of American History, 79 (September 1992), 590.

5. Paul Thompson, “Britain Strikes Back: Two Hundred Years of ‘Oral History,’” Oral History Association Newsletter, 15 (Summer 1981), 4–5; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press; 1978), 19, 25–26; Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1973), 39.

6. Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104.

7. David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 327–328; Dean Albertson, “Remembering Oral History’s Beginning,” The Annual of the New England Association of Oral History, 1 (1987–88), 2.

8. Thompson, Voice of the Past, 46–47; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–46.

9. Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery, Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 81–83; Sally Adams with Wynford Hicks, Interviewing for Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1.

10. Donald A. Ritchie, “Oral History in the Federal Government,” Journal of American History, 74 (September 1987), 587–595; Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996 [1931]); xiv–xv; John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865–1918 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 151; David A. Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 178; Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation (New York: New Press, 1998), xiii–lii; WPA interviews are accessible online at the Library of Congress’ American Memory website.

11. Stephen E. Everett, Oral History Techniques and Procedures (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1992), 5–11; Forrest C. Pogue, Pogue’s War: Diaries of a WWII Combat Historian (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); H. Lew Wallace, “Forrest C. Pogue: A Biographical Sketch,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly, 60 (July 1986), 373–402; see also John Douglas Marshall, Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey of War and Honor (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), for some of the controversies concerning S. L. A. Marshall’s interviews and the conclusions he drew from them.

12. Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8.

13. Joseph L. Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret (New York: Viking Press, 1965), reprints the two New Yorker essays from 1942 and 1964, and was the basis for the motion picture Joe Gould’s Secret. Winslow C. Watson referred to “oral history” in an address to the Vermont Historical Society in 1863, but Wilson lacked the national audience and notoriety that the New Yorker gave to Gould. See Morrissey, “Why Call It ‘Oral History’?” 20–48.

14. New York Times, July 7, 1972; Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History (Boston: Appleton-Century, 1938), iv; Ray Allen Billington, ed., Allan Nevins on History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 209–210, 281–283, 288–293; Elizabeth I. Dixon, et al., “Definitions of Oral History,” Oral History at Arrowhead: The Proceedings of the First National Colloquium on Oral History (Los Angeles: Oral History Association, 1969), 14.

15. Willa K. Baum, “A Brief History of Oral History,” address delivered at California State University, Fullerton, April 22, 1972.

16. David Lance, “British Launch Oral History Society,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 8 (Summer 1974), 1–2; Graham Smith, “The Making of Oral History,” in Making History: The Changing Face of the Profession in Britain, Institute of Historical Research, http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/oral_history_3.html, 2008.

17. Wolfgang Weber, “Mass of Trash” or “Veins of Gold”? An Investigative Report on the Relationship Between Oral History and Archives (Regensburg, Austria: S. Roderer Verlag, 2000), 21–24; Irina Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), 235–45.

18. Miroslav Vaněk, Around the Globe: Rethinking Oral History with Its Protagonist (Prague: Karolinium Press, 2013), 84–85.

19. Robert Gildea, “The Long March of Oral History: Around 1968 in France,” Oral History, 38 (Spring 2010), 69.

20. Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (New York: Dell, 1969), 17–19; Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Routledge, 1992 [1975]); Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War, 1936–1939 (London: Allen Lane, 1979).

21. Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd, Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 99–101, and Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); J. Anthony Lukas, “Historians’ Conference: The Radical Need for Jobs,” New York Times Magazine, March 12, 1972, 38.

22. Thompson, Voice of the Past, 55–59; Studs Terkel, Hard Times; An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon, 1970); Working; People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon, 1974); and “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976); and “Black History, Oral History, and Genealogy,” in David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary History, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 258–279.

23. Sally Adams with Wynford Hicks, Interviewing for Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2001); Ronald J. Grele, “Why Call It Oral History? Some Ruminations from the Field,” Pennsylvania History, 60 (October 1993), 506–509.

24. Scott Sherman, “Caro’s Way,” Columbia Journalism Review (May–June 2002), 68.

25. Reporting on an oral history project in three Philadelphia neighborhoods, Charles Hardy noted, “We have found that the best interviewers often come from the enthusiastic amateur....The historian generally comes from or has been trained in academic culture and academic style which raises the problem of establishing rapport, particularly when the time with the interviewee is limited.” Charles Hardy, “The Urban Archives’ ‘Discovering Community History Project,’” Oral History Association Newsletter, 15 (Winter 1981), 4–5; Jean Lester, Faces of Alaska from Barrow to Wrangell: A Glimpse of History Through Paintings, Photographs, and Oral Histories (Ester, AK: Poppies, 1992); Dr. Junichi Saga, Memories of Wind and Waves: A Self-Portrait of Lakeside Japan (New York: Kodansha America, 2002), 13–17.

26. Susan Paterno, “The Question Man,” American Journalism Review (October 2000), 52.

27. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 10; James MacGregor Burns, “The Truth of the Battlefield,” New York Times Book Review, March 6, 1994, 34.

28. Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 88. For an example of the blind spots in written history, see Lael Morgan, “Writing Minorities Out of History: Black Builders of the Alcan Highway,” Alaska History, 7 (Fall 1992), 1–13.

29. Robert Gildea, “The Long March of Oral History: Around 1968 in France,” Oral History, 38 (Spring 2010), 68.

30. Louise A. Tilly, “People’s History and Social Science History,” “Between Social Sciences: Responses to Louise A. Tilly by Paul Thompson, Luisa Passerini, Isabell Bertaux-Wiame, and Alessandro Portelli,” and “Louise A. Tilly’s Response,” International Journal of Oral History, 6 (February 1985), 5–46; David Lodge, Out of the Shelter (New York: Penguin, 1989), 185.

31. Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), xv–xviii.

32. Alexander Stille, “Prospecting for Truth in the Ore of Memory: Oral History Is Gaining New Respect Through Insights into Its Distortions,” New York Times, March 10, 2001.

33. New York Times, November 3, 2008.

34. Dixon, et al., “Definitions of Oral History,” 3–8; see also Martha J. Ross, “Interviewer or Intervener: Interpretation in the Oral History Interview,” Maryland Historian, 13 (Fall–Winter 1982), 3–6.

35. Joseph Roddy, “Oral History: Soundings from the Sony Age,” RF [Rockefeller Foundation] Illustrated, 3 (May 1977), 4; E. Culpepper Clark, Michael J. Hyde, and Eva M. McMahon, “Communication in the Oral History Interview: Investigating Problems of Interpreting Oral Data,” International Journal of Oral History, 1 (February 1980), 29; Saul Benison, “Oral History: A Personal View,” in Edward Clark, ed., Modern Methods in the History of Medicine (New York: Oxford, 1971), 291; Ronald J. Grele, introduction to International Annual of Oral History, 1990: Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 2; and Grele, ed., Envelopes of Sound (New York: Praeger, 1991).

36. Perry Blatz, “Craftsmanship and Flexibility in Oral History: A Pluralistic Approach to Methodology and Theory,” The Public Historian, 12 (Fall 1990), 7–22; Ross, “Interviewer or Intervener,” 3–6.; Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), xx–xxiii; Donald A. Ritchie, “An Interview with Michael Frisch,” OHMAR Newsletter, 11 (Fall 1988), 4–9.

37. See Ronald J. Grele, “The History of Oral History,” in Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Meyers, and Rebecca Sharpless, eds., Handbook of Oral History (New York: AltaMira, 2006), 43–103.

38. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York: Routledge, 1994), xv–xvi.

39. Robert Gildea, “The Long March of Oral History: Around 1968 in France,” Oral History, 38 (Spring 2010), 69.

40. William H. McNeill, “Continental Choo-Choo,” New York Review of Books, 48 (September 20, 2001), 63.

41. Eva McMahan, Elite Oral History Interviewing (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991); Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); and Terry L. Birdwhistell, “Re-Educating an Oral Historian: Putting Practice Into Theory,” unpublished paper, April 26, 1990.

42. Herman Kahn, review, American Historical Review, 73 (June 1968), 1471.

43. Gluck and Patai, eds., Women’s Words, 226–227; see also Charles T. Morrissey, “Riding a Mule Through the ‘Terminological Jungle’: Oral History and the Problems of Nomenclature,” Oral History Review, 12 (1984), 13–28.

44. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–but Some Don’t (New York: Penguin, 2012), 12.

45. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Memories Wanted for History of Ellis Island,” New York Times, November 24, 1985, 36.

46. Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (New York: Macmillan, 1966), xvii–xviii, 62.

47. John Neuenschwander, “Oral Historians and Long-Term Memory,” in Dunaway and Baum, eds., Oral History, 324–332; James W. Lomax and Charles T. Morrissey, “The Interview as Inquiry for Psychiatrists and Oral Historians: Convergence and Divergence in Skills and Goals,” The Public Historian, 11 (Winter 1989), 17–24; William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 687.

48. Robert N. Butler, “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged,” in Robert Kastenbaum, ed., New Thoughts on Old Age (New York: Springer, 1964), 265–280.

49. “Memory has always proven difficult for historians to confront,” Michael Frisch noted in his essay, “The Memory of History,” in A Shared Authority, 15–27; see also David Thelen, “Memory and History,” Journal of American History, 75 (March 1989), 1117–1129.

50. Louis P. Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 266–267.

51. Diane Manning, Hill Country Teacher: Oral Histories from the One-Room School and Beyond (Boston: Twayne, 1990), xx–xxi.

52. Ruth Young Watt, chief clerk of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, interviewed by Donald A. Ritchie, 1979, transcripts, Senate Historical Office Oral History Project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

53. On Kirk’s memory, the historian Gordon Prange commented: “Pearl Harbor’s happening the next day impressed the memory upon him.” Gordon Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 719–720.

54. See Jean Piaget, Memory and Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Edmund Blair Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting: Inquiries into the Nature of Memory (New York: Walker, 1988); and W. Walter Menninger, “Memory and History: What Can You Believe?” Archival Issues: Journal of the Midwest Archives Conference, 21 (1996), 97–106.

55. Nigel Hamilton, JFK, Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992), 532–533.

56. See Jaclyn Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall, eds., Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Evidence (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994).

57. David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988); and “The Conversation: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Interviews David Brinkley,” Washington Post Magazine, April 10, 1988, 29.

58. See Jackyn L. Jeffrey, “The Waco Tornado of 1953 as Symbol of Modernization and Rite of Initiation,” Sound Historian: Journal of the Texas Oral History Association, 1 (Fall 1993), 39.

59. Gildea, “The Long March of Oral History: Around 1968 in France,” 68.

60. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob reexamine memory and perspective in Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 254–261.

61. William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (New York: Macmillan, 1938), vii. See Charles T. Morrissey, “More Than Embers of Sentiment: Railroad Nostalgia and Oral History Memories of the 1920s and 1930s,” The Public Historian, 15 (Summer 1993), 29–35.

62. Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, Living With Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4–5.

63. Joel Gardner, “An Interview with Linda Shopes,” OHMAR Newsletter, 15 (Fall 1992), 9, 11; Linda Shopes, “Beyond Trivia and Nostalgia: Collaborating in the Construction of a Local History,” International Journal of Oral History, 5 (November 1984), 151–158.

64. Jo Stanley, “‘We were Skivvies/We had a Ball’: Shame and the Interwar Ships,” Oral History, 38 (Autumn 2010), 64–74.

65. Ronald Steel, “Harry of Sunnybrook Farm,” The New Republic, August 10, 1992, 34.

66. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), xv; see also Selma Leydesdorff, “The Screen of Nostalgia: Oral History and the Ordeal of Working-Class Jews in Amsterdam,” International Journal of Oral History, 7 (June 1986), 109–115.

67. Barbara Erskine, “Loss and Grief in Oral History,” Oral History Association of Australia Journal, 18 (1996), 1–6; Ken Ringle, “People Were Drowning All Around Us,” Washington Post, May 22, 1994; Amy Taxin, “Vietnamese Americans Try to Save Elders’ Stories,” October 28, 2012; Rhoda G. Lewin, ed., Witnesses to the Holocaust: An Oral History (Boston: Twayne, 1990).

68. David Glassberg, “Public History and the Study of Memory,” Public Historian, 18 (Spring 1996), 7–23; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

69. See Robert R. Weyeneth, “History, He Wrote: Murder, Politics, and the Challenges of Public History in a Community with a Secret,” The Public Historian, 16 (Spring 1994), 51–73.

70. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, 1, 15, 20, 51–52.

71. Kerwin Lee Klein, From History to Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 112–114.

72. Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giula: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 52, 57.

73. Anna Green, “Can Memory Be Collective?” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 108.

74. Jerry Lembcke, “Why Students Should Stop Interviewing Vietnam Veterans,” History News Network, May 27, 2013; Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 74, 78, 141.

75. Bob Greene, Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam (New York: Putnam, 1989); Bob Greene, “Vietnam Vets Recall the Spit Hitting the Fan,” Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, MA), January 29, 1989.

76. Lemkcke, The Spitting Image, 117–118.

77. Barbara Allen, “Oral History: The Folk Connection,” in Stricklin and Sharpless, eds., The Past Meets the Present, 15–26; see also William Lynwood Montell, The Saga of Coe Ridge: A Study in Oral History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970), vii–xxi.

78. Peter Burke, “History and Folklore: A Historiographical Survey,” Folklore, 115 (2004), 133–139; Micaela di Leonardo, “Oral History as Ethnographic Encounter,” Oral History Review, 15 (Spring 1987), 1–20; Kathyrn Marie Dudley, “In the Archive, In the Field: What Kind of Documentation Is an ‘Oral History’?” in Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson, eds., Narrative and Genre (New York: Routledge, 1998), 160–166; see also Peter Bartis, Folklife & Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques (Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, 1979); and Harry F. Wolcott, Ethnography: A Way of Seeing (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).

79. Burke, “History and Folklore: A Historiographical Survey,” 133–139.

80. New York Times, July 20, 2002; Don Fleming and David Taylor, “Alan Lomax Collection Finds Permanent Home at the Library of Congress,” Folklife Center News, 36 (Winter 2004), 3–5; Woody Guthrie: Take It Easy But Take It (Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease Museum, 2012), 64–65.

81. Barbara Allen, “Story in Oral History: Clues to Historical Consciousness,” Journal of American History, 79 (September 1992), 606–611; William Schneider, So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002), 37–52.

82. William Schneider, “Expanding the Definition of Oral History with Examples from Alaska and South Africa,” in Philippe Denis and James Worthington, eds., The Power of Oral History: Memory, Healing and Development (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: International Oral History Association, 2002), 2:839–849; Schneider, So They Understand, 66.

83. Dave Isay, ed., Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project (New York: Penguin, 2007).

84. Nancy Abelmann, Susan Davis, Cara Finnegan, and Peggy Miller, “What is StoryCorps, Anyway?” Oral History Review, 36 (Summer–Fall 2009), 255–260; Benjamin Filene, “Passionate Histories: ‘Outsider’ History-Makers and What They Teach Us,” The Public Historian, 34 (February 2012), 16–17.

85. “American Folklife Center Collects Reactions to the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks,” Folklife Center News, 223 (Fall 2001), 3–4; Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2001; Mary Marshall Clark, “The September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project: A First Report,” Journal of American History, 89 (September 2002), 569–579.

86. See James Hoopes, Oral History: An Introduction for Students (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 33–40.

87. Rick Harmon, “Oral Histories of the Federal Courts: The Oregon Experience,” Western Legal History, 1 (Summer/Fall 1988), 277–284.

88. American Historical Association, “Statement on Interviewing for Historical Documentation,” in Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1989).

89. The journalist Isabelle Shelton made this observation to interviewer Anne Ritchie.

90. See Daniel J. Walkowitz, “On Public History...” Organization of American Historians Newsletter, 12 (August 1984), 11; and James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, eds., Public History: Essays from the Field (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1999).

91. See Donald A. Ritchie, “The Oral History/Public History Connection,” in Public History: An Introduction, ed. Barbara J. Howe and Emory L. Kemp (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1986), 57–69.

92. Ritchie, “Oral History in the Federal Government,” 587–595; Lu Ann Jones, “Capturing the Spirit of History: Oral History in the National Park Service,” The Federalist: Newsletter of the Society for History in the Federal Government, 27 (Fall 2010), 3–5; Donna Sinclair, “Voices from the Forest: Oral Histories in the U.S. Forest Service,” The Federalist, 26 (Summer 2010), 11–12.

93. J. Todd Moye, “The Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project and Oral History in the National Park Service,” Journal of American History, 89 (September 2002), 580–587; Public Law 106–380; Veterans’ Oral History Project, Library of Congress.

94. Rob Perks, Paul Thompson, Alan Dein, Harriet McKay, and Polly Russell, “Twenty-five Years of National Life Stories, 1987–2012,” National Life Stories Review and Accounts, 2012/2013 (London: British Library, 2013), 10–11.

95. Hilary Stout, “Historians-for-Hire Chronicle Lives of Ordinary Folks,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 1998; L. Elizabeth Beattie, “The Advent of Independents: Oral Historians Who Stand Alone,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 26 (Summer 1992), 1.

96. Ibid., 3; “COH Starts Pioneer Mill Company Project,” Oral History Recorder: Newsletter of the Center for Oral History, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 18 (Summer 2001), 1.

97. Enid Hart Douglass, “Corporate History—Why?” The Public Historian, 3 (Summer 1981), 75–80.

98. Rob Perks, “‘Corporations Are People Too!’: Business and Corporate History in Britain,” Oral History, 38 (2010), 36–54; Sjperd Keulen and Ronald Kronze, “Back to Business: A Next Step in the Field of Oral History—the Usefulness of Oral History for Leadership and Organizational Research,” Oral History Review, 39 (Winter–Spring, 2012), 15–36.

99. “Oral History Supports Land Claims in West,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 17 (Fall 1983), 1, 8.

100. Jenny Hudson, “The Tape, the Book, the Client: One Big Happy Family?” Oral History Association of Australia Journal (1995), 59–63.

101. Perks, “Corporations Are People Too!,” 36–54.

102. Charles T. Morrissey, “Public Historians and Oral History: Problems of Concept and Methods,” The Public Historian, 2 (Winter 1980), 22–29; see also Charles T. Morrissey, “Truman and the Presidency—Records and Oral Recollections,” The American Archivist, 28 (January 1965), 53–61.

103. Stephen J. Lofgren, U.S. Army Guide to Oral History (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2006), 2.6

104. James Morris, “The Historian’s Craft,” The Woodrow Wilson Center Report, 4 (September 1992), 4–5.

105. Ritchie, “The Public History/Oral History Connection,” 57–69; Donald A. Ritchie, James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

106. Charles L. Sullivan, Gathering at the River: South Mississippi’s Camp Meetings (Perkinston: Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College Press, 1990), 10–11.

Chapter 2

1. If all else fails, a follow-up session may be conducted by telephone—although it is a poor substitute for a face-to-face oral history.

2. L. Elisabeth Beattie, “The Advent of Independents: Oral Historians Who Stand Alone,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 26 (Summer 1992), 6.

3. “Instant Internet Heroes,” New York Times, September 18, 2012.

4. Jo Reilly, “Oral History, Learning, and the Heritage Lottery Fund: Tips for a Good Application,” Oral History, 38 (Autumn 2010), 102–105: John Stedman, “Applying to the Heritage Lottery Fund: The Portsmouth Experience,” Oral History, 33 (Spring 2005), 93–102.

5. Graham Smith, Historical Insights: Focus on Research (Warwick, UK: History at the Higher Education Academy, 2010), 17.

6. See Joe Rossi, “Who Was That Masked Interviewer?” Oral History Recorder; Newsletter of the Center for Oral History, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 8 (Fall 1991), 1.

7. Links to these websites are located on the websites of the Oral History Association, the Oral History Society, and the International Oral History Association.

8. “Nuclear History Program Examines Past Policies of Nuclear Arms Management and Explores Assumptions About Nuclear Detente,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 23 (Spring 1989), 1, 8.

9. See, for example, Charles Scribner Jr., In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing, based on the oral histories by Joel R. Gardner (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1990).

10. Dean Albertson, “Remembering Oral History’s Beginning,” The Annual of the New England Oral History Association, 1 (1987–88), 3.

11. Donald A. Ritchie, “The Evolution of Oral History,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–19.

12. Matthew MacDonald, H-OralHist, November 1, 2011.

13. Alistair Thomson, H-OralHist, April 11, 2013; Jennifer M. Abraham, H-OralHist, April 12, 2013.

14. For the advantages and disadvantages of group interviewing, see Robert K. Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia L. Kendall, The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures (New York: Free Press, 1990), 135–169.

15. Michael Kenny, “The Patron-Client Relationship in Interviewing: An Anthropological View,” Oral History Review, 15 (Spring 1987), 75.

16. Donald A. Ritchie, “Back in the News: The Nixon Tape Transcripts,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 43 (Spring 2009), 9.

17. Doug Lambert blog, Randforce Associates, August 23, 2012: http://randforce.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=17.

18. Michael Dudding, H-OralHist, November 10, 2010; see “Processing the Interview—A Guide to Recording Oral History,” New Zealand History, http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/hands/processing-the-interview-a-guide-to-recording-oral-history.

19. Mary Larson, H-OralHist, October 22, 2012.

20. Betty Hoffman, H-OralHist, December 9, 2006; Miriam Meislik, H-OralHist, March 13, 2012.

21. Deborah Reid, “Talk Ain’t Cheap: How to Get a Perfect Transcript,” Techni-Type brochure.

22. Willow Roberts Powers, Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005), 10.

23. Elliot G. Mishler, Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 47–51; Henry H. Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster County (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 40.

24. Ledger (Queens NY), April 20, 2006.

25. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 214.

26. David Henige, Oral Historiography (New York: Longman, 1982), 107; Raphael Samuel, “Perils of the Transcript,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), 388–392; Kate Moore, “Perversion of the Word: The Role of Transcripts in Oral History,” Words and Silence: Bulletin of the International Oral History Association, 1 (June 1997), 14–35, and responses by Michael Frisch and Rosemary Block, 26–35; Michael Agar, “Transcript Handling: An Ethnographic Strategy,” Oral History Review, 15 (1986), 209–219.

27. Carl M. Marcy, interviewed by Donald A. Ritchie, September 14 to 16 November 16, 1983, transcripts, Senate Historical Office, 24–25, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

28. The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 744–746.

29. Shannon Page, “The Invisible Participant: The Role of the Transcriber in Interpreting Meaning in Oral History Research,” in Philippe Denis and James Worthington, eds., The Power of Oral History: Memory, Healing and Development (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal, 2002), 2:825–838.

30. Katherine R. Martin and Charles E. Martin, “Transcription Style: Choices and Variables at the Appalachian Oral History Project,” International Journal of Oral History, 6 (June 1985), 126–128.

31. Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1–44.

32. Graham Smith, H-OralHist, March 17, 2006.

33. Jack Dougherty and Candace Simpson, “Who Owns Oral History? A Creative Commons Solution,” in Doug Boyd, et al., Oral History in the Digital Age (Washington, DC: Institute of Library and Museum Services, 2012).

34. John A. Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 317.

35. See responses to an H-OralHist request by Greta Reisel Browning, September 19, 2002.

36. John Noble Wilford, “Fun and Comradeship,” New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1985, 3; George Tames, Eye on Washington: The Presidents Who’ve Known Me (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

37. Alben Barkley, That Reminds Me (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954); Donald A. Ritchie, “Alben W. Barkley: The President’s Man,” in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 127–162.

38. Molly Torsen and Jane Anderson, Intellectual Property and the Safeguarding of Traditional Cultures (Geneva: World Intellectual Property Organization, 2010).

39. Peggy A. Bolger, “Oral History in the Digital Age: Protecting IP Rights to Life Histories,” unpublished paper, Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

40. Kelly Anderson, H-OralHist, July 10, 2013.

41. San Francisco Chronicle, December 25, 2007; John A. Neuenschwander, “A Selective Review of Defamation Cases in 2009 Involving Professional Reputation,” OUPblog, January 26, 2010, https://blog.oup.com/2010/01/defamation-reputation/ give permalink.

42. Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 31–47.

43. “Secret Archive of Ulster Troubles Faces Subpoena,” New York Times, May 13, 2011.

44. Chris Bray, “The Whole Story Behind the Boston College Subpoenas,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 5, 2011; Christine Anne George, “Archives Beyond the Pale: Negotiating Legal and Ethical Entanglements After the Belfast Project,” American Archivist, 76 (Spring–Summer 2013), 47–67.

45. John A. Neuenschwander, “Belfast Project Researchers Lose Court Battle,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 46 (Summer 2012), 3–4; “Irish Historians Consider Significance of Fight over Papers at Boston College,” Inside Higher Ed, June 4, 2012; Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2012.

46. Boston Globe, July 11, 2012; see Oral History Society (UK) Statement on the Boston College Belfast Project, May 2014, H-OralHist, May 19, 2014.

47. Neuenshchwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 105–111.

48. Sherna Berger Gluck, Donald A. Ritchie, and Bret Eynon, “Reflections on Oral History in the New Millennium: Roundtable Comments,” Oral History Review, 26 (Summer–Fall 1999), 1–28.

49. “The Rocky Gap High School Oral History and Technology Project,” 110; Tamara Kennelly, “Oral History on the Internet: Narratives from Pioneering Black Students,” in Denis and Worthington, eds. The Power of Oral History, 1:86–99.

50. John A. Neuenschwander, “Legal Considerations in Electronic Publishing,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 28 (Fall 1994), 1, 3–4; Neuenschwander, “Putting Interviews on the Internet? A Look at Key Issues,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 33 (Fall 1998), 4–6; Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 87–96.

Chapter 3

1. Mercedes Vilanova, “Ronald Fraser (1930–2012): A Giant of Oral Sources.” Bulletin of the International Oral History Association, 20 (June 2012).

2. Clifford Terry, “The Real Studs,” Chicago Tribune, April 5, 1992.

3. Ken Adelman, “The Voice in the Box,” Washingtonian, 35 (March 2000), 32.

4. David Jenkins, “History in the Speaking,” Financial Times, July 29, 2011.

5. Ruth Finnegan, “A Note on Oral Tradition and Historical Evidence,” in David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Nashville: American Association of State and Local History, 1984), 113–114; see also Linda Shopes, “Beyond Trivia and Nostalgia: Collaborating in the Construction of a Local History,” International Journal of Oral History, 5 (November 1984), 151–58.

6. Ken MacDermot Roe, “The Secret to Interviewing Historians on the Radio,” History News Network (HNN), July 13, 2009, http://hnn.us/article/93752.

7. Will von Tagen. H-OralHist, October 16, 2012.

8. Donald A. Ritchie, “Beyond the Congressional Record: Congress and Oral History,” Maryland Historian, 13 (Fall–Winter 1982), 7–16.

9. John Brady, The Craft of Interviewing (NewYork: Vintage, 1977), 155.

10. Shirley Biagi, Interviews That Work: A Practical Guide for Journalists (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986), 56.

11. Paul Grabowicz, “Researching People on the Internet,” Online Journalism Review (July 24, 2002).

12. See Edward D. Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 33–47.

13. David King Dunaway, “Field Recording Oral History,” Oral History Review, 15 (Spring 1987), 34.

14. Andie Palmer, Alberta, Canada, H-OralHist, March 8, 2007.

15. Valerie J. Janesick, Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher: Choreographing the Story (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), 46–47.

16. Sherna Gluck, “What’s So Special about Women? Women’s Oral History,” in Dunaway and Baum, eds., Oral History, 231.

17. Shirley Biagi, Interviews That Work: A Practical Guide for Journalists (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986), 82–85. A useful collection of sample questions for recording family history, and models for other types of interviewing, can be found in William P. Fletcher, Recording Your Family History: A Guide to Preserving Oral History with Videotape, Audio Tape, Suggested Topics and Questions, Interview Techniques (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986.)

18. Charles T. Morrissey, “The Two-Sentence Format as an Interviewing Technique in Oral History Fieldwork,” Oral History Review, 15 (Spring 1987), 43–53.

19. Q&A, C-SPAN, May 20, 2012.

20. Elliot G. Mishler, Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 117–135; for the “human element” in fieldwork interviewing, see Robert A. Georges and Michael O. Jones, People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

21. William Cutler III, “Accuracy in Oral History Interviewing,” in Dunaway and Baum, eds., Oral History, 82. Although it is directed at pollsters, anyone asking questions should also consult Stanley L. Payne’s classic and oft-reprinted account The Art of Asking Questions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951).

22. William W. Moss, Oral History Program Manual (New York: Praeger, 1974), 43.

23. Studs Terkel, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 64–70.

24. Robert S. McNamara interviewed by Walt W. Rostow, January 8, 1975, Johnson Library.

25. Timothy P. Maga interviewed Secretary Muskie for his book on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policies.

26. “Lopate Still Hits the Books for 20th Anniversary,” New York Daily News, March 7, 2005.

27. Sally Adams with Wynford Hicks, Interviewing for Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2001), 50, 115.

28. Ronald Steel, “The Biographer as Detective: What Walter Lippmann Preferred to Forget,” New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1985.

29. Louis Achincloss, The House of the Prophet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 19.

30. Brian Lamb, Booknotes: Stories from American History (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), 257.

31. Richard Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

32. Sean Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration,” Oral History, 34 (Spring 2006), 37–39.

33. Jenny Harding, “Talk About Care: Emotions, Culture and Oral History,” Oral History, 38 (Autumn 2010), 33–42.

34. Carrie Hamilton, “On Being a ‘Good’ Interviewer: Empathy, Ethics, and the Politics of Oral History,” Oral History, 36 (Autumn 2008), 36.

35. Valerie Yow, “Do I Like Them Too Much?” Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice-Versa,” Oral History Review, 24 (Summer 1997), 55–79; Sherna Berger Gluck, “From California to Kufr Nameh and Back: Reflections on 40 Years of Feminist Oral History,” in Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembryzycki, eds., Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 27–28.

36. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), xiv–xv, xix–xxii, 615–619.

37. Adams with Hicks, Interviewing for Journalists, 45.

38. Brady, The Craft of Interviewing, 104; Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, act 1.

39. Alexander Freund, “Towards an Ethics of Silence? Negotiating Off-the-Record Events and Identity in Oral History,” in Sheftel and Zembryzycki, eds., Oral History Off the Record, 223–3.

40. Percora’s son, Louis, and nephew, Louis Stephens, recalled his acute memory and persistent reminiscing in interviews that I conducted while writing “The Pecora Wall Street Expose,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Roger Bruns, eds., Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1972–1974 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1975), 4:2555–732.

41. For a case study, see Mary Elizabeth Aube, “Oral History and the Remembered World: Cultural Determinants from French Canada,” International Journal of Oral History, 10 (February 1989), 31–49.

42. Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd, Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 1; Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview, 74–79.

43. Lynda Mannik, “Remembering, Forgetting, and Feeling with Photographs,” in Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson, eds., Oral History and Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 77–95; and Paula Hamilton, “The Proust Effect: Oral History and the Senses,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 218–232.

44. Pete Daniel, Deep’n as It Come (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Andrea Hammer, “Federal Visions/Regional Revisions: Oral History’s Role in Revisiting FSA Portraits of Southern Maryland” (paper delivered to the Oral History Association meeting, October 1992, Cleveland, OH). The Alaskan portrait artist Jean Lester interviewed her subjects as she painted them to gain a deeper perspective on their personalities. See Jean Lester, Faces of Alaska (Ester, AK: Poppies, 1988), and Faces of Alaska from Barrow to Wrangell (Ester, AK: Poppies, 1992).

45. “Twenty Years of Oral History,” Oral History Recorder [newsletter of the Center for Oral History, University of Hawaii at Manoa], 13 (Spring 1996), 1.

46. James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: Knopf, 1982), 169–204.

47. William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968–1973 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1996), 479.

48. For an example of this type of strategic planning, see Mary Jo Deering, “Oral History and School Integration Research: A Case Study,” Oral History Review, 7 (1979), 27–41.

49. John T. Chirban, Interviewing in Depth: The Interactive-Relational Approach (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), xii, 90.

50. James Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, The Active Interview (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 5; Mary J. Festle, “Qualifying the Quantifying: Assessing the Quality of Life of Lung Transplant Recipients,” Oral History Review, 29 (Winter–Spring 2002), 85.

51. Washington Post, February 20, 2001; Marc Pachter, ed., Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); see also Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Knopf, 1974).

52. Donald A. Ritchie, “Learning to Listen,” Southwest Oral History Association Newsletter, 13 (Summer 1987), 1–7; Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack, “Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analysis,” in Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphni Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 11–26.

53. See Martha J. Ross, “Interviewer or Intervener: Interpretation in the Oral History Interview,” Maryland Historian, 13 (Fall–Winter 1982), 3–6.

54. Adams with Hicks, Interviewing for Journalists, 9, 15, 33.

55. Abra Schnur, H-OralHist, April 30, 2013.

56. Moss, Oral History Program Manual, 39–40.

57. Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York: Random House, 1993), 235.

58. Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, eds., Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13; Judith Miller, “Erasing the Past: Europe’s Amnesia about the Holocaust,” New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1986, 3–15; Daon and Petrie Kladstrup, Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 7.

59. Alexander von Plato, quoted in Miroslav Vaněk, Around the Globe: Rethinking Oral History with its Protagonists (Prague: Karolinium Press, 2013), 115.

60. Richard S. Tedlow, Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 144–49.

61. Larry Tye, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend (New York: Random House, 2009), vii–viii, 266.

62. Sally Adams with Wynford Hicks, Interviewing for Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2001), 32–33; Amelia Fry, correspondence with the author, August 1993.

63. Mike Walters, “Report on ‘Siberia’ Interviews,” Working Together: A Regional Approach to Community Traditions and History in Idaho, Newsletter, 5 (Fall 1982), 4.

64. Albert Lichtblau, “Case Study: Opening Up Memory Space: The Challenges of Audiovisual History,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 281.

65. Abe Louise Young, H-OralHist, November 30, 2011.

66. “Lives of Artists with Disabilities,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 41(Spring 2007), 3.

67. Richard F. Fenno, Jr., “Observation, Context, and Sequence in the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review, 80 (March 1986), 2–15.

68. Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview, 79–81.

69. Sally Ninham, H-OralHist, May 9, 2012. Also see the use of translators in Olivia Bennett and Christopher McDowell, Displaced: The Human Cost of Development and Resettlement (New York: Palgrave, 2012).

70. Jeff Friedman, H-OralHist, May 23, 2007.

71. John Wolford, H-OralHist, February 14, 2006.

72. Walter Liniger, “The Original Down Home Blues Show,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 22 (Spring 1988), 1.

Chapter 4

1. “Statement on Interviewing for Historical Documentation,” Statement on Professional Conduct (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1990), 25–27; Perspectives: The American Historical Association Newsletter, 27 (October 1989), 8; see also the American Historical Association website.

2. Barbara Tuchman, “Distinguishing the Significant from the Insignificant,” in David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1996), 96–97; Shirley Biagi, Interviews That Work: A Practical Guide for Journalists (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986), 16–19.

3. Barth Healey, “‘I’m Not One of Those Who Say Kissinger is Paranoid,’ Mr. Nixon Said,’” New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 6, 1992, 20.

4. The interviewer was Martha Ross, who cited it frequently in oral history workshops.

5. Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation, November 13, 2012, http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy.

6. Donald A. Ritchie, Holly Cowan Shulan, Richard S. Kirkendall, and Terry L. Birdwhistell, “Interviews as Historical Evidence: A Discussion of New Standards of Documentation and Access,” The History Teacher, 24 (February 1991), 226–228.

7. Joanna Bornat, “Remembering and Reworking Emotions: The Reanalysis of Emotion in an Interview,” Oral History, 38 (Autumn 2010), 44; April Gallwey, “The Rewards of Using Archived Oral Histories in Research: The Case of the Millennium Memory Bank,” Oral History, 41 (Spring 2013), 37–50.

8. Vaněk, Around the Globe: Rethinking Oral History with its Protagonists, 161.

9. The interview with Sen. Fong was conducted by Michaelyn P. Chou of the University of Hawaii. See Donald A. Ritchie, “Beyond the Congressional Record: Congress and Oral History,” The Maryland Historian, 13 (Fall–Winter 1982), 7–16.

10. See Ronald J. Grele, “Why Call It Oral History? Some Ruminations from the Field,” Pennsylvania History, 60 (October 1993), 506–509.

11. Philip Brooks’s remarks are included in Elizabeth I. Dixon, et al., “Definitions of Oral History,” Oral History at Arrowhead: The Proceedings of the First National Colloquium on Oral History (Los Angeles: Oral History Association, 1969), 6–7; see also Ronald J. Grele, introduction to International Annual of Oral History, 1990: Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), 1–8.

12. Patrick Sharma, “Oral History, Policy History, and Information Abundance and Scarcity,” American Historical Association Perspectives on History (April 2012), 26–27.

13. Michael Grunwald, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 461.

14. Lewis L. Gould, ed. Watching Television Come of Age: The New York Times Review by Jack Gould (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).

15. Duff Cooper, Talleyrand (New York: Fromm International, 1986 [1932]), 86; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), 17.

16. See for example Robert W. Cherny, “Constructing a Radical Identity: History, Memory, and the Seafaring Stories of Harry Bridges,” Pacific Historical Review, 70 (November 2001), 571–599.

17. Elizabeth Faue, Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 236.

18. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: Vintage, 1979).

19. John C. Dann, The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xv–xxi; see also Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Charles T. Morrissey, “Beyond Oral Evidence: Speaking (Con)structively about Oral History,” Archival Issues, 17 (November 2, 1992), 90.

20. “Stewart E, McClure, Chief Clerk, Senate Committee on Labor, Education, and Public Welfare,” interviewed by Donald A. Ritchie for the Senate Historical Office, December 1982–May 1983, transcripts, Library of Congress, 118.

21. Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 19–25; Joan Fairweather, “Stories Matter: Oral History and Land Claims in Canada and South America” in Philippe Denis and James Worthington, eds., The Power of Oral History: Memory, Healing and Development (Pietmaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal, 2002), 611–626.

22. Bongani Finca, “Learning to Bless Our Memories,” in Philippe Denis, ed., Orality, Memory and the Past: Listening to the Black Clergy Under Colonialism and Apartheid (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster, 2000), 16.

23. Max Hastings, “Drawing the Wrong Lesson,” New York Review of Books (March 11, 2010), 41; Ritchie, et al., “Interviews as Historical Evidence,” 223–238.

24. Dan K. Utley, “From the Ground Up: Oral History and Historical Archaeology,” Sound Historian: Journal of the Texas Oral History Association, 1 (Fall 1993), 24.

25. See T. G. Ashplant, “Anecdote as Narrative Resource in Working-Class Life Stories: Parody, Dramatization and Sequence,” in Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson, eds., Narrative and Genre (New York: Routledge, 1998), 99–113.

26. Donald A. Ritchie, “Learning to Listen,” Southwest Oral History Association Newsletter (Summer 1987), 1, 3–7.

27. Blair Worden, “Lyrical Historian,” New York Review of Books, 40 (July 15, 1993), 12; Johnson quoted in Christopher Matthews, Hardball: How Politics Is Played—Told by One Who Knows the Game (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 133.

28. “Southern History and the Politics of Recent Memory: Responses to the C. Vann Woodward Interview,” Radical History Review, 38 (1987), 143–151.

29. New York Times, February 21, 2010.

30. Kathleen M. Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History, 80 (September 1993), 143–151.

31. Pamela Sugiman, “I Can Hear Lois Now: Corrections to My Story of the Internment of Japanese Canadians—‘For the Record,’” in Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembryzycki, eds., Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 149–167.

32. Allan Nevins, “Oral History: How and Why It Was Born,” in Dunaway and Baum, eds., Oral History, 34.

33. Mark A. Stoler, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century (Boston: Twayne, 1989). Apart from his four-volume biography of Marshall, Pogue’s interviews were published in Larry I. Bland, et al., eds., George C. Marshall Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue (Lexington, VA: George C. Marshall Research Foundation, 1991).

34. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 1:xv.; Lynn A. Bonfield, “Conversations with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: The Use of Oral History,” The American Archivist, 43 (Fall 1980), 466.

35. Charlotte Allen, “Spies Like Us: When Sociologists Deceive Their Subjects,” Lingua Franca, 7 (November 1997), 31–39.

36. Penny Robinson, H-OralHist, November 7, 2012.

37. Sherna Berger Gluck, “We Will Not Be Another Algeria: Women’s Mass Organizations, Changing Consciousness, and the Potential for Women’s Liberation in a Future Palestinian State,” International Annual of Oral History, 1990, 225.

38. William W. Moss, “Anonymity of Sources in Oral History,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 23 (Fall 1989), 1, 8.

39. Oral History Association, Evaluation Guidelines (Los Angeles: Oral History Association, 1992), 2.

40. Howard E. McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 189.

41. Suzy Subways, H-OralHist, July 10, 2013.

42. Edward Rothstein, “He Gave Voice to Many, Among Them Himself,” New York Times, November 3, 2008.

43. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–7; Luisa Passerini, “Work, Ideology and Consensus Under Fascism.” History Workshop Journal, 8 (1979), 82–108.

44. Heather Howard, H-OralHist, April 25, 2007; Patricia Leavy, Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5–7, 48.

45. Kerwin Lee Klein, From History to Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 112–113.

46. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 79.

47. Ibid., 16.

48. Mary Chamberlain, “Narrative Theory,” in Charlton, et al., Handbook of Oral History, 384–407.

49. See Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

50. Anna Green, “Can Memory Be Collective?” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 96–111.

51. Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 112.

52. Ibid., 9.

53. Ibid., 184–206.

54. Paula Hamilton, and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), xi.

55. Alistair Thompson, “Memory and Remembering in Oral History,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 82–90; and Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Berkshire, UK: McGraw-Hill House, 2003), 63–64.

56. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 93; Caitlin Tyler-Richards, “Oral History in Disaster Zones,” OUP blog, December 14, 2012.

57. Stephen Sloan, “Oral History and Hurricane Katrina: Reflections on Shouts and Silences,” Oral History Review, 35 (June 2008), 176–186.

58. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory, 187.

59. New York Times, February 14, 2003.

60. Mary Marshall Clark interview, “The Oral History of 9/11,” PND: Philanthropy News Digest (September 11, 2003); Clark, “Case Study: Field Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 262–263.

61. Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2010 [1998]), xi–xiii.

62. David Beorlegu Zarranz, H-OralHist, September 19, 2013; Joanna Bornat, “Remembering in Later Life: Generating Individual and Social Change,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 212–213.

63. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 153, 159, 165, 173.

64. Valerie J. Janesick, Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher: Choreographing the Story (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), 17.

65. Grele quoted in Vaněk, Around the Globe, 75–77.

66. Joseph Roddy, “Oral History: Soundings from the Sony Age,” RF [Rockefeller Foundation] Illustrated, 3 (May 177); Charles T. Morrissey, “Oral History and the Boundaries of Fiction,” The Public Historian, 7 (Spring 1985), 42.

67. Morrissey, “Oral History and the Boundaries of Fiction,” 43; Robert H. Ferrell and Francis H. Heller, “Plain Faking?,” American Heritage (May–June 1995), 14, 16.

68. Richard Rayner, “Channeling Ike,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.

69. Cullom Davis, “Success and Excess: Oral History at High Tide,” in David Stricklin and Rebecca Sharpless, eds., The Past Meets the Present: Essays on Oral History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 77–85.

70. David Lodge, Home Truths, A Novella (New York: Penguin, 1999), 39–40.

71. Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Teller and the Tape,” New York Review of Books, May 30, 1985, 3–5.

72. Henry Fairlie, review of Robert F. Kennedy and His Times, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The New Republic, 179 (September 9, 1978), 32.

73. Unlike other reviewers who praised Terkel’s Hard Times’ uplifting, inspirational spirit, Frisch thought it depressing that even thirty years after a massive breakdown in the economic system Americans still could not bring themselves to examine their culture and institutions. Reading the other views, he decided that most had been more concerned with the celebratory message of the interviews for the dispirited America of the 1970s than with the reality of the 1930s. Donald A. Ritchie, “An Interview with Michael Frisch,” OHMAR Newsletter, 11 (Fall 1988), 5; Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 5–13.

74. Bonfield, “Conversations with Schlesinger,” 33.

75. Diane Johnson, “I, The Jury: Why This Novelist Can’t Resist a Good Book Panel,” New York Times Book Review, April 10, 1994, 14; see also Ina Yalof’s rebuttal, “Thinking Is Required,” New York Times Book Review, May 8, 1994, 27.

76. Timothy Foote, “Battle Stars: Recollections of the Pacific War,” Washington Post Book World, May 8, 1994, 27.

77. Linda Shopes, “Developing a Critical Dialogue About Oral History: Some Notes Based on an Analysis of Book Reviews,” Oral History Review, 14 (1986), 9–25.

78. Ritchie, et al., “Interviews as Historical Evidence,” 223–224.

79. Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th ed., revised by John Grossman and Alice Bennett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 150, 206–207.

Chapter 5

1. Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster County (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 40; Richard Sweterlitsch, “Oral History and Myth-Making: Confessions of a Researcher Turned Producer,” Annual of the New England Oral History Association, 1 (1987–88), 10–17.

2. Pamela M. Henson and Terri A. Schorzman, “Videohistory: Focusing on the American Past,” Journal of American History, 78 (September 1991), 620; Joel Gardner, “Oral History and Video in Theory and Practice,” Oral History Review, 12 (1984), 105–111; Brad Jolly, Videotaping Local History (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 75–87; “History Leaves the Page: Videotaping Oral History,” HAIpoints [History Associates, Inc. newsletter] (Winter–Spring 1997), 2–3.

3. See Thomas L. Charlton, “Videotaped Oral Histories: Problems and Prospects,” American Archivist, 47 (Summer 1984), 228–236.

4. Gardner, “Oral History and Video,” 108–109.

5. See “The Mirror with a Memory,” in James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: Knopf, 1982), 205–231.

6. L. Elizabeth Beatime, “Video: The Saving Face,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 25 (Winter 1992), 6.

7. Larry Miller, H-OralHist, May 10, 2012.

8. W. Richard Whitaker, “Why Not Try Videotaping Oral History?” Oral History Review, 9 (1981), 120.

9. Charlton, “Videotaped Oral Histories,” 235.

10. Joseph Wilson, “The Afro-American Labor Leadership Oral/Video History Series,” Oral History Review, 14 (1986), 27–33.

11. Henson and Schorzman, “Videohistory,” 620; Pamela Henson, “Excerpts from an Interview with John Schuchman,” OHMAR Newsletter, 8 (Fall 1990), 6–10.

12. Tom Lean, “But of course your little box can’t see what I’m doing, can it?” National Life Stories (London: British Library, 2010–2011), 13

13. Donald A. Ritchie, Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 159–182.

14. Joanna Hay, “Case Study: Using Video in Oral History—Learning from One Woman’s Experiences,” in Doug Boyd, Steve Cohen, Brad Rakerd, and Dean Rehberger, Oral History in the Digital Age (Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2012).

15. Henson and Schorzman, “Videohistory,” 623.

16. Hank Greenspan, H-OralHist, October 3, 2012.

17. Jim Small, “A Visual Recording,” CRM Bulletin [National Park Service], 13 (1990), 1, 4–5.

18. Lean, “But of course your little box can’t see what I’m doing, can it?,” 12.

19. See Buffalo Trace Oral History Project, Louis B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries website.

20. Brien R. Williams, “Doing Video Oral History,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History,” 272.

21. Jolly, Videotaping Oral History, 109–121; this section also draws on a video workshop conducted by the producer Brien Williams, OHMAR meeting, St. Mary’s College, St. Mary’s City, MD, April 1992.

22. Dennis Curtin, “A Short Course on Digital Video,” www.shortcourse.com.

23. Whitaker, “Why Not Try Videotaping Oral History?,” 115–124.

24. Doug Boyd, “Microphone Strategies for Recording Video for Oral History Interviews,” in Boyd, et al., Oral History in the Digital Age; Craig Breaden, H-OralHist, October 5, 2012.

25. Documentary filmmaker William Gazecki, “Breaking into Documentary Filmmaking,” Digital VideoEditing, www.mightycompanions.org.

26. David H. Mould, “Composing Visual Images for the Oral History Interview,” International Journal of Oral History, 7 (November 1986), 198–205; Jolly, Videotaping Local History, 50–51.

27. Richard Campbell, “Don Hewitt’s Durable Hour,” Columbia Journalism Review (September–October 1993), 26.

28. Terri A. Schorzman, ed., A Practical Introduction to Videohistory: The Smithsonian Institution and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Experiment (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1993), 59–65, 210–215.

29. Dan Arden, “Producing Videos: Reports from the Field,” presentation at the 1996 meeting of the Oral History Association.

30. Gazecki, “Breaking into Documentary Filmmaking.”

31. Charlton, “Videotaped Oral Histories,” 234.

32. Schorzman, Practical Introduction to Videohistory, 41–42, 206–208.

33. William W. Moss and Peter C. Mazikana, Archives, Oral History, and Oral Tradition, a RAMP [Records and Archives Management Programme] Study (Paris: UNESCO, 1986), 44; Jolly, Videotaping Local History, 19–37.

34. Verena Alberti, “How to Deal with Sound Archives: Dilemmas on the Technical Preservation of Oral History Archives,” Crossroads of History: Experience, Memory, Orality (Istanbul: International Oral History Association, 2000), 1:1–8.

35. Doug Boyd, H-OralHist, December 13, 2005; and Boyd, “Achieving the Promise of Oral History in a Digital Age,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 290–291; Boyd also developed the highly useful website Oral History in the Digital Age.

36. William J. Staples, “Videotape is Dead,” Industrial Photography (March 1993), 14–15.

37. Juliana Nykolaiszyn, “Preserving Born-Digital Oral History,” in Carol Smallwood and Elaine Williams, eds., Preserving Local Writers, Genealogy, Photographs, Newspapers, and Related Material (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 258.

38. Nykolaiszyn, “Preserving Born-Digital Oral History,” 258–261.

39. Boyd, “Achieving the Promise of Oral History in the Digital Age,” 291–299.

40. Michael Frisch and Douglas Lambert, “Case Study: Between the Raw and the Cooked in Oral History: Notes from the Kitchen,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 333–248.

41. Max D. Baumgarten, “Organizing Testimonies in the Digital Age,” The Federalist: Newsletter of the Society for History in the Federal Government, 38 (Summer 2013), 5–6.

42. Whitaker, “Why Not Try Videotaping Oral History,” 123; Shaw, “Public Access Television,” 7.

43. “Oral History and the Arts,” plenary session, OHMAR conference, April 18, 1982, transcript, OHMAR papers, George Washington University.

44. “The Film and Video Archive Project,” Oral History Recorder [Newsletter for the Center for Oral History, University of Hawaii at Manoa], 6 (Spring 1989), 2–3.

45. Ibid., 8.

46. Henson and Schorzman, “Videohistory,” 625.

47. E. John B. Allen, “A Sporting Chance: Oral History and Films,” Annual of the New England Oral History Association, 1 (1987-88), 23.

48. Dean Albertson, “Remembering Oral History’s Beginnings,” Annual of the New England Oral History Association, 1 (1987–88), 7–8.

49. “Film Documents Kentucky’s Civil-Rights Movement,” Louisville Courier-Journal, January 21, 2002.

50. Michael Frisch, “Oral History, Documentary, and the Mystification of Power: A Critique of Vietnam: A Television History,” in A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 159–178.

51. Sweterlitsch, “Oral History and Myth-Making,” 12; see also Brien Williams, “Recording Videohistory: A Perspective,” in Schorzman, Practical Introduction to Videohistory, 138–154.

52. At www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/.

53. Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air (New York; Berkeley, 1978), 18.

54. Sweterlitsch, “Oral History and Myth-Making,” 15–16; Allen, “A Sporting Chance,” 19–20.

55. Allen, “A Sporting Chance,” 23–24; Robert Brent Toplin, “The Filmmaker as Historian,” American Historical Review, 93 (December 1988), 1219–1227.

56. “The Rights and Responsibilities of Historians in Regard to Historical Films and Video,” Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter, 30 (September 1992), 15, 17.

57. Jolly, Videotaping Local History, 77.

58. Anne Valk and Holly Ewald, “Bringing a Hidden Pond to Public Attention: Increasing Impact Through Digital Tools,” Oral History Review, 40 (Winter/Spring 2013), 8–24.

59. Mary Rose Bosewell [review of “The Boott Cotton Mills Museum,”] Oral History Review, 20 (Spring–Fall 1992), 88–89.

60. Beverly Serrell, “Are They Watching? Visitors and Video in Exhibitions,” Curator, 45 (January 2002), 50–64.

61. Doug Boyd, H-OralHist, December 16, 2005.

62. See www.densho.org.

63. Kelly Shrum, et al, “Oral History in the Digital Age,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 508–112.

64. Lynn A. Bonfield, “Conversations with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: The Use of Oral History,” American Archivist, 43 (Fall 1980), 471.

65. Beattie, “Video: The Saving Face,” Shaw, “Public Access Television,” 7.

Chapter 6

1. Donald A. Ritchie, “A Sense of Collective Responsibility: An Interview with Ronald J. Grele,” OHMAR Newsletter, 16 (Fall 1993), 7; Elizabeth I. Dixon, et al., “Definitions of Oral History,” Oral History at Arrowhead: The Proceedings of the First National Colloquium on Oral History (Los Angeles: Oral History Association, 1969), 5–7.

2. Johnnie Russell, in conversation with Katharine Haydon, “Enriching a Paper Archive with Oral History,” National Life Stories (London: British Library, 2010–2011), 20–21.

3. Barbara Tuchman, “Distinguishing the Significant from the Insignificant,” in David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, 2nd ed.(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1996), 96; see also Wolfgang Weber, “Mass of Trash” of “Veins of Gold”? An Investigative Report on the Relationship Between Oral History and Archives (Regensburg, Austria: S. Roderer Verlag, 2002), 33–37.

4. Donald A. Ritchie, “Oral Histories May Help Scholars Plow Through the Rapidly Accumulating Mass of Federal Paper,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2, 1988, A44.

5. James E. Fogerty, “Filling in the Gap: Oral History in the Archives,” American Archivist, 46 (Spring 1983), 148–157.

6. Ibid., 151; see also Ronald L. Filippelli, “Oral History and the Archives,” American Archivist, 39 (October 1976), 479–483.

7. Fogerty, “Filling in the Gap,” 153–154; William W. Moss and Peter C. Mazikana, Archives, Oral History and Oral Tradition: A RAMP Study (Paris: UNESCO, 1986), 4, 25–26, 29.

8. Ritchie, “A Collective Sense of Responsibility,” 7.

9. John T. Mason Jr., interviewed by Benis M. Frank, July 16, 1983, transcripts, Marine Corps Oral History Program, Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, DC.

10. Oral History Evaluation Guidelines (Los Angeles: Oral History Association, 1992), 1–2.

11. Cary C. Wilkins, ed., The Guide to Kentucky Oral History Collections (Frankfort: Kentucky Oral History Commission, 1991); “California Legislature Creates State OH Program,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 20 (Fall 1986), 3.

12. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission has shied away from giving grants for oral histories, with a single exception: the commission concluded that oral traditions were so integral in Native American historical consciousness that efforts to preserve its documentation would be incomplete without oral sources.

13. Interview with Mary Marshall Clark, “The Oral History of 9/11,” PDN: Philanthropy News Digest, September 11, 2003, http://pndblog.typepad.com/pndblog/2011/09/ten-years-later-mary-marshall-clark.html.

14. See Baylor University Institute for Oral History Workshop on the Web, “Funding for Digital Oral History Projects,” www.baylor.edu/oralhistory.

15. Federal copyright law stipulates that a transfer of ownership “is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed.” See Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 3–17.

16. Nancy MacKay, Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), 22; Beth M. Robertson, H-OralHist, May 7, 2013.

17. MacKay, Curating Oral Histories, 34–35, 48–49, 56.

18. Marion Matters, Oral History Cataloging Manual (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1995).

19. See Jennifer Rutner and Roger C. Schonfeld, Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians, Final Report from ITHAKA S+R, December 10, 2012.

20. For archival finding aids, see Moss and Mazikana, Archives, Oral History and Oral Tradition, 62–63; for library finding aids, see Cullom Davis, Kathryn Back, and Kay MacLean, Oral History from Tape to Type (Chicago: American Library Association, 1977), 87–101.

21. Michael Frisch and Douglas Lambert, “Between the Raw and the Cooked in Oral History: Notes from the Kitchen,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 333–348.

22. Robert B. Perks, “Messiah with the Microphone? Oral Historians, Technology, and Sound Archives,” in Ritche, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 315–332.

23. Christopher Ann Paton, “Whispers in the Stacks: The Problem of Sound Recordings in Archives,” American Archivist, 53 (Spring 1990), 274–280.

24. Louis Starr, letter to David Wallace, February 16, 1962, reprinted in Oral History Association Newsletter, 24 (Spring 1990), 2.

25. Paton, “Whispers in the Stacks,” 276–277; Moss and Mazikana, Archives, Oral History and oral Tradition, 43–45.

26. Perks, “Messiah with the Microphone?,” 322; Ronda L. Sewald, “Descriptive Challenges of Audio Archiving,” Recorded Sound: Society of American Archivists Newsletter (Spring 2012), 4–5.

27. Larry I. Bland, ed., George C. Marshall Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue (Lexington, VA: George C. Marshall Research Foundation, 1991).

28. Virginia Danielson, “Stating the Obvious: Lessons Learned Attempting to Access Archival Audio Collections,” Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000).

29. John Blau, “Do Burned CDs Have Short Life Span?” PC World (January 10, 2006), msn.pcworld.com.

30. Doug Boyd, “Achieving the Promise of Oral History in the Digital Age,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 299–301.

31. Robert B. Perks, “Messiah with a Microphone? Oral Historians, Technology, and Sound Archives,” in Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 326–327.

32. Andy Kolovos, “Field Recording in the Digital Age,” Vermont Folklife Center.

33. “Nate Shaw Tapes Damaged in Hurricane, Restored by UNC Southern Folklife Collection,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 24 (Fall 1990), 3; Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Knopf, 1974).

34. “Walls of Sound: The Sound Conservation Centre,” BBC Radio 4 documentary on the Sound Conservation Centre at the British Library, March 30, 2011.

35. Boyd, “Achieving the Promise of Oral History in the Digital Age,” 301.

36. Elizabeth P. Jacox, “Making an Oral History Collection Available to the Public,” Idaho Oral History Center Newsletter, 4 (Summer 1982), 3–4.

37. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980), 189.

38. Roy Rosenzweig, “Automating Your Oral History Program: A Guide to Data Base Management on a Microcomputer,” International Journal of Oral History, 5 (November 1984), 174–187.

39. Kenneth Thibodeau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” The State of Digital Preservation, An International Perspective (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Services, 2002); William Schneider and Daniel Grahek, Project Jukebox: Where Oral History and Technology Come Together (Anchorage: Center for Information Technology, University of Anchorage, 1992), 1–8.

40. Frederick J. Graboske, “Digitizing the United States Marine Corps Oral History Collection,” in Philippe Denis and James Worthington, eds., The Power of Oral History: Memory, Healing and Development (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: International Oral History Association, 2002), 1:72–85.

41. Ibid.; Schneider and Grahek, Project Jukebox.

42. John Naughton, “Gordon E. Moore: No Goodbyes for World’s Mr. Chips,” The Observer, August 8, 1999; Thibideau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years.”

43. Bruce H. Bruemmer, “Access to Oral History: A National Agenda,” American Archivist, 54 (Fall 1991), 494–501; Meg Bellinger, “Understanding Digital Preservation: A Report from OCLC,” The State of Digital Preservation, An International Perspective (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Services, 2002).

44. Matters, Oral History Cataloging Manual; Cathryn A. Gallacher and Dale E. Treleven, “Developing an Online Database and Printed Directory and Subject Guide to Oral History Collections,” Oral History Review, 16 (Spring 1988), 33–68.

45. Helen R. Tibbo and Lokman I. Meho, “Finding Finding Aids on the World Wide Web,” American Archivist, 64 (Spring–Summer 2001), 61–77.

46. Sherna Berger Gluck, “Pace, Performance, Pitch—and Even Poetry: The CSULB Virtual Oral/Aural History Project,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 36 (Spring 2002), 4–5; see www.csulb.edu/voaha.

47. Donald A. Ritchie, “www.oralhistory.infinity,” Oral History Review, 26 (Summer–Fall, 1999), 13–15. Paul Thompson, “Sharing and Reshaping Life Stories: Problems and Potential in Archiving Research Narratives,” in Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson, eds., Narrative and Genre (New York: Routledge, 1998), 180.

48. Mary Ann Larson, “Guarding Against Cyberpirates,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 33 (Fall 1999), 4–5.

49. Karen Brewster, “Oral Recordings on the Internet: Finding the Issues,” paper delivered at the American Folklore Society, October 17–21, 2001, Anchorage, Alaska.

50. Sherna Berger Gluck, “Brief Note on CSULB Project Methodology and Procedures,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 36 (Spring 2002), 6.

51. “Statement on Interviewing for Historical Documentation,” Perspectives: The American Historical Association Newsletter, 27 (October 1989), 8.

52. David M. Oshinsky, “Oral History: Playing by the Rules,” Journal of American History, 77 (September 1990), 609–614; Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983).

53. Jon Wiener, “The Alger Hiss Case, the Archives, and Allen Weinstein,” Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association, 30 (February 1992), 12; Donald A. Ritchie, “Interviewers and Archivists,” Society of American Archivists Newsletter, July 1990, 13; Donald A. Ritchie, Holly Cowan Shulman, Richard S. Kirkendall, and Terry L. Birdwhistell, “Interviews as Historical Evidence: A Discussion of New Standards of Documentation and Access,” History Teacher, 24 (February 1991), 234.

54. Ritchie, et al., “Interviews as Historical Evidence,” 235–236.

55. Frederick J. Stielow, The Management of Oral History Sound Archives (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 36; Ritchie, et al., “Interviewers and Archivists,” 13; National Archives and Records Administration, “Procedures for Initiating Cooperative Oral History Projects,” typescript report available from the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

56. “National Archives Adopts Oral History Plan,” The Federalist: Newsletter of the Society for History in the Federal Government, 8 (Fall 1987), 7–8.

57. Pamela Henson, “Smithsonian Leads the Way Among Federal Agencies,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 13 (Winter 1979), 1, 6; Carol Dreyfus and Thomas Connors, “Oral History and American Advertising: How the ‘Pepsi Generation’ Came Alive,” International Journal of Oral History, 6 (November 1985), 191–197.

58. Neuenschwander, A Guide to Oral History and the Law, 33–35.

59. Ibid., 31–37.

60. Jennifer Howard, “Boston College Wins a Victory in Legal Fight Over Oral-History Records,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2013.

61. Jeremy J. Beck and Libby Van Cleve, “Speaking of Music and the Counterpoint of Copyright: Addressing Legal Concerns in Making Oral History Available to the Public,” Duke Law and Tech Rev., 5 (2011), reprinted in the Oral History Association Newsletter, 46 (Spring 2012), 4, 6, 10.

62. Liza Talbot, “Archives in a New Context: The LBJ Time Machine,” Archival Outlook: Society of American Archivists Newsletter (March–April 2012), 6–7.

63. Ann E. Pederson and Gail Farr Casterline, Archives & Manuscripts: Public Programs (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1982), 8.

64. Joseph W. Palmer, Oral History in Public Libraries (Urbana: University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Service, 1984), 8–9, 10.

65. Pederson and Casterline, Archives & Manuscripts: Public Programs, 9, 15, 23–24.

66. See http://www2.state.id.us/ishs/smokejumper.html; Troy Reeves, H-ORALHIST, May 23, 2002; Tamara Kennelly, “Oral History on the Internet: Narratives from Pioneering Black Students,” in Denis and Worthington, eds. The Power of Oral History, 1:86–99.

67. Willa K. Baum, “Building Community Identity Through Oral History—A New Role for the Local Library,” California Librarian, October 1970, 271–284.

Chapter 7

1. Richard P. Onderdonk, “Piaget and Oral History: Cognitive Development in the Secondary Studies Class,” Oral History Review, 11 (1983), 77.

2. Julia Letts, “Oral History and Schools: Practical Tips for Getting Started in the Classroom,” Oral History, 39 (Spring 2011), 104; see also Barry A. Lanman, “The Use of Oral History in the Classroom: A Comparative Analysis of the 1974 and 1987 Oral History Association Surveys,” Oral History Review, 17 (Spring 1989), 223–224.

3. Eliot Wigginton, Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 325–386.

4. June Jordan, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” in From the Hip: Documentary Team Guidebook (Durham, NC: From the Hip, 1993), 14–15.

5. Civic Voices Profiler (November 2011), 1; Abby Mills, Stephen Schechter, Shannon Lederer, and Robert Naeher, “Global Stories of Citizenship: Oral History as Historical Inquiry and Civic Engagement,” Oral History Review, 38 (Winter–Spring 2011), 34–62.

6. Eliot Wigginton, ed., The Foxfire Book (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 9–14.

7. Wigginton, Sometimes a Shining Moment, 329–330, 343–343, 346, 352, 354; Thad Sitton, “The Descendants of Foxfire,” Oral History Review, 6 (1978), 20–35; see also the Foxfire series published by Doubleday beginning in 1972.

8. Sitton, “The Descendants of Foxfire,” 20–35; George L. Mehaffy, “Foxfire Comes of Age,” Oral History Review, 13 (1985), 145–149; “Cultural Journalism Shares Oral History Through Schoolchildren,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 20 (Summer 1986), 3; Pamela Wood, ed., The Salt Book (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977); Ellen G. Massey and Ruth E. Massey, eds., Bittersweet County (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); and “Minds Stayed on Freedom: Movement Veterans Speak to Holmes Country Youth,” Bloodlines, 2 (Spring 1990).

9. Paul Aleckson, “The D.C. Everest Oral History Project,” Perspectives on History: Newsletter of the American Historical Association, 49 (March 2011), 25–27.

10. Linda P. Wood, Oral History Projects in Your Classroom (Carlisle, PA: Oral History Association, 2001); Pamela Dean, Toby Dispat, and Petra Munro, Talking Gumbo: An Oral History Manual for Secondary School Teachers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1998), also available at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/williams/talking_gumbo.pdf; a companion to the video “You’ve Got to Hear This Story,” http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/williams/video.html.

11. Cynthia Stokes Brown, Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History (New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1988).

12. Lanman and Mehaffy, Oral History in the Secondary School Classroom, 11–12; Wigginton, ed., The Foxfire Book, 12.

13. William Cutler, et al., “Oral History as a Teaching Tool,” Oral History Review, 1 (1973), 38–43.

14. George Mehaffy, “Oral History in Elementary Classrooms,” Social Education (September–October 1984), 470–473; Stephen Lehane and Richard Goldman, “Oral History: Research and Teaching Tool for Educators,” Elementary School Journal, 77 (January 1977), 173–181; Laura Wendling, “Oral History...It’s Elementary!” The Oral History Educator, 1 (Fall 1999), 5–7; and Alistair Ross, “Children Becoming Historians: An Oral History Project in a Primacy School,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), 432–447.

15. “Cultural Journalism,” 3.

16. Stan and Jan Berenstain, The Berenstain Bears and the Giddy Grandma (New York: Random House, 1994).

17. Dale W. Johnson, H-OralHist, November 1, 2011.

18. Diane Skiffington Dickson, Dick Heyler, Linda Reilly, and Stephanie Romano, The Oral History Project: Connecting Students to their Community, Grades 4–8 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006), 3, 47, 141, 143.

19. Anne Valk, Amy Atticks, Rachael Binning, Elizabeth Manekin, Aliza Schiff, Reina Shibata, and Meghan Townes, “Engaging Communities and Classrooms: Lessons from the Fox Point Oral History Project,” Oral History Review, 38 (Winter–Spring 2011), 136–157.

20. George Mehaffy and Thad Sitton, “Oral History: A Strategy That Works,” Social Education, 41 (May 1977), 378–382; Barbara A. Levy and Karen Marshall, “Kids Making History,” History News (March–April 1990), 20; Michael Brooks, “‘Long, Long Ago’: Recipe for a Middle School Oral History Program,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, 11 (Spring 1997), 32–35.

21. Levy and Marshall, “Kids Making History,” 18–20; see also Alan J. Singer, “Oral History and Active Learning,” Social Science Record, 31 (Fall 1994), 4–20; and John Marshall Carter, “‘Grandma Book’: Writing to Discover Your Past: Classroom Teachers Idea Notebook,” Social Education 59 (February 1995), 92–94.

22. Bernadette Anand, Michelle Fine, Tiffany Perkins, Davis S. Surrey and the Renaissance School Class of 2000, Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town: A Guide to Doing Oral History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002).

23. Howard Levin, “Authentic Doing: Student-Produced Web-Based Digital Video Oral Histories,” Oral History Review, 38 (Winter–Spring 2011), 10.

24. Lanman and Mehaffy, Oral History in the Secondary School Classroom, 1–6, 8; see also Donald A. Ritchie, “Teaching the Cold War through Oral History,” History Teacher, 8 (Winter 1994), 10–12; and the special oral history issue edited by Cliff Kuhn and Marjorie L. McLellan, Organization of American Historians’ Magazine of History, 11 (Spring 1997).

25. Mitch Mendosa, “Reflections on Voices of the Valley,” in Tell Us How It Was: Stories of Rural Elders Preserved by Rural Youth (Washington, DC: Rural School and Community Trust, 2002), 15–22, 25.

26. Roy Rosenzweig, “www.historymatters.gmu.edu: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web,” Organization of American Historians Newsletter (November 1998), 13; Mississippi Humanities Council, et al., “Ordinary People Living Extraordinary Lives: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi,” website; Samuel Totten, “Using Oral Histories to Address Social Issues in the Social Studies Classroom,” Social Education, 53 (February 1989), 114.

27. Joel R. Gardner, “Using Oral History and Folklore in the Classroom,” New Jersey Folklore Society, 11 (Spring–Fall 1990), 1–16; Brown, Like It Was, 31–47.

28. Lanman and Mehaffy, Oral History in the Secondary School Classroom, 14; Totten, “Using Oral Histories to Address Social Issues,” 115.

29. John A. Neuenschwander, Oral History as a Teaching Approach (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1976), 11–13.

30. Garrison Keillor, Happy to Be Here (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 194–195; Mehaffy, et al., Oral History in the Classroom, 3; Thad Sitton, “Oral History: From Tape Recorder to Typewriter,” The Social Studies, 72 (May–June 1981), 122–123.

31. Interview with G. R. F. Key, Earth Waves, 3 (1982), 6.

32. Gardner, “Oral History and Folklore.”

33. Elaine Thatcher, H-OralHist, March 7, 2007.

34. Levin, “Authentic Doing,” 12–13.

35. Amy Dayton-Wood, Laren Hammongs, Lisa Matherson, and Leah Tollison, “Bridging Gaps and Preserving Memories Through Oral History Research and Writing,” English Journal, 101 (March 2012), 77–82.

36. Mehaffy and Sitton, “Oral History: A Strategy That Works,” 378–382; James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle offer a valuable case study in After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: Knopf, 1982), 169–204.

37. Lehane and Goldman, “Oral History: Research and Teaching Tool for Educators,” 181; Onderdonk, “Piaget and Oral History,” 77–85.

38. Peter N. Stearns, Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 15, 63, 155–156, 170, 175–176.

39. Totten, “Using Oral Histories to Address Social Issues,” 114–116, 125.

40. Glenn Whitman, Dialogue with the Past: Engaging Students & Meeting Standards Through Oral History (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004), 32–33.

41. Charlene Hunter-Gault, “Students of Little Rock Central High,” Southern Living, 2013, http://www.southernliving.com/travel/new-heroes-civil-rights-little-rock-central-high-students.

42. Barry A. Lanman, “Oral History as an Educational Tool for Teaching Immigration and Black History in American High Schools: Findings and Queries,” International Journal of Oral History, 8 (June 1987), 122–135.

43. Paula J. Paul, “Fish Bowls and Bloopers: Oral History in the Classroom,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, 11 (Spring 1997), 43–46; Nicholas P. Ciotola, “Recording Wartime Reminiscences: Using Oral History to Teach World War II,” OAH Magazine of History, 16 (Spring 2002), 59–61.

44. Totten, “Using Oral Histories to Address Social Issues,” 115.

45. Mehaffy, Sitton, and Davis, Oral History in the Classroom; Gardner, “Using Oral History and Folklore in the Classroom,” 5.

46. Stephen Sloan, “On the Other Foot: Oral History Students as Narrators,” Oral History Review, 39 (Summer–Fall 2012), 298–311.

47. Washington Post, March 11, 1999; Glenn E. Whitman, “Teaching Students How to Be Historians: An Oral-History Project for the Secondary School Classroom,” The History Teacher, 33 (August 2000), 469–481.

48. Neuenschwander, Oral History as a Teaching Approach, 21.

49. Levin, “Authentic Doing,” 19–23.

50. Elinor Maze, H-OralHist, June 16, 2004.

51. George L. Mehaffy and Thad Sitton, “Oral History Tells Its Own Story: The Development of the Loblolly Project,” Social Studies, 68 (1977), 231–235.

52. Neuenschwander, Oral History as a Teaching Approach, 9, 22.

53. Frank J. Fonsino, “Criteria for Evaluating Oral History Interviews,” The History Teacher, 2 (1980), 239–243.

54. Mehaffy, Sitton, and Davis, Oral History in the Classroom, 1; Willa K. Baum, “Looking at Oral History,” ERIC/CHESS (Boulder, CO: September 1975), 2.

55. Marjorie L. McLellan, “Oral History in the Classroom and on the World Wide Web,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 31 (Fall 1997), 9; Anne Ray, “Resources Make Oral History Work,” The [National History Education] Network News, 7 (Summer 1999), 1, 3; “What Did You Do in the War, Grandma?” Oral histories of Rhode Island Women in World War II by students of South Kingstown High School, 1989.

56. Jane McDowell and Monica Gorman, “Combining Intergenerational Interviews with Creative Drama in U.S. History,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 48 (November 2010), 43–44.

57. Aishwarya Gautam, Shruti Vaidya, and Sarah J. Yockey, “Doing Oral History Through a High School-Public Radio Partnership,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 47 (Spring 2013), 1, 8, 10–11.

58. Ken Woodward, “The Digital Revolution and Pre-Collegiate Oral History: Meditations on the Challenge of Teaching Oral History in the Digital Age,” Oral History Review, 40 (Summer–Fall 2013), 325–331.

59. “Observations on National History Day,” OHMAR Newsletter, 8 (Fall 1984), 14–15.

60. McGregor McCance, “Learning History from Its Source,” Greenville News (South Carolina), June 13, 1993.

61. Lanman and Mehaffy, Oral History in the Secondary School Classroom, 19.

62. Janis Wilton, “Oral History in Universities: From Margins to Mainstreams,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 480.

63. Rina Benmayor, “Digital Technologies and Life Stories,” 1:60–71, and Mats Greiff, “Oral History at Malmö University,” in Philippe Denis and James Worthington, eds., The Power of Oral History: Memory, Healing and Development (Pietermaritzburg: South Africa: University of Natal, 2002), 3:1510–1523.

64. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall interviewed by Kathryn Nasstrom, “Case Study, the Southern Oral History Program,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 409–416; and E. G., “Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,” Humanities, 20 (Nov.–Dec. 1999), 22–23.

65. Richard Candida Smith, “Case Study: What Is It That University-Based Oral History Can Do? The Berkeley Experience,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 417–426.

66. Graham Smith, Historical Insights: Focus on Research (Warwick, UK: History at the Higher Education Academy, 2010), 2.

67. John Forrest and Elisabeth Jackson, “Get Real: Empowering the Student Through Oral History,” Oral History Review, 18 (Spring 1990), 29–44.

68. See Stacy Erickson and Troy Reeves, eds., A Field Notebook for Oral History (Boise: Idaho Oral History Center, 2001).

69. James Hoopes, Oral History for Students (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 49; Donald A. Ritchie, “A Sense of Collective Responsibility: An Interview with Ronald J. Grele,” OHMAR Newsletter, 16 (Fall 1993), 6–8.

70. Michael H. Ebner, “Students as Oral Historians,” The History Teacher 9 (February 1976), 196–201.

71. A. Glenn Crothers, “‘Bringing History to Life’: Oral History, Community Research, and Multiple Levels of Learning,” Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002), 1446–51.

72. Sandy Polishuk, H-OralHist, November 1, 2006.

73. Mary M. Schweitzer, “Oral History in the Classroom,” Pennsylvania History, 60 (October 1993), 496–499.

74. Martha Norkunas, “Teaching to Listen: Listening Exercises and Self-Reflective Journals,” Oral History Review, 38 (Winter–Spring 2011), 63–108.

75. See Tracy E. K’Meyer, “‘It’s Not Just Common Sense’: A Blueprint for Teaching Oral History,” 35–56, and Marjorie L. McLellan, “Case Studies in Oral History and Community Learning,” Oral History Review, 25 (Fall 1998), 81–112.

76. Edward Ives, untitled subsection of Cutler, et al., “Oral History as a Teaching Tool,” 45; see also Louisa Schell Hoberman, “The Immigrant Experience and Student-Centered Learning: An Oral History Video Project,” Perspectives, 32 (March 1994), 1, 13–16.

77. See Ebner, “Students as Oral Historians,” 198. Much of the discussion of oral history on the college level is drawn from the course syllabi of Terry L. Birdwhistell at the University of Kentucky, Thomas L. Charlton at Baylor University, and Wendell Wray at the University of Pittsburgh.

78. E.g., “Jacqueline Dowd Hall,” Humanities, 20 (Nov.–Dec. 1999), 22–23; Renata W. Prescott, “The Vietnam War and the Teaching and Writing of Oral History: The Reliability of the Narrator,” Oral History Review, 26 (Summer–Fall 1999), 47–64.

79. Jean M. Humenz and Laurie Crumpacker, “Oral History in Teaching Women’s Studies,” Oral History Review, 7 (1979), 53–69.

80. Mary Jo Deering, “Oral History and School Integration Research: A Case Study,” Oral History Review, 7 (1979), 27–41.

81. Rina Benmayor, “Case Study: Engaging Interpretation Through Digital Technologies,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 490–498.

82. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, H-OralHist, March 20, 2013.

83. For example, see Dan Riordan, ed., Reminiscences: An Anthology of Oral History (Stout, WI: University of Wisconsin-Stout, 1980); As I Remember Fordham: Selections from the Sesquicentennial Oral History Project (New York: Fordham University, 1991); and Diamond Days: An Oral History of the University of Texas at El Paso (El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso, 1991).

84. Beverly Blois, et al., Northern Virginia Community College: An Oral History, 1965–1985 (Annandale, VA: Northern Virginia Community College, 1987).

85. Günham Danişman, “The Oral History of a History Department,” in Denis and Worthington, eds., The Power of Oral History, 3:1477–1492.

86. Charles T. Morrissey, “Oral History on Campus: Recording Changes in Higher Education,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin, 11 (April 1971), 75–76.

87. Andrew Darien, “Historicizing and Humanizing Historians: Oral History and History Faculty,” American Historical Association Perspectives on History (February 2008), 23–25.

88. “Fox Point Oral Histories,” Brown University Library, Center for Digital Scholarship website.

89. Jennifer Reut, “Oral History Projects Document Hurricane Sandy,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 51 (October 2013), 10–11.

90. John Rothstein, “Oral History: A Student’s View,” The Journal of the New England Association of Oral History, 2 (1988–89), 38–44.

91. David Washburn, “Oral History and Undergraduate Education: A Self-Interview,” Memory Lines: Newsletter of the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1 (Spring 2004), 7–8.

92. Patricia D. Beaver and Judith Jennings, eds., Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 142.

93. Linda Shopes, “Oral History and the Academy: An Assessment for the Mellon Foundation,” Oral History Association website; and Charles T. Morrissey, “Oral History, Memory, and the Hallways of Academe: Tenure Decisions and Other Job Skirmishes,” Oral History Review, 27 (Winter–Spring 2000), 99–116.

94. The Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship, Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian: A Report (Bloomington, IL: Organization of American Historians, 2010).

95. See Zachary M. Schrag, Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965–2009 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

96. “Panelists Defend, Criticize Campus IRB Process,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 35 (Winter 2001), 6.

97. Gary May to author, November 4, 1995; Michael A. Gordon, “Historians and Review Boards,” Perspectives (September 1997), 35–37.

98. Alice Kessler-Harris, “Historians and the Institutional Review Board,” OAH Outlook, 1 (November 2011). 1; Jillian Maxey, H-OralHist, November 2, 2012; Shiobhan McHugh, H-OralHist, November 28, 2012; Carol Lasser, H-OralHist January 5, 2012.

99. Michael A. Carome, OHRP Director, to Linda Shopes and Donald A. Ritchie, September 22, 2003, “Application of the Department of Health and Human Services Regulations for the Protection of Human Subjects at 45 CFR Part 46, Subpart A to Oral History Interviewing,” Oral History Association website.

100. Katherine Sharp Lanndeck, H-OralHist, November 28, 2013.

101. Robert B. Townsend, “Getting Free of the IRB: A Call to Action for Oral Historians,” AHA Perspectives (September 2011), 9; Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano, eds., Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 131.

102. “Columbia University Articulate IRB Policy” Oral History Association Newsletter, 42 (Spring 2008), 7.

103. Nathaniel Comfort, H-OralHist, October 29, 2012; “OHA Involved in New Rules Affecting Academic Oral Historians,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 33 (Winter 1999), 3.

104. Valerie J. Janesick, Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher: Choreographing the Story (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), 54, 57, 68–69.

105. L. L. Wynn, “Ethnographers’ Experiences of Institutional Oversight: Results from a Quantitative and Qualitative Survey,” Journal of Policy History, 23 (2011), 94–114.

106. Anna Louise Bates, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s Life and Career (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 185.

Chapter 8

1. Elizabeth Gremore Figa, “Products of Oral History Work—Follow-Up,” H-Oralhist, June 22, 2000.

2. The public history uses of oral history are discussed in chapter 1. For the use of oral history in video documentaries, see chapter 5.

3. Donald A. Ritchie, “At the Crossroads: Oral History in the 21st Century,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 35 (Winter 2001), 3.

4. Roy Rosenzweig, “Why Read a History Book on a Computer? Putting Who Built America? on CD-Rom,” History Microcomputer Review (Fall 1993), 1–2, 6, 11; Thomas J. DeLoughry, “History Post-Print,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 40 (January 12, 1994), A19–20; Roy Rosenzweig and Steve Brier, “Historians and Hypertext” Is It More Than Hype?” American Historical Association Perspectives, 32 (March 1994), 3–6.

5. William Schneider and Daniel Grahek, Project Jukebox: Where Oral History and Technology Come Together (Anchorage: Center for Information Technology, University of Alaska, Anchorage, 1992), 1–9; William Schnider, So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002), 27–28.

6. “The Rocky Gap High School Oral History and Technology Project,” 110.

7. Bradford R. Cole, “‘Voices from the Trading Post’: The United Indian Traders Association Legacy Project,” Western Historical Quarterly, 33 (Summer 2002), 205–211.

8. Free Speech Movement Digital Archives, University of California, Berkeley.

9. H-OralHist@H-Net.MSU.Edu.

10. Linda Shopes, H-OralHist, March 27, 2013.

11. Stories from the Collection: Columbia University Oral History Research Office, produced by Charles Hardy III (New York: Columbia University, 1998), CD-Rom.

12. Steve High, “Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling,” Public History News, 27 (December 2006), 5; Alistair Thomson, H-OralHist, March 17, 2012.

13. Linda Shopes media review, The Public Historian, 29 (Winter 2007), 111–13.

14. Oral History in the Digital Age, http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/.

15. Discovering Our Delta, http://www.folkways.si.edu/discovering-our-delta-a-learning-guide-for-community-research-teaching-kit/documentary/video/smithsonian.

16. See Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students or Carts.org.

17. History Matters, George Mason University, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/.

18. Congressional Record, 105th cong., 1st sess., S5605; David Darlington, “Veterans History Project Launched,” Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association, 40 (May 2002), 14–15; Gail Fineberg, “Veterans History Project Enlists Powerful Allies,” Folklife Center News, 24 (Winter 2002), 8–11.

19. David Jenkins, “History in the Speaking,” Financial Times, July 29, 2011.

20. Steven High, “Telling Stories: A Reflection on Oral History and New Media,” Oral History, 38 (Spring 2010), 101–112.

21. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, H-OralHist, November 16, 2012.

22. Cliff Kuhn, H-OralHist, November 16, 2012.

23. Laurie Mercier and Madeline Buckendorf, Using Oral History in Community History Projects (Los Angeles: Oral History Association, 1992), i; Rose T. Diaz and Andrew B. Russell, “Oral Historians: Community Oral History and the Cooperative Ideal,” in James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, eds., Public History: Essays from the Field (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1999), 203–216.

24. Helen M. Lewis, “Community History,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, 11 (Spring 1997), 20–22.

25. Ronald E. Marcello, Small Town America in World War II (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2014).

26. Barbara Allen Bogart, H-OralHist, December 1, 2006; Leslie Waggener, “Project Documents Boom-and-Bust Energy Development in Wyoming,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 46 (Summer 2012), 7, 11.

27. Charles Hardy, “The Urban Archives’ ‘Discovering Community History Project,’” Oral History Association Newsletter, 15 (Winter 1981), 4–5.

28. Thelma Russell, “The Humanities Belong to All of Us: A Voice from Public Housing,” Humanities (Newsletter of the D.C. Community Humanities Council) 6 (Summer 1993), 1–2; “In Search of Common Ground Video to Premier at Public Humanities Award Program,” Humanities, 6 (Fall 1993), 1, 3.

29. Knox Mellon, “Oral History, Public History, and Historic Preservation: California Birds of a Feather,” Oral History Review, 9 (1981), 85–95.

30. Dan J. Utley, “From the Ground Up: Oral History and Historical Archaeology,” Sound History: Journal of the Texas Oral History Association, 1 (Fall 1993), 18–28.

31. Audrey Petty, ed., High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (San Francisco: Voice of Witness, 2013); Douglas A. Boyd, Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).

32. Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7.

33. Hardy, “Discovering Community History Project,” 4; Michelle Palmer, Marianne Esolen, Susan Rose, Andrea Fishman, and Jill Bartoli, “‘I Haven’t Anything to Say’: Reflections of Self and Community in Collecting Oral Histories,” International Annual of Oral History, 1990: Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 175.

34. Linda Shopes, “Oral History and the Study of Communities: Problems, Paradoxes, and Possibilities,” Journal of American History, 89 (September 2002), 588–598.

35. Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. (Dick) Miller, “A Shared Inquiry in Shared Inquiry,” The Public Historian, 28 (Winter 2006), 15–38.

36. Joe Doyle, “Community History in a Community That Doesn’t Want It,” Public History: The Newsletter of New York University’s Program in Public History, 1 (1984), 6–9.

37. Charles E. Trimble, Barbara W. Sommer, Mary Kay Quinlan, The American Indian Oral History Manual: Making Many Voices Heard (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 9, 17–21.

38. Andrew Holmes, “The Ouse Project: A Case Study of Applied Oral History,” in Shelley Trower, ed., Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 127–147.

39. See Fox Point Oral Histories, Brown University Libraries website.

40. Jerry Carrier, ed., “Goin’ North: Tales of the Great Migration,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1985; “Fourth Issue of Narratives Builds on a Strong Start,” Narratives, 2 (Spring 2001), 2.

41. Donald Hyslop, “From Oral Historians to Community Historians: Some Ways Forward for the Use and Development of Oral Testimony in Public Institutions,” Oral History Association of Australia Journal, 17 (1995), 1–8; Mercier and Buckendorf, Using Oral History, 16–19.

42. Ibid., 30–31.

43. Laurie Mercier, Mary Murphy, Linda Peavy, Diane Sands, and Ursula Smith, Molders and Shapers: Montana Women as Community Builders: An Oral History Sampler and Guide (Helena: Montana Historical Society Office, 1987), 9–19.

44. Sally Voris, “Oral History in Museum Exhibits,” H-OralHist, November 13, 2001.

45. George McDaniels, “Folklife Festivals: History as Entertainment and Education,” in Barbara J. Howe and Emory L. Kemp, eds., Public History: An Introduction (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1986), 277–291; see Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage website.

46. Bonnie J. Morris, “In Their Own Voices: Oral Histories of Festival Artists,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 19 (1998), 53–71.

47. Fernando Columbus, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 10.

48. See Ellen Robinson Epstein and Rona Mendelsohn, Record and Remember: Tracing Your Roots Through Oral History (New York: Monarch, 1978), 2, 16; Robert Bowden, “Recording Your Family Roots,” St. Petersburg Times, February 24, 1985.

49. Linda Shopes, “Using Oral History for a Family History Project,” in David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1996), 231–240.

50. Corrine Azen Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters: Oral Histories of Three Generations of Ethnic American Women (Boston: Twayne, 1991). See also Tamara Haraven, “The Search for Generational Memory,” in Dunaway and Baum, eds., Oral History, 241–256.

51. William P. Fletcher, Recording Your Family History: A Guide to Preserving Oral History with Videotape, Audiotape, Suggested Topics and Questions, Interview Techniques (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986); Shopes, “Using Oral History,” 239.

52. Ingrid Winther Scobie, “Family and Community History through Oral History,” The Public Historian, 1 (Summer 1979), 38–39; Carl Ryant, “Oral History and the Family: A Tool for the Documentation and Interpretation of Family History,” Annual of the New England Oral History Association, 2 (1989-1990), 30–37.

53. Henry Fairlie, review, New Republic, 204 (March 28, 1988), 20; Robert B. Butler, “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged,” in Robert Kastenbaum, ed., New Thoughts on Old Age (New York: Springer, 1964), 265–280.

54. Patrick B. Mullen, Listening to Old Voices: Folklore, Life Stories and the Elderly (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 7, 11; Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 63.

55. Sandy Forster, “‘Reminiscence Is Wonderful Therapy for Older People and Their Care-Givers,’” Oral History Association of Australia Journal, 18 (1996), 9.

56. Tony Rohling, H-OralHist, January 27, 2013; Terrl M. Asia, “‘I Witness to History’ Sparks Retirement Community Interest,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 33 (Fall 1999), 6–7; Denise Flaim, “Oral History Preserves the Past for Future,” Kenosha News (Wis.), June 7, 1993.

57. Kenosha News, June 7, 1993; see also Joanna Bornat, “Oral History as Social Movement: Reminiscence and Older People,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), 189–295.

58. Tracy Kidder, Old Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Marie Arana-Ward, “Tracy Kidder,” Washington Post Book World (September 5, 1993), 10.

59. AARP, Reminiscence: Researching Back, Moving Forward (Washington, DC: AARP, 1990); “Oral History and the Elderly in Minnesota,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 24 (Winter 1991), 3.

60. Marat Moore, “Oral History: An Organizing Tool and a Healing Art for Labor Union Women,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 26 (Fall 1992), 1–2.

61. “Oral History Used to Enhance Care for AIDS Victims,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 21 (Fall 1993), 1; Wendy Rickard, “HIV and AIDS Testimonies in the 1990s,” in Joanna Bornat, Robert Perks, Paul Thompson and Jan Walmsley, eds., Oral History, Health and Welfare (New York: Routledge, 2000), 227–248; “Whole Lives: Reflections on Living with HIV,” NC Crossroads: North Carolina Humanities Council, 3 (November–December 1999).

62. Philippe Denis and James Worthington, The Power of Oral History: Memory, Healing and Development (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal, 2002), 2:1376–1390; and Philippe Denis, ed., Never Too Small to Remember: Memory Work and Resilience in Times of AIDS (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2005).

63. Michael V. Angrosino, Exploring Oral History: A Window on the Past (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2008), 5–6.

64. Daniel Kerr, “Countering Corporate Narratives from the Streets: The Cleveland Oral History Project,” in Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 234–235; see also Desiree Hellegers, ed., No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

65. Michelle Winslow and Graham Smith, “Ethical Challenges in the Oral History of Medicine,” in Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 380–385; Sarah Milligan, H-OralHist, January 29, 2013.

66. Stephen Garr Ostrander and Martha Aladjem Bloomfield, The Sweetness of Freedom: Stories of Immigrants (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 1–28.

67. Joyce Appleby, “Rattling Skeletons in the Nation’s Attic,” Washington Post, February 10, 2002; “Voices’ Preserving Minnesota History,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 21 (Fall 1987), 7.

68. James B. Lane, “Oral History and the Industrial Heritage Museum,” Journal of American History, 80 (September 19903), 607–618; Emory L. Kemp, “A Perspective on Our Industrial Past Through Industrial Archaeology,” in Howe and Kemp, eds., Public History, 188.

69. Carol Dreyfus and Thomas Connors, “Oral History and American Advertising: How the ‘Pepsi Generation’ Came Alive,” International Journal of Oral History, 6 (November 1985), 191–97.

70. Donald A. Ritchie, review of the Newseum, The Public Historian, 19 (Fall 1997), 98–100.

71. Jacqueline Woodfork, H-OralHist, December 1, 2006.

72. Paul E. Sigrist, Jr., “Ellis Island Projects Captures Unique Slice of American History,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 32 (Winter 1998), 10.

73. David Lance, An Archive Approach to Oral History (London: Imperial War Museum and International Association of Sound Archives, 1978), 55.

74. Linda Clark and Elspeth Wishart, “The Frozen Face: Using Oral Histories in Museum Exhibitions,” Oral History Association of Australia Journal, 18 (1996), 60–62.

75. Lance, An Archive Approach to Oral History, 56–57.

76. Selma Thomas, “Private Memory in a Public Space: Oral History and Museum,” in Hamilton and Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories, 89.

77. “History and the Public: What Can We Handle? A Round Table about History after the Enola Gay Controversy,” Journal of American History, 82 (December 1995), 1029–1044.

78. Washington Post, April 22, 1998.

79. Ritchie review of the Newseum, 98–100; Ritchie, “When History Goes Public: Recent Experiences in the United States,” Oral History (Spring 2001), 92–97.

80. David Neufield, “Parks Canada, the Commemoration of Canada, and Northern Aboriginal Oral History,” in Hamilton and Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories, 11–12.

81. Simon Bradley, “History to Go: Oral History, Audiowalks, and Mobile Media,” Oral History, 40 (Spring 2012), 99–110.

82. Steven High, “Mapping Memories of Displacement: Oral History, Memoryscapes, and Mobile Methodologies,” and Toby Butler, “The Historical Hearing Aid: Located Oral History from the Listener’s Perspective,” in Trower, ed., Place, Writing, and Voice in History, 193–231.

83. Jessica I. Elfenbein, “Bringing to Life Baltimore ‘68: Riots and Rebirth—a How-to Guide,” and Linda Shopes, “Baltimore ‘68: An Assessment,” The Public Historian, 31 (November 2009), 13–27, and 60–66.

84. David Dunaway, “Radio and the Public Use of Oral History,” in Dunaway and Baum, eds., Oral History, 306–320.

85. “Black Workers’ History Airing on Radio,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 18 (Spring 1985), 1.

86. Walter Liniger, “The Original Down Home Blues Show,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 22 (Spring 1988), 1–2.

87. Alan Bunce, “Radio Series Evokes Powerful Images with Accounts of Civil Rights,” Christian Science Monitor, March 31, 1997; “The Making of Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Beyond the Printed Word,” Southern Changes: Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, 19 (Spring 1997), 22–27.

88. Gene Preuss, H-OralHist, July 2, 2000.

89. Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, “Talking to Strangers,” in John Biewen and Alexa Dilworth, eds., Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 36–39.

90. Siobhán McHugh, “The Affective Power of Sound: Oral History on Radio,” Oral History Review, 39 (Summer–Fall 2012), 187–206.

91. Lance, An Archive Approach to Oral History, 53.

92. Dunaway, “Radio and the Public Use of Oral History,” 312.

93. Kevin Farkas, H-OralHistory, August 20, 2013.

94. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 130–32.

95. David Troop, “The Body Event: Voice and Recorded Histories in the Creation of a Sound Installation Based on the Ideas of the Work of Artist John Latham,” in Linda Sandino and Matthew Partington, eds., Oral History in the Visual Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 17–24.

96. Kathryn Nasstrom, “Performing Like a Family,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 23 (Spring 1989), 3.

97. “Urban Oral Histories Dramatized,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 15 (Summer 1981), 4.

98. Edward M. Miggins, “Communities of Memory,” Oral History Association Newsletter, 26 (Spring 1992), 1, 3; “World War II Living History Performances Scheduled,” Center for Oral History, Oral History Recorder, 18 (Fall 2001), 1.

99. Alicia J. Rouverol, “Trying to be Good: Lessons in Oral History and Performance,” in Della Pollock, ed., Remembering: Oral History Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 19–43.

100. Amy Green, “New Oral-History Based Play Available for September 11 Memorials,” H-OralHist, July 23, 2002.

101. Roger Kitchen, “Dig Where You Stand—Using Local Lives to Generate Community in Milton Keynes,” Oral History, 40 (August 2012), 93–98.

102. Jeff Friedman, “Fractious Action: Oral History-Based Performance,” in Charlton, et al., Handbook of Oral History, 465–480; and Freidman, “Muscle Memory: Performing Embodied Knowledge,” in Richard Candida Smith, ed., Text & Image: Art and Performance of Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006).

103. Friedman, “Fractious Action,” 498–504.

104. See also Pollock, ed., Remembering: Oral History Performance.

105. Krista Woodley, “Let the Data Sing: Representing Discourse in Poetic Form,” Oral History, 32 (Spring 2004), 49–58.

106. Edward Byrne review, Valpariso Poetry Review, February 6, 2007.

107. Pam Schweitzer, “Making Memories Matter: Reminiscence and Creativity, A Thirty Year Retrospective,” Oral History, 41 (Spring 2013), 84–97; and Schweitzer, Making Theatre from Memories (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2006).

108. Lorraine McConaghy, “Performance/Participation: A Museum Case Study in Participatory Theater,” in William Schneider, ed., Living With Stories: Telling, Re-telling, and Remembering (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 138–54.

109. See Charles T. Morrissey, “The Santayana Watch,” Organization of American Historians Newsletter, 20 (February 1992), 8.

Bibliography

The literature on oral history has expanded to the point where attempting a comprehensive bibliography is fruitless. What follows is a highly selective biography of classic and recent handbooks, monographs, and documentaries that use or focus on oral history.

Theory and Methodology

Abrams, Lynn. Oral History Theory. London: Routledge, 2010.

Anand, Bernadette. Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town: A Guide to Doing Oral History. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002.

Angrosino, Michael V. Exploring Oral History: A Window on the Past. Long Grove: Waveland, 2008.

Barnickel, Linda A. Oral History for the Family Historian: A Basic Guide. Carlisle, PA: Oral History Association, 2006.

Bornat, Joanna, Robert Perks, Paul Thompson, and Jan Walmsley, eds. Oral History, Health, and Welfare. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Bradley, Kevin, ed. Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects: Standards, Recommended Practices and Strategies. Aarhus, Denmark: International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, 2004.

Charlton, Thomas L., Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless, eds. Handbook of Oral History. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006.

Chew, Daniel, ed. Oral History Manual. Singapore: Oral History Department, 1992.

Cohen, Daniel I., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

DeBlasio, Donna M., Charles F. Ganzert, David H. Mould, Stephen H. Paschen, and Howard L. Sachs. Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2009.

Dunaway, David K., and Willa J. Baum. Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996.

Fletcher, William P. Recording Your Family History: A Guide to Preserving Oral History with Videotape, Audio Tape, Suggested Topics and Questions, Interview Techniques. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986.

Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral History and Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Green, Anna, and Megan Hutching, ed. Remembering: Writing Oral History. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2004.

Grele, Ronald, J., ed. Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History. New York: Praeger, 1991.

Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein, eds. Handbook of Interview Research. Beverly Hills: Sage, 2001

Hart, Cynthia, and Lisa Sampson. Tell Me Your Story: The Oral History Workshop. New York: Workman, 2009.

Henige, David. Oral Historiography. New York: Longman, 1982.

Howarth, Ken. Oral History: A Handbook. Stroud, England: Sutton, 1998.

Huen, P. Lim Pui, James H. Morrison, and Kwa Chong Guan. Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method. Singapore: National Archives of Singapore and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998.

Hutchins, Megan. Talking History: A Short Guide to Oral History. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books, 1993.

Isay, Dave with Lizzie Jacobs, eds. Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps. New York: Penguin, 2013.

Ives, Edward D. The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995; with the video: An Oral Historian’s Work. Blue Hills Falls, ME: Northeast Historic Film, 1988.

Janesick, Valerie J. Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher: Choreographing the Story. New York: Guilford Press, 2010.

Klein, Kerwin Lee. From History to Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Kurkowska-Budzan, Marta, and Krzysztof Zamorski. Oral History: The Challenges of Dialogue. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009.

Kyvig, David E., and Myron A. Marty. Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000.

Lance, David. An Archive Approach to Oral History. London: Imperial War Museum and International Association of Sound Archives, 1978.

Leavy, Patricia. Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Lummis, Trevor. Listening to History: The Authenticity of Oral Evidence. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1988.

MacKay, Nancy. Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

MacKay, Nancy, Mary Kay Quinlan, and Barbara W. Sommer. Community Oral History Toolkit. 5 volumes. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012.

Martin, Ruth R. Oral History in Social Work: Research, Assessment, and Intervention. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.

Maynes, Mary Jo, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Mayotte, Cliff, ed. The Power of the Story: The Voice of Witness Teacher’s Guide to Oral History. San Francisco: Voice of Witness, 2013.

McMahan, Eva M. Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and Coherence. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.

McMahan, Eva, and Kim Lacy Rogers, eds. Interactive Oral History Interviewing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994.

Neuenschwander, John, A. A Guide to Oral History and the Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Olson, Karin. Essentials of Qualitative Interviewing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011.

Perks, Robert. Oral History: Talking About the Past. London: Historical Association, 1995.

Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Pohlmann, Ken C. Principles of Digital Audio. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005.

Potter, Claire Bond, and Renee C. Romano: Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Powers, Willow Roberts. Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005.

Ritchie, Donald A., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Robertson, Beth M. Oral History Handbook. Adelaide: Oral History Association of Australia, 2000.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelin. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Schneider, William. So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002.

Searle, Clive, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman, eds. Qualitative Research Practice. London: Sage, 2004.

Sheftel, Anna, and Stacey Zembrycki, eds. Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Slim, Hugo, and Paul Thomson. Listening for a Change: Oral Testimony and Community Development. Philadelphia: New Society, 1995.

Smallwood, Carol, and Elaine Williams, eds. Preserving Local Writers, Genealogy, Photographs, Newspapers, and Related Material. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Sommer, Barbara W. and Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009.

Stave, Bruce M. The Making of Urban History: Historiography Through Oral History. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977.

Stricklin, David, and Rebecca Sharpless. The Past Meets the Present: Essays on Oral History. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988.

Stielow, Frederick J. The Management of Oral History Sound Archives. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.

Thabane, Motlatsi. Personal Testimony as an Historical Source in Lesotho: Some Methodological Guidelines. Roma, Lesotho: National University of Lesotho, 1986.

Thompson, Paul. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Tonkin, Elizabeth. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Trimble, Charles E., Barbara W. Sommer, and Mary Kay Quinlan. The American Indian Oral History Manual: Making Many Voices Heard. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008.

Vaněk, Miroslav. Around the Globe: Rethinking Oral History with Its Protagonists. Prague: Karolinium Press, 2013.

Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2006.

Weber, Wolfgang. “Mass of Trash” or “Veins of Gold”?: An Investigative Report on the Relationship Between Oral History and Archives. Regensburg: Roderer, 2000.

Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005.

Zusman, Angela. Story Bridges: A Guide to Conducting Intergenerational Oral History Projects. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010.

Memory Studies

Allen, Barbara, and William Lynn Montell. From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local History Research. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1981.

Bertaux, Daniel, and Paul Thompson, eds. Between Generations: Family Models, Myths & Memories. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Connerton, Paul. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Crownshaw, Richard, Jane Kirby, and Anthony Rowland, eds. The Future of Memory. New York: Berghahn, 2010.

Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Danziger, Kurt. Marking the Mind. A History of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Dennis, Philippe, ed. Never Too Small to Remember: Memory Work and Resilience in Times of AIDS. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2005.

Draaisma, Douwe. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Fentress, James, and Chris Wicham. Social Memory. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.

Field, Sean, ed., Oral History, Community, and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Hamilton, Paula, and Linda Shopes, eds. Oral History and Public Memories. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.

Hodgkin, Katharine, and Susannah Radstone, eds. Memory, History, Nation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006.

Hoffman, Alice M., and Howard S. Hoffman. Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

Hutton, Patrick H. History as an Act of Memory. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993.

Jeffrey, Jaclyn, and Glenace Edwall, eds. Memory and History: Essays on Remembering and Interpreting Human Experience. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994.

Kaminsky, Marc, ed. The Uses of Reminiscence: New Ways of Working with Older Adults. New York: Haworth Press, 1984.

Misztal, Barbara A. Theories of Social Remembering. Buckingham: Open University, 2003.

Passerini, Luisa, ed. Memory & Totalitarianism. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005.

Portelli, Alessandro. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Portelli, Alessandro. The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Radstone, Suzanna, ed. Memory and Methodology. New York: Berg, 2000.

Radstone, Suzanna, and Bill Schwartz, eds. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Rossington, Michael, and Anne Whitehead, eds. Theories of Memory: A Reader. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007.

Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 1994.

Schacter, Daniel L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Schneider, William, ed., Living With Stories: Telling, Re-telling, and Remembering. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008.

Schweitzer, Pam, Errollyn Bruce, and Faith Gibson. Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today: Reminiscence in Dementia Care—A Guide to Good Practice. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2008.

Thelen, David, ed. Memory and American History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Tonkin, Elizabeth. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Wertsch, James V. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Wood, Harriet Harvey, and A. S. Byatt, eds. Memory: An Anthology. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008.

Video Interviewing

Hartman, Geoffrey H. Preserving Living Memory: The Challenge and Power of Videotestimony. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995.

Jolly, Brad. Videotaping Local History. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1982.

Schorzman, Terri A., ed. A Practical Introduction to Videohistory: The Smithsonian Institution and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Experiment. Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1993.

Winston, Brian, and Julia Keydel. Working with Video: A Comprehensive Guide to the World of Video Production. London: Mobius International, 1986.

Zettl, Herbert. Video Basics. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2007.

Teaching with Oral History

Beaver, Patricia D., and Judith Jennings, eds., Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012.

Dean, Pamela, Toby Daspit, and Petra Munru. Talking Gumbo: A Teacher’s Guide to Using Oral History in the Classroom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, T. Harry Williams Center, 1998.

Hickey, M. Gail. Bringing History Home: Local and Family History Projects for Grades K–6. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999.

Lanman, Barry, and Laura M. Wendling. Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians: An Anthology of Oral History Education. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006.

Smith, Graham. Historical Insights: Focus on Research. Warwick: History at the Higher Education Academy, 2010.

Taylor, Evelyn S. Conducting Oral Histories: A Student’s Guide to a Successful Interviewing Experience. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2011.

Williams, Robert C. The Historian’s Toolbox: A Student’s Guide to the Theory and Craft of History. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2012.

Whitman, Glenn. Dialogue with the Past: Engaging Students & Meeting Standards Through Oral History. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004.

Oral History and Holocaust Studies

Browning, Christopher. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Douglas, Lawrence. The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Greenspan, Henry. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony. New York: Paragon House, 2010.

Hartmann, Geoffrey, ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of the Past. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

Hirsh, Michael. The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust. New York: Bantam, 2010.

Hochstadt, Steve. Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Lewin, Rhoda G. Witnesses to the Holocaust: An Oral History. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Matthäus, Jürgen, ed. Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rosen, Alan. The Wonder of their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Stier, Oren Baruch. Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

Wolman, Ruth. Crossing Over: An Oral History of Refugees from Hitler’s Reich. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Oral History and Trauma, Illness, Hardship, and Disaster

Bayer, Ronald, and Gerald M. Oppenheimer. AIDS Doctors: Voices from the Epidemic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Bennett, Olivia, and Christopher McDowell, eds. Displaced: The Human Cost of Development and Resettlement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Bornat, Joanna, Robert Perks, Paul Thompson, and Jan Walmsley, eds. Oral History, Health and Welfare. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Clark, Mary Marshall, Peter Bearman, Catherine Ellis, and Stephen Drury Smith, eds. After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed. New York: New Press, 2011.

Danforth, Loring M., and Riki van Boeschoten. Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Gardner, Judith, and Judy El Bushra, eds. Somalia—The Untold Story: Through the Eyes of Somali Women. London: Pluto Press, 2004.

Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck. Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Hartman, Chester, and Gregory D. Squires. There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Hellegers, Desiree. No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Leydersdorf, Selma. Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Miller, Donald E., and Lorna Touryan Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Mukherjee, Suroopa. Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonies of Women in the Wake of an Industrial Disaster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Murphy, Dean E. September 11: An Oral History. New York: Doubleday, 2002.

Neal, Arthur G. National Trauma and Collective Memory: Extraordinary Events in the American Experience. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005.

Penner, D’Ann R., and Keith C. Ferdinand. Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009.

Rogers, Kim Lacy, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, eds. Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Vilanova, Mercedes. The Fourth World: Baltimore Narratives, 1990. Istanbul, Turkey: Bogazicci University Press, 2005.

Ying, Chris and Lola Vollen, eds. Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath. San Francisco: Voice of Witness, 2006.

Oral History and Family and Community Studies

Archibald, Robert R. A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1999.

Bastian, Jeannette A., and Ben Alexander, eds. Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory. London: Facet, 2009.

Boyd, Doulgas A. Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011.

Caunce, Stephen. Oral History and the Local Historian. New York: Longman, 1994.

Cooper, Leland, and Mary Lee Cooper. The People of the New River: Oral Histories from the Ashe, Alleghany, and Watauga Counties of North Carolina. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

Field, Sean. Oral History, Community, and Displacement: Imaging Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Kammen, Carol. On Doing Local History. 3rd ed. New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2014.

Marcello, Ronald E. Small Town America in World War II: War Stories from Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2014.

Opp, James, and John C. Walsh. Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.

Petty. Audrey, ed. High Rise Stories Voices from Chicago Public Housing. San Francisco: Voice of Witness, 2013.

Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Ransel, David. Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Rogaly, Ben, and Becky Taylor. Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Trower, Shelley. Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Walker, Melissa. Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

Wymard, Ellie. Talking Steel Towns: The Men and Women of America’s Steel Valley. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007.

Oral History and Racial and Ethnic Studies

Barnett, Teresa, and Chon A. Noriega. Oral History and Communities of Color. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2013.

Bauer, Elaine, and Paul Thompson. Jamaican Hands Across the Atlantic. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2006.

Benally, Malcolm D., ed. Bitter Water: Diné Oral Histories of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011.

Berlin, Ria, Marx Faveau, and Stephen F. Miller, eds. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. New York: New Press, 1998.

Black, Timuel D. Jr. Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration: An Oral History. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Bruchac, Joseph. Lasting Echoes: An Oral History of Native American People. San Diego, CA: Silver Whistle, 1997.

Carey, David, Jr., and Robert Atkinson. Latino Voices in New England. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.

Cash, Joseph H., and Herbert T. Hoover. To Be An Indian: An Oral History. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1995.

Chafe, William, et. al. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. New York: New Press, 2001.

Del Giudice, Luisa. Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Dubrow, Gail. Sento at Sixth and Main: Preserving Landmarks of Japanese American Heritage. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.

Etter-Lewis, Gwen. My Soul Is My Own: Oral Narratives of African American Women in the Professions. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Frommer, Myrna Katz, and Harvey Frommer, eds. Growing Up Jewish in America: An Oral History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Huntley, Horace, and John W. McKerley, ed. Foot Soldiers for Democracy: The Men and Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Kim, Elaine H., and Eui-Young Yu. East to America: Korean American Life Stories. New York: New Press, 1996.

Kodama-Nishimoto, Michi, Warren S. Nishimoto, and Cynthia A. Oshiro. Talking Hawaii’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island People. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009.

Kohn, Rita, W. Lynwood Montell, and Michelle Mannering, eds. Always a People: Oral Histories of Contemporary Woodlands Indians. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Lehrer, Warren, and Judith Sloan. Crossing the Blvd.: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

Miller, Bruce Granville. Oral History on Trial: Recognizing Aboriginal Narratives in the Courts. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011.

Morris, Gabrielle. Head of the Class: An Oral History of African-American Achievement in Higher Education and Beyond. New York: Twayne, 1995.

Moye, J. Todd. Freedom Fliers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Nguyen, Nathalie Chau. Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009.

Martin, Patricia Preciado, ed. Beloved Land: An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southern Arizona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.

Rogers, Kim Lacy. Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Schultz, Debra L. Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Stave, Bruce M., and John F. Sutherland, with Aldo Salerno. From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.

Tateishi, John, ed. And Justice For All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.

Terkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession. New York: New Press, 1992.

Trimble, Charles E., Barbara W. Sommer, and Mary Kay Quinlan. The American Indian Oral History Manual: Making Many Voices Heard. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008.

Valk, Anne, and Leslie Brown, eds. Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010.

Willink, Kate. Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle Toward School Integration in Rural North Carolina. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Oral History and Gender Studies

Armitage, Susan H., Patricia Hart, and Kare Weathermon, eds. Women’s Oral History: The Frontiers Reader. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Boyd, Nan Alamilla, and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez. Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai, eds. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hamilton, Carrie. Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Leydesdorff, Selma, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson, eds. Gender & Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2005.

Moore, Marat. Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Muldowney, Mary. The Second World War and Irish Women: An Oral History. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007.

Newton, Esther. Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in American’s First Gay and Lesbian Town. Boston: Beacon, 1993.

Rogers, Carole Garibaldi. Habits of Change: An Oral History of American Nuns. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Ross, Fiona. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Press, 2003.

Saika, Yasmin. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Sharpless, Rebecca. Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Cotton Farms of the Texas Blackland Prairie, 1900–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Summerfield, Penny. Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.

Thomson, Alistair, with Phyllis Cave, Gwen Good, Joan Pickett, and Dorothy Wright. Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women Across Two Countries. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Walker, Melissa, ed., Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Oral History of War and Peace

Arthur, Max, ed. Forgotten Voices of the Great War: A History of World War I in the Words of the Men and Women Who Were There. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2004.

Brinkley, Douglas, and Ronald J. Drez, eds. Voices of Valor: D-Day, June 6, 1944. New York: Bulfinch Press, 2004.

Budra, Paul, and Michael Zeitlin. Soldiers Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Carlson, Lewis H. We Were Each Other’s Prisoners: An Oral History of World War II American and German Prisoners of War. New York: Basic Boos, 1997.

Frazier, Heather T., and John O’Sullivan. “We Have Just Begun to Not Fight”: An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors in Civilian Public Service During World War II. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Gluck, Sherna B. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Grob-Fitzgibbon, Benjamin. The Irish Experience During the Second World War: An Oral History. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004.

Hutching, Megan. Last Line of Defence: New Zealanders Remember the War at Home. Auckland, NZ: HarperCollins, 2007.

Hutching, Megan, and Ian McGibbon. The Desert Road: New Zealanders Remember the North African Campaign. Auckland, NZ: HarperCollins, 2005.

Koontz, Christopher N., ed. Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2008.

La Forte, Robert S., and Ronald E. Marcello. Building the Death Railway: The Ordeal of American POWs in Burma, 1942–1945. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1993.

La Forte, Robert S., and Ronald E. Marcello. Remembering Pearl Harbor: Eyewitness Accounts by U.S. Military Men and Women. New York: Bantam, 1991.

La Forte, Robert S., Ronald E. Marcello, and Richard L. Himmel. With Only the Will to Live: Accounts of Americans in Japanese Prison Camps, 1941–1945. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994.

McHugh, Siobhan. Minefields and Miniskirts: Australian Women and the Vietnam War. Sydney, Australia: Doubleday, 1993.

Mirra, Carl. Soldiers and Citizens: An Oral History of Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Battlefield to the Pentagon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Parr, Alison, ed. The Big Show: New Zealanders, D-Day and the War in Europe. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2006.

Riegle, Rosalie G., ed. Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.

Rushton, Patricia, ed. Gulf War Nurses: Personal Accounts of 14 Americans, 1990–1991 and 2003–2010. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

Stacewicz, Richard. Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Stannard, Richard M. Infantry: An Oral History of a World War II American Infantry Battalion. New York: Twayne, 1993.

Terkel, Studs. The “Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend. Melbourne, Australia: Monash University, 2013.

Tollefson, Jane W. The Strength Not to Fight: An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors of the Vietnam War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Oral History of Business and Labor

Bradley, Sue, ed. The British Book Trade: An Oral History. London: British Library, 2008.

Dunar, Andrew J., and Dennis McBride. Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001.

Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, James Leloudis, Robert Korstadt, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Halpern, Rick, and Roger Horowitz. Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality. New York: Twayne, 1996.

K’Meyer, Tracy E., and Joy L. Hart. I Saw It Coming: Worker Narratives of Plant Closings and Job Loss. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Kuhn, Clifford M. Contesting the New South Order: The 1914–1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

LaTour, Jane. Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Polishuk, Sandy. Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Oral History and Performance, the Media, and the Arts

Biewen, John, and Alexa Dilworth, eds. Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Broven, John. Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ‘N’ Roll Pioneers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Dunaway, David King, and Molly Beer. Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Freund, Alexander, and Alistair Thompson, eds. Oral History and Photography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Honey, Michael K. Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Kelin, Daniel A. II. To Feel as Our Ancestors Did: Collecting and Performing Oral Histories. Portsmouth, NH: Heinmann, 2005.

McLaughlin, Cahal. Recording Memories from Political Violence: A Film-Maker’s Journey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Podber, Jacob J. The Electronic Front Porch: An Oral History of the Arrival of Modern Media in Rural Appalachia and the Melungeon Community. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007.

Pollock, Della, ed. Remembering: Oral History Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Sandino, Linda, and Matthew Partington, eds. Oral History in the Visual Arts. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Schweitzer, Pam. Reminiscence Theatre: Making Theatre from Memories. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2006.

Thierer, Joyce M. Telling History: A Manual for Performers and Presenters of First-Person Narratives. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2010.

Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. New York: Crown, 2011.

Documentaries Featuring Oral History

Cowboy Poetry: A Woman Ranching the Rockies, the Miracle of Peggy Godfrey (documentary on a rancher, wife, mother, and cowboy poet, by Kent Gunnufson, 2005).

Don’t You Forget About Me (documentary on the films of John Hughes, by Matt Austin Sadowski, 2010).

Enemies of the People (documentary on the Cambodian Killing Fields, by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, 2011).

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons Learned from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (documentary on Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War, by Errol Morris, 2003).

Harlan County, U.S.A. (documentary on Appalachia, by Barbara Kopple, 1976).

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashing (documentary on the Japanese American internment, by Rea Tajiri, 1991).

Hearts of Steel (documentary on September 11, by Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr., 2006).

Hitler’s Secretary: Blind Spot (documentary on blind loyalty, by Andre Hiller and Othmar Schmiderer, 2002).

The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (documentary on women war workers, by Connie Field, 1980).

Los Trabajadores, The Workers (documentary on immigrant day laborers, by Heather Courtney, 2001).

Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle (documentary on railroad porters, by Paul Wagner, 1982).

Nobody’s Business (documentary on interviewing a resistant father, by Alan Berliner, 1996).

Quest for the Perfect Bourbon: Voices of Buffalo Trace Distillery (documentary on the bourbon business, by Joanna Hay, 2011).

Regret to Inform (documentary on American and Vietnamese widows, by Barbara Sonneborn, 1998).

Shoah (documentary on the Holocaust, by Claude Lanzmann, 1985).

Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story (documentary on the WPA writers’ project by Andrea Kalin, 2009).

The Uprising of ‘34 (documentary on the Southern textile workers’ strike, by Judith Helfand and George Stoney, 1995).

War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us (documentary on New Zealand war experiences, by Gaylene Preston, 1995).

With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade (documentary on the UAW sit-down strike, by Lyn Goldfarb, 1979).

Internet Resources

This is a sampling from the proliferation of oral history websites of associations, institutions, and specific projects—large and small—grouped by common themes. Since URLs can change, it may be easier to use Internet search engines to find these and others. The websites of the International Oral History Association, the Oral History Society, and the Oral History Association also provide links to many sites.

International Sites

Internationally, the growing number of websites attests to the global spread of oral history. The International Oral History Association maintains links to many national sites and also provides a semiannual newsletter and information about upcoming meetings. The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives provides information on the preservation and management of all sound recordings. Oral history websites in twenty-one nations are also provided. These include national oral history associations and major university sites, offering a range of services, including tutorials, interview transcripts, and general news about oral history in the vicinity.

International Oral History Association (IOHA)

www.iohanet.org

International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives

www.iasa-web.org

Argentina

Asocación de Historia Oral de la República Argentina (AHORA)

www.historiaoralargentina.org

Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas de la Argentina

www.cedinci.org

Instituto Histórico de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

www.curiosamonserrat.com.ar/ac/insthist.html

Programa de Historia Oral de la Universidad de Buenos Aires

iigg.sociales.uba.ar/archivo-de-historia-oral

Australia

National Library of Australia Oral History and Folklore Collection

www.nla.gov.au/what-we-collect/oral-history-and-folklore

Oral History Australia

www.oralhistoryaustralia.org.au

State Library of Western Australia

http://slwa.wa.gov.au/find/wa_collections/oral_history

University of New South Wales Oral History Program, Sydney

www.recordkeeping.unsw.edu.au/Collections/oral_history.html

Brazil

Associaçao Brasileira de História Oral

www.historiaoral.org.br

Fundaçao Getulio Vargas, Programa de História Oral, Rio de Janeiro

http://cpdoc.fgv.br/acervo/historiaoral

Memorial do Imigrante, História Oral, Sao Paulo

http://memorialdoimigrante.org.br

Museu da Pessoa, Sao Paulo

www.museudapessoa.net/pt/home

Núcleo de Estudos em História Oral da Universidade de São Paulo

http://nehousp.wordpress.com

Cambodia

Beauty and Darkness: Cambodia in Modern History

www.mekong.net/cambodia

Canada

Canadian Oral History Association

www.canoha.ca

Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Concordia University

http://history.concordia.ca/research/public-history/centre-for-oral-history-and-digital-storytelling

Oral History Center, University of Winnepeg

www.oralhistorycentre.ca

China

Oral history in China

oralhistory.wzu.edu.cn

Colombia

Colectivo de Historia Oral

http://colectivohistoriaoral.wordpress.com

Czech Republic

Czech Oral History Association

http://sites.google.com/site/czechoralhistoryassociation

Germany

Institut für Geschichte und Biographie

www.fernuni-hagen.de/geschichteundbiographie

Ireland

Oral History Network of Ireland

www.oralhistorynetworkireland.ie

Israel

Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem

www.yadvashem.org

Italy

Associazione Italiana di Storia Orale

http://www.aisoitalia.it

Japan

Japan Oral History Association

http://joha.jp

Mexico

Asociación Mexicana de Historia Oral

http://iohanet.org/espa/home/documents/

Instituto Mora

www.mora.edu.mx/inicio.aspx

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Centro Zacatecas, Los archivos de la memoria

www.logicnet.com.mx/~zac450/archmemo.htm

New Zealand

National Oral History Association of New Zealand

www.oralhistory.org.nz/

Singapore

National Archives of Singapore Oral History Centre

www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/oral_history_interviews

South Africa

Centre for Popular Memory (CPM), University of Cape Town

www.popularmemory.org.za

Oral History Association of South Africa

www.ohasa.org.za

SA History On-Line

www.sahistory.org.za

The Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory-Work, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal

sinomlando.ukzn.ac.za

South African Archives

www.national.archives.gov.za

Spain

AHOA: Archivo de la Memoria

www.ahoaweb.org/

United Arab Emirates

National Center for Documentation and Research (NCDR)

www.cdr.gov.ae/ncdr/english/index.aspx

United Kingdom

British Library Oral History

www.bl.uk/oralhistory

Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, University of London

http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-cultural-memory

East Midlands Oral History Archive, University of Leicester

www.le.ac.uk/emoha

History Workshop Online

www.historyworkshop.org.uk

Oral History Society

www.oralhistory.org.uk

School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh

www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/literatures-languages-cultures/celtic-scottish-studies

University of London Institute of Historical Research

www.history.ac.uk

Warwick Oral History Network, University of Warwick

www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/current/networks/oralhistory

United States

In the United States, the Oral History Association combines representation of the entire nation with a strong international component. The OHA website offers links to the many regional associations, as well as announcements of meetings, blogs, and recommendations for best practices. Around the nation are state and regional oral history associations that sponsor regular meetings and affordable workshops, with announcements posted on their websites. Many universities and historical societies maintain oral history archives, offer classes, and sometimes post their interviews on their websites. H-OralHist is a listserv that enables oral historians to post announcements, pose questions, and provide solutions. Oral History in the Digital Age offers information and advice on all phases of using digital electronics in conducting, preserving, and disseminating oral history.

H-OralHist (affiliated with the OHA)

https://networks.h-net.org/h-oralhist

Michigan Oral History Association (MOHA)

www.michiganoha.org/

Midwest Oral Historians (MOH)

moh.library.okstate.edu

New England Association of Oral History (NEAOH)

www.oralhistory.uconn.edu/neaoh.html

Northwest Oral History Association (NOHA)

http://northwestoralhistory.org

Oral History Association (OHA)

www.oralhistory.org

Oral History Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR)

ohmar.org

Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA)

www.southwestoralhistory.org

Texas Oral History Association (TOHA)

www.baylor.edu/toha

University and Historical Society Programs

Baylor Institute for Oral History, Baylor University

www.baylor.edu/oralhistory

Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton

coph.fullerton.edu

Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University

www.indiana.edu/~cshm

Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University

library.columbia.edu/locations/ccoh.html

Dartmouth College Oral History Project

www.dartmouth.edu/~library/rauner/archives/oral_history/?mswitch-redir=classic

Idaho State Historical Society Archives

history.idaho.gov/oral-history

Kennesaw State University Oral History Project

archon.kennesaw.edu/?p=collections/controlcard&id=202

Louis B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky

libraries.uky.edu/nunncenter

Maria Rogers Oral History Program, Boulder, Colorado Public Library

boulderlibrary.org/carnegie/collections/mrohp.html

Miller Center Presidential Oral History, University of Virginia

millercenter.org/oralhistory

Oral History in the Digital Age

ohda.matrix.msu.edu

Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), University of California at Berkeley

bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO

Studs Terkel: Conversations with America, Chicago Historical Society

studsterkel.org

T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana State University

www.lib.lsu.edu/special/williams/links.html

University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program

library.uaf.edu/oral-history

University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Oral History Program

oralhistory.library.ucla.edu

Oral History Research Areas

Larger oral history archives may include interviews on diverse subjects, but there are numerous websites that devote themselves to a single theme. Those themes listed below represent some of the most widely pursued areas among oral historians. The sponsoring organizations range from high schools to local communities, museums, archives, libraries, colleges and universities, government agencies, and broadcasters. In addition to identifying research materials, and sometimes providing transcripts and audio and video recordings online, they can serve as models for other projects in disseminating the interviews they have collected.

Family and Community Oral History

Center for Northern Appalachian Studies, Saint Vincent College

www.stvincent.edu/Majors_and_Programs/Centers_and_Institutes/Center_for_Northern_Appalachian_Studies/Home

Family Farm Project, Kenyon College

www2.kenyon.edu/projects/famfarm

Images of Iberville Parish: Place Embodied in Art

www.lapage.com/ii

Mystic Seaport & The Stonington Fishing Oral History Project

www.mysticseaport.org

New York Chinatown Oral History Project

http://ceoservices.wix.com/nycchinatownoralhist

Regional History Project, UC Santa Cruz University Library

library.ucsc.edu/regional-history-project

Folklore, Cultural Studies, and Oral History

American Memory, Library of Congress

memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution http://siarchives.si.edu/history/exhibits/pictures/center-folklife-and-cultural-heritage

Cork Folklore Project, University College Cork, Ireland

www.ucc.ie/en/cfp

Maine Folklife Center, University of Maine

umaine.edu/folklife

Oral History and Folklore, National Library of Australia

www.nla.gov.au/what-we-collect/oral-history-and-folklore

Holocaust Oral History

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library

www.library.yale.edu/testimonies

Holocaust Memorial Center, Michigan

www.holocaustcenter.org

Holocaust Oral History Archives, Gratz College

www.gratz.edu/pages/holocaust-oral-history-archive

Holocaust Survivor Oral History Project, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

www.chgs.umn.edu/educational/audio.html

Telling Their Stories, Urban School of San Francisco

www.tellingstories.org

UCSB Holocaust Oral History Project, University of California, Santa Barbara

www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/holocaust

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Oral History Department and Archive

www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/overview/oral-history

USC Shoah Foundation

http://sfi.usc.edu

Voice/Vision: Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

holocaust.umd.umich.edu

Voices of the Holocaust, British Library

www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/holocaust.html

Voices of the Holocaust, Illinois Institute of Technology [the David Boder interviews]

voices.iit.edu

Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem

www.yadvashem.org

Immigration Oral History

Arab Immigration Oral History, University of Florida

ufdc.ufl.edu/oharab

Becoming Minnesotan: Stories of Recent Immigrants and Refugees, Minnesota

Historical Society

education.mnhs.org/immigration

Ellis Island Oral History, National Park Service

www.nps.gov/elis/historyculture/ellis-island-oral-history-project.htm

Immigration, Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso

academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=20021

Italian-American Immigrant Oral History, Northern Michigan University

www.nmu.edu/archives/node/103

South Asian Oral History Project, University of Washington

content.lib.washington.edu/saohcweb

Vietnamese-American Oral History Project, University of California Irvine

sites.uci.edu/vaohp

Medicine and Health Oral History

The Historical Center for the Health Sciences, University of Michigan

chm.med.umich.edu

Medicine and Health Professionals, British Library

www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/sound/ohist/ohcoll/ohmed/medicine.html

New Jersey Oral History AIDS Project

libraries.rbhs.rutgers.edu/History_of_Medicine/AIDS.html

Oregon Health & Science Oral History Project

www.ohsu.edu/xd/education/library/about/collections/historical-collections-archives/oral-history-program/index.cfm

Social Security Administration History Archives

www.ssa.gov/history/archives/archivesguide.html

University of Minnesota Academic Health Center Oral History Project

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ahc-ohp/ahc-oral-history-project

Washington University School of Medicine Oral History Project

beckerexhibits.wustl.edu/oral

Military and Diplomatic Oral History

American Airpower Heritage Museum, Oral History Program Midland, Texas

airpowermuseum.org/?page=cms/index&cms_page=95

British Diplomatic Oral History Programme

www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/bdohp

Commonwealth Oral History Project

commonwealth.sas.ac.uk/research/cw-oral-history-project

Foreign Affairs Oral History Collections

adst.org/oral-history

Imperial War Museum, United Kingdom

www.iwm.org.uk/collections-research/about/sound

Natick Veterans Oral History Project, Morse Institute Library, Massachusetts

www.natickvets.org

New York State Military Museum

dmna.ny.gov/historic/veterans/vindex.htm

An Oral History of the Gulf War, Frontline, PBS

www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral

Veterans Oral History Project, University of Maine

umaine.edu/folklife/research-and-exhibits/research/the-veterans-oral-history-project

Veterans Project, Library of Congress

www.loc.gov/vets/

Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, Texas Tech University

www.vietnam.ttu.edu/oralhistory

Virginia Military Institute

www.vmi.edu/archives.aspx?id=3727

West Point Center for Oral History

www.westpointcoh.org/westpointcoh

Women in Military Service Oral History Program

www.womensmemorial.org/H&C/Oral_History/oralhistory.html

World War II Oral History Archives, Rutgers University

oralhistory.rutgers.edu/military-history

Native Peoples and Oral History

Doris Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History, University of Oklahoma

digital.libraries.ou.edu/whc/duke

Indigenous Oral History, State Library of Western Australia

slwa.wa.gov.au/for/indigenous_australians/indigenous_oral_history

Institute of American Indian Studies/South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota

www.usd.edu/institute-of-american-indian-studies

National Library of New Zealand

natlib.govt.nz/collections/a-z/oral-history-and-sound

Our Voices, Our Stories: First Nations, Metis and Inuit Stories: National Library and Archives Canada

www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/stories/020020-1000-e.html

Project Jukebox: University of Alaska, Fairbanks

jukebox.uaf.edu/site7

Performance and Oral History

Artists with Disabilities Oral History Project, ROHO

bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/artistsdis/

Cleveland Music Oral History Program, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

rockhall.com/education/inside-the-classroom/teachers-rock/cleveland-music-oral-history/

Jazz Oral History Index, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University

jazz.tulane.edu/collections/oralhistory

Legacy Oral History Program, San Francisco

www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=21200

Music at MIT Oral History Program

libraries.mit.edu/music/oralhistory/

Oral History of American Music (OHAM), Yale University

web.library.yale.edu/oham/about

Oral History Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

www.country.org/oral-history-collection/browse

Oral History Project, New York Public Library Dance Collection

www.nypl.org/node/35207

Performing Arts and Music, British Library

www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/sound/ohist/ohcoll/ohperf/performingarts.html

Race and Civil Rights Oral Histories

African American Oral History Collection, University of Louisville

digital.library.louisville.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/afamoh/

Black Women at Virginia Tech Oral History Project

spec.lib.vt.edu/blackwom/

Black Women’s Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University

www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collection/black-women-oral-history-project

Bronx African American History Project, Fordham University

www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/bronx_african_americ

Civil Rights Documentation Project, University of Southern Mississippi

www.usm.edu/crdp

Civil Rights History Project, Library of Congress

www.loc.gov/folklife/civilrights

Georgia Government Documentation Project, Georgia State University Special Collections

http://library.gsu.edu/search-collections/special-collections-archives/georgia-government-documentation-project

The HistoryMakers

www.thehistorymakers.com

Moorland-Spingarn Research Center

www.howard.edu/msrc

Oral Histories of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

docsouth.unc.edu/sohp

Science, Technology and Oral History

Archives of Women in Science And Engineering, Oral History Project

www.add.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/wise/OralHistories/neh.html

Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics

aip.org/history-programs

Center for Oral History, Chemical Heritage Foundation

www.chemheritage.org/research/policy-center/oral-history-program/index.aspx

IEEE History Center, Rutgers University

www.ieee.org/about/history_center/index.html

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, NASA and University of Houston

www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/oral_histories.htm

National Science Foundation Oral History Project

www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:National_Science_Foundation_(NSF)

Oral Histories, Life Sciences Foundation

lifesciencesfoundation.org/oral_histories.html

Oral History and Archives Project, Pew Charitable Trust

www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_detail.aspx?id=973

Oral Histories at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives

www.aip.org/history/nbl/oralhistory.html

Oral History of British Science, British Library

www.bl.uk/historyofscience

Social and Labor History and Oral History

The American Social History Project

ashp.cuny.edu/

Oral History Collections, Tamiment Library, New York University

www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/oh_collection.html

Oral History Project in Labor History, Roosevelt University

www.roosevelt.edu/Library/Locations/UniversityArchives/OralHistory.aspx

Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, University of Washington

depts.washington.edu/civilr/

Voice of Labor Oral History Project, Georgia State University

research.library.gsu.edu/VoicesofLabor

Trauma and Disaster

9/11 Memorial Oral Histories

www.911memorial.org/oral-histories-0

Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project

www.nzdl.org/gsdlmod?a=p&p=about&c=aliveint

Brooklyn Collection Hurricane Sandy Oral History Project

ww.bklynlibrary.org/brooklyn-collection/brooklyn-collection-hurricane-sandy-oral-history-project

Hurricane Sandy Oral History Interviews

library.monmouth.edu/main/content/hurricane-sandy-oral-history-interviews

The Katrina Experience

thekatrinaexperience.net

Narrating Hurricane Katrina Through Oral History, George Mason University

hurricanearchive.org/collections/show/103

September 11, 2001 Oral History Projects, Columbia Center for Oral History

library.columbia.edu/locations/ccoh/new_projects/9-11.html

Voice of Witness

voiceofwitness.org

Video Oral History

Buffalo Trace Oral History Project

www.nunncenter.org/buffalotrace

Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project

www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/oral_hist/carnegie/video-interviews

Densho: The Japanese-American Legacy Project

www.densho.org

Oral History in the Digital Age

ohda.matrix.msu.edu

Smithsonian Institution Archives

siarchives.si.edu/research/oralvidhistory_intro.html

Tibet Oral History Project

www.tibetoralhistory.org/interviews.html

Women’s Oral History

CSULB History: Oral History Archives, California State University Long Beach

symposia.library.csulb.edu/iii/cpro

Ethnic Women of Cleveland: An Oral History Project, Cleveland State University

www.clevelandmemory.org/ewc

Rosie the Riveter American World War II Homefront Oral History Project, ROHO

bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/rosie

Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project, University of Sussex

www.sussex.ac.uk/clhlwr/research/sisterhoodafter

Suffragists Oral History Project, ROHO

bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/suffragist

Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Smith College

www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/vof-intro.html

What did you do in the war, Grandma?, South Kingstown High School

cds.library.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/tocCS.html

Women in Journalism, National Press Club

press.org/archives/oral-histories

Women of the Oklahoma Legislature, Oklahoma State University

www.library.okstate.edu/oralhistory/wotol

Women’s History in Michigan Science and Engineering Oral History Program

deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/92219

About the Author

As Historian of the U.S. Senate, Donald A. Ritchie conducts an oral history program with former senators and Senate staff. A graduate of the City College of New York, he received his PhD in history from the University of Maryland. His other books include James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (1980), Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (1991), American Journalists: Getting the Story (1997), The Oxford Guide to the United States Government (2001), Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (2005), and The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction (2010). He serves as senior advisor to the Oxford Oral History Series and edited The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (2011). He has conducted numerous oral history workshops, chaired the Organization of American Historians’ committee on research and access to historical documentation, and established the “Pioneers in Public History” interview series for The Public Historian. A past president of the Oral History Association and of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), he also served on the councils of the American Historical Association and the International Oral History Association. He received the Organization of American Historians’ Richard W. Leopold Prize and OHMAR’s Forrest C. Pogue Award for significant contributions to the field of oral history.

Index

Aboriginal communities, 96, 248, 262–263

Abrams, Lynn, 128, 268

Abstracting, 38, 41, 47, 52–53, 151. See also Processing oral history

Advanced Oral History Institute (ROHO), 217

African Americans, 151, 187, 191

AIDS, 138, 257

Air and Space Museum, 187

Air Force Oral History Program, 65

Albertson, Dean, 45, 154

Allen, Barbara, 23

Allen, E. John B., 157

Ambrose, Stephen, 130

American Association of Retired People (AARP), 256

American Federation of Teachers, 194

American Folklife Center, 26, 29, 241

American Heritage Center, 243

American Historical Association, 7, 28, 103–104, 183–184, 230

American History Museum, 187

American Memory Project, 237

American Sociological Association, 120

Amfac Land Company, 30

Anacostia Neighborhoor Museum, 244

Anecdotal information, 115–116.

See also Evidence, oral

Angrosino, Michael, 258

Anonymity, 120–121, 228–230

Anthropology, 120, 123, 184, 216, 221, 268

Appalachian Oral History Project, 60

Appleby, Joyce, 259

Arce, Danny, 96

Archive of World Music, Harvard University, 174

Archives

archival preservation of oral history, 110, 161–164

depositing interviews, 69

digital recordings, 177–183

donated interviews, 183–186

finding aids, 52–53, 61–62, 70, 151–152, 179–180

Internet use, 70–72

managing oral history collections, 167–171

public outreach, 189–192

sound recordings in, 171–177

video archives, 149–150. See also Copyright of oral history; Legal releases; Libraries and oral history

Aristotle, 254

Army, U.S. See Military oral history

Artist interviews, 152–153, 268

Artists with Disabilities oral history project, 99

Asian Americans, 159–160, 190, 216

Atlantic Richfield Company Oral History Project, 31

Atwater, Lee, 106

Auchincloss, Louis, 85

Audiowalks, 263–264

Aural history, 55, 172

Australia, 323–324

Australian Aboriginal oral history project, 96

Australian Generations oral history project, 239

Ball, Lucille, 92–93

Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, 19

Baltimore ‘68 Driving Tour, 264

Baltimore Theatre Project, 269

Baltimore Voices, 269

Bancroft, Frederic, 3

Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 3

Barclays Bank, 31–32

Baring Brothers, 162

Barkley, Alben, 65

Bates, Anna, 233

Baumgarten, Max, 152

Baylor University, Institute for Oral History, 148, 196, 209

Benmayor, Rina, 223

Bennett, Michael, 270

Bielli, Sophia, 137

Bi-Folkal Productions, 256

Biography and oral history, 11, 78, 85, 87–88, 105, 119, 129, 131, 184, 231

Blee, Kathleen, 117

Bloch, Marc, 9

Blues Archives, 102, 265

Blythe, Ronald, 6

Boder, David, 4

Bodnar, John, 21

Body language, 97–98

Boğaziçi University, 224

Bolger, Peggy, 66

Boot Cotton Mills Museum, 158–159

Boston College case, 68–69

Boston University, 222

Boswell, James, 2

Botkin, Ben, 4

Boyd, Doug, 149, 151

Bradley, Stephen, 263

Brazil, 6, 324

Brier, Steve, 235–236

Brigham Young University, 270

Brinkley, David, 15, 17–18

British Library, 29–30, 176, 237–238, 241

Brooks, Philip, 109, 161–162

Brown, Josh, 235–236

Brown, Leslie, 19

Brown University, 200, 213, 224–225, 237

Bunce, Alan, 265

Burns, James McGregor, 9

Burns, Ken, 156–157

Butler, Robert, 15, 254

Califano, Joseph, 27

California Office of Historic Preservation, 245

California State University at Long Beach, 180, 182, 239

California State University at Monterey, 223

Cambodia, 324

Canada, 55, 114, 239, 262–263, 324

Canadian National Film, Television, and Sound Archives, 153

Cantelon, Philip, 30

Capture Wales, 242

Carcross-Tagish tribe, 262–263

Care Stories, 86

Caro, Robert, 8, 82

Carter, Jimmy, 141

Center for Civil and Human Rights, 242

Center for Land Grant Studies, 31

Center for Oral History, University of Hawaii, 30, 269

Center for Southern Folklore, 251

Central High School, 208

Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, 239

Charlton, Thomas L., 148

Chernow, Ron, 87–88

Chilkoot Trail Oral History Project, 262–263

China, 1, 324

Chiriban, Joseph T., 92–93

City Lights Program, 244

Civic Voices oral history program, 194

Clark, Mary Marshall, 127

Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project, 258

Cobb, Ty, 15

Cohen, Benjamin V., 77, 108

Collective Memory. See Memory

Columbia Oral History Research Office, 5, 26, 45, 55, 61, 89, 111, 127–128, 166, 170–171, 172, 184, 224, 239

Columbia University, 5, 224, 231

Columbus, Christopher, 252

Columbus, Fernando, 252

Community history, 200–202, 204, 208, 224–225, 242–252, 328

Comstock, Anthony, 233

Confidentiality, 67–68

Conybeare, Chris, 153

Coolidge, Calvin, 19

Cooper, Duff, 111

Copeland, Aaron, 139

Copyright of oral history, 62–64, 72, 148–149, 150, 181, 183

Corcoran, Thomas G., 77

Cornell University, 224

Corporate oral histories, 30–33, 38–42, 144, 162, 260

Country Music Highway, 263

Courtney, Cathy, 73

Courts, 27, 31, 67–68, 114, 150, 187–188

Crawfish Bottom, 246

Crawford, “Wahoo Sam,” 15

Creative Commons licensing, 63

Criminal acts, 67, 68–69, 188, 229

Crothers, A. Glenn, 219

Crowd funding, 39

Crystal, David, 56

C-SPAN Archives, 153

Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students (CARTS), 240

Cultural Resource Management (CRM), 115, 245–246

Cuyahoga Community College, 269

Dallek, Robert, 8

Dance and oral history, 138, 270.

See also Performance and oral history

Daniel, Pete, 90

Danielson, Virginia, 174

Dann, John C., 112

Davis, Cullom, 130

Davis, Jefferson, 15

Dawes, Kwame, 271

Debriefings, 4, 26–27, 167, 186

Deeds of gift. See Legal releases

Defamation. See Libel

Densho Digital Archives, 159–160

Dialects, 60

Digital recording

audio, 45–47, 171–177

video, 144, 145–146, 149

Digital Storytelling Project, 206

Diplomatic oral history, 330–331

Disaster. See September 11 oral histories; Trauma

Discovering Community Project, 243–244, 246

Discovering Our Delta, 240

Documentaries

radio, 213, 214, 264–268

video, 145, 146, 154–156, 244.

See also Videoing oral history

Documenting Lesbian Lives, 66

Downtown San Diego Project, 245

Doyle, Joe, 248

Duke University Oral History Program, 12

Dunaway, David, 264–265, 267

Editing

interviews, 176, 266

sound recordings, 176

transcripts, 54–59, 129–132. See also Processing oral history

Edwards, Bob, 73

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 130

Elderly interviewees, 244

age differences with interviewer, 200

family members, 252–254

life review, 15–16, 27, 254–256

videoing, 140.

See also Gerontology; Nursing homes

Elfenebin, Jessica, 264

Elliott, Carl, 113

Ellis Island, 15, 260

Empathy, 86–87

Emporia State University, 255

Empowerment, 128–129

Enola Gay exhibit, 261–262

Equipment for oral history, 45–49, 173, 197–198.

See also Digital recorders; Microphones; Tape recorders; Videoing oral history

Ethnography, U.S. Bureau of, 3

Evidence, oral, 110–115

Exit interviews. See Interviews

Fairlie, Henry, 131, 254

Family oral history, 201, 204, 252–254, 328

Farkas, Kevin, 267

Farm Security Agency, 90–91

Federal Writers Project. See Works Progress Administration (WPA)

Federal Writers Project (WPA), 91, 237

Fenno, Richard, 100, 121

Festivals, 251–252

Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 66

Fieldwork, 48, 100, 120, 122, 124, 195–197, 205, 216–219, 221.

See also Observation, continuing/personal

Film and Video Archive Project, 153

First Nations, 114, 248, 263

Fischer, David Hackett, 2

Fletcher, Bill, 253

Fogerty, James, 163

Folklife festivals, 251

Folklore, 23–24, 328

Fonsino, Frank, 212

Foote, Timothy, 133

Ford, Henry, 97

Former Members of Congress project, 75, 109

Former Slave Interviews, 3–4, 7, 91, 237

Forrest, John, 218

Foxfire, 194–196, 218

Fox Point oral history project, 224–225, 249

Franklin, John Hope, 205

Fraser, Ronald, 6, 73

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 186–187

Free Speech Movement project (ROHO), 237

Fresno Historical Society, 242

Friedman, Jeff, 101, 270

Frisch, Michael, 12, 132

Fry, Amelia, 98

Funding oral history, 38–42, 143–144, 164–167, 191–192, 197–198

Gallant, Barbara, 198

“Gatekeepers,” 77.

See also Interviewees

Gazecki, William, 146

Generalizable reseach, 230–231

George C. Marshall Research Foundation, 174

George Mason University, 203, 240

George Washington University, 222

Gerontology, 15–16, 27.

See also Elderly interviewees

Gildea, Robert, 18

Glassie, Henry, 55, 255

Gluck, Sherna, 81, 86–87, 120, 180

Goodwyn, Lawrence, 12

Gordon, William, 2–3

Gould, Jack, 110–111

Gould, Joseph, 4–5, 6

Government oral history programs, 28–30, 186–187

Grants, 40–41

Greeley, Horace, 3

Green, Anna, 22, 124–125

Green, James R., 116–117

Greene, Bob, 23

Grele, Ronald J., 82, 129, 161

Grounded theory. See Theory

Gubrium, Jaber, 93

Guthrie, Woody, 24

Gwaltney, John, 87

Haley, Alex, 129

Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, 217, 221–222

Hamilton, Paula, 126

Hammer, Andrea, 90–91

Hardwick, Elizabeth, 131

Hardy, Charles, 249

Harvard University, 174

Hashimoto, Lois, 117

Hastings, Max, 114

Hay, John, 11

Hebrew Academy case, 59

Heritage Lottery Fund, 40, 165

Heritage tourism, 263–264

Herodotus, 2

Highlander Research and Education Center, 226

Hill, Lister, 113

Hispanic Americans, 203, 216, 225–226

Historic preservation, 245–246

History Associates, 30, 138

History Factory, 30

History Makers, Inc., 151

History Matters, 196, 203, 240

History Workshop, 5

Holocaust oral history, 98, 128, 138, 151–152, 158, 237, 255, 262, 329

Holstein, James, 93

Hoopes, James, 218

H-OralHist, 70, 238

Howard, Heather, 123

Hudson, Hosea, 60

Hughes, Brendan, 68

Human Subjects Research. See Institutional Review Boards

Hurricane Hugo, 175

Hurricane Katrina, 50, 176

Hurricane Sandy, 225

Idaho Historical Society, 191

Idaho Oral History Center, 191

Immigration oral history, 329–330

Imperial War Museum, 5

Inappropriate language, 211

Indexing, 52–53, 61–62, 151–152, 176, 239–240.

See also Processing oral history

Indiana University Southwest, 219

Indigenous people, 65–66

Individual researchers. See Researchers, individual/independent

Informed consent, 107, 230, 232.

See also Legal releases

Inglis, William, 87–88

Institute of Recorded Sound, 5

Institutional Review Boards, 227–233

International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), 173

International Oral History Association, 6

Internet

archives and, 70–72

audio video on, 235–242

deeds of gift for, 63

interviews on the, 63, 70–72, 118, 121–122, 180–183, 238–239

public presentations of oral history, 159–160

teaching with, 196–197.

See also Digital recording; Online databases

Internet resources

countries outside the U.S., 323–326

United States, 326–334

Interpretation, 13–14, 123, 130–131

Interviewees

anonymity of, 120–121, 228–230

contacting, 78–79, 182–183

defined, 14

disagreeing with, 95, 116–118

evaluating, 115, 119

identifying, 42–43

imposter, 117

legal rights of, 62–69, 107–108, 140, 148–149, 150, 186–189

locating, 43, 78

lying or misspeaking, 95–97

memories of, 16–19, 89–91, 119–120

payment of, 101

quoting, 53, 105–106, 111, 129–130, 132, 183

rapport with, 86–87, 117–118, 127–128

selection of, 37, 43–44, 77–79

uncooperative, 83–85, 105.

See also Elderly interviewees; Legal releases; Memory; Videoing oral history

Interviewers

archival responsibility of, 69–70

credit for, 44–45

insiders/outsiders, 246–247

journalists as, 7–8

legal responsibilities, 68–69

multiple, using, 50

neutrality of, 11–13, 43, 91–92, 97, 116, 161–162

paid and volunteer, 38, 42, 43–44, 64, 191

qualities needed, 73–74

relations with interviewee, 86–87, 117–118, 127–128

team, 205–206

video considerations, 97–98, 139–141.

See also Journalists; Oral history projects; Questions; Teaching oral history; Videoing oral history

Interviews

concluding, 101–102

conducting, 73–74

documentation, 47–48, 168–169

“Elite” v. “nonelite,” 39, 92–93

elitist, 87, 161

ethics of, 210

exit interviews, 33, 186

“funnel,” 81

group, 49, 138, 147

history of, 1–4

individual/independent, 30, 106, 108–109, 114

on the Internet, 63, 70–72, 118, 121–122, 180–183, 238–239

length of, 37–38, 77

locations for, 48, 98–100, 118, 142–143

“off the record,” 88–89

oral histories vs., 109–110

preparing for, 209–211

Principles and Best Practices(OHA), 274–276

scheduling, 51

single v. multiple sessions, 76–77

student, 196, 199–201, 203–206, 209–213, 212, 217–219

techniques of, 74–76, 139, 148

timing of, 26–27, 50–51, 110

uses for, 234–235

videoing, 137–148.

See also Equipment for oral history; Interviewers; Processing oral history; Questions; Researchers, individual/independent

iPhones, 45

iPod, 173

Ireland, David, 152–153

Isaacson, Walter, 105

Isay, Dave, 25–26

Janesick, Valerie, 232

Japan, 67, 87, 262, 325

Jasanoff, Maya, 111

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 269–270

Johnson, Andrew, 3

Johnson, Dale W., 200

Johnson, Diane, 132–133

Johnson, Lyndon B., 8, 110, 116

Johnson, Lyndon B. Library, 27, 83, 189

Johnson, Samuel, 2

Johnston, Susanna, 128

Journalists as interviewers, 7–8

Kahn, Herman, 14

Kean University, 225

Kedourie, Elie, 33

Keillor, Garrison, 119, 204

Kennedy, John F., 5, 17, 49, 52

Kennedy, John F. Library, 5, 32, 49

Kennedy, Robert F., 131

Kennelly, Tamara, 70

Kenny, Michael, 50

Kent State University, 222, 270

Kentucky Bourbon Trail, 144

Kentucky Oral History Commission, 165

Kerr, Dan, 258

Kidder, Tracy, 256

King, Coretta Scott, 205

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 264

Kirk, H.D., 17

Kissinger, Henry, 92, 105

Kitchen Sisters, 266

Knowland, William F., 98

Koleva, Daniela, 6

Krause, Corinne, 253

Ku Klux Klan, 117, 188

Labor oral history, 207, 333

Ladurie, Emmanuel LeRoy, 112

Lamb, Brian, 79

Lamis, Alexander, 106

Lance, David, 261

Lane, James B., 259

Laramie Project, 271

Latham, John, 268

Latino/Latina oral history projects, 225–226, 249

Laudurie, Emmanuel LeRoy, 112

The LBJ Time Machine, 189

Lean, Tom, 143

LEGACY oral history project, 138, 270

Legal releases

generally, 61–71, 107–108, 167–168, 183

Internet, 63, 72

restrictions, 47, 57, 63, 65, 148, 167, 170, 174, 176, 181, 186–189

samples of, 277–279

video releases, 65–66, 140.

See also Copyright of oral history; Informed consent

Lembcke, Jerry, 22–23

Letts, Julia, 194

Lewis, Helen, 243

LGBT oral history projects, 66, 99

Libel, 66–67, 72, 187–188

Libraries and oral history

community history, 190–192

school libraries, 200, 213, 250

university libraries, 222.

See also Archives; Online Catalog Research Center (OCLC)

Library of Congress, 29, 237, 241

Lichtblau, Albert, 98

Life histories, 27–28

Life review, 15–16, 26–27, 120–121

Lincoln, Abraham, 11, 16

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts oral history program, 166

Linguists, 24, 55–56, 80, 82, 120, 123, 240

Liniger, Walter, 102

Lippmann, Walter, 85

Listening skills, 219–220

Lodge, David, 10–11, 131

Lomax, Alan, 24, 26

Lopate, Louis, 84

Lynd, Alice, 7, 90

Lynd, Staughton, 7, 90

MacArthur, Douglas, 105

Mackenzie, Suzie, 85

Malmö University, 216

Mandela, Nelson, 175–176

Mansfield, Mike, 76

Marcello, Ronald, 243, 255

Marcus, Neil, 99

Marcy, Carl, 56

Marshall, George C., 56, 119, 174

Marshall, S.L.A., 4, 9

Martin Luther King Public Library, Washington, D.C., 191

Mashapaug Project, 158

McCarthy, Eugene, oral history project, 50

McCarthy, Joseph R., 184

McClure, Stewart, 113

McConaghy, Lorraine, 272

McDonald, Grace Burnham, 86–87

McHugh, Siobhán, 266

McNamara, Robert S., 83–84

McNeill, William, 13

Medicine and health oral history, 138, 257–258, 330

Memoirs, 65, 97

Memory

aiding recall, 255, 256

collective, 21–22, 127

fallibility of, 14–16, 22–23, 119–120

nostalgia, 19–21

rehearsal of, 126

subjective nature of, 16–19, 124

suppression of, 125, 127

tragedy and, 26–27, 126–128

visual, 143.

See also Public memory

Memory Boxes, 257

Memoryscapes, 264

Memory Share, 26

Memory theory. See Theory

Mental disabilities, 257–258

Michelet, Jules, 2

Michigan Historical Museum, 258–259

Microphones, 46, 145

Military oral history, 29, 50, 65, 112, 114, 241, 267, 330–331

Miller, Arthur, 269

Miller, Merle, 129–130

Miller Center of Public Affairs, 50

Minnesota Historical Society, 142, 256

Mitchell, Joseph, 4–5

Montaillou, 112

Montana Historical Society, 250

Montreal Life Stories, 242

Moore, Gordon, 178

Moore, Marat, 257

Morris, Bonnie, 251–252

Morrissey, Charles T., 30, 32, 81, 129

Moss, William W., 121

Mould, Daivd, 146–147

Mullen, Patrick, 255

Museum of Jewish Heritage, 138

Museum of London, 264

Museums and oral history, 158–159, 201, 250, 258–264

Music, 139

Muskie, Edmund, 84

Myerhoff, Barbara, 90

Narrative theory. See Theory

Narrators. See Interviewees

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 121

National Air and Space Museum, 259, 261–262

National Archives and Records Administration, 46, 87, 121, 185

National Center for Civil and Human Rights, 242

National Council for the Social Studies, 197

National Defense Education Act, 113

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 40, 165, 166, 174, 228

National Gallery of Art, 187

National Historical Preservation Act, 245

National History Day, 138–139, 205, 214–216

National Life Stories, 29–30, 143, 241

National Museum of American History, 259–260, 262

National Museum of Broadcasting, 153

National Park Service, 26, 29, 141, 158, 236

National Public Radio (NPR), 25–26, 265, 266

National Public Radio and Television Archives, 153

National Science Foundation, 26, 166, 228

National World War II Museum, 260

Native Americans, 3, 31, 52, 237, 248

Native peoples and oral history, 237, 331

Natural History Museum, 187

Nelson, Davia, 266

Neuenschwander, John A., 69, 210

Nevins, Allan, 5, 6, 12, 45, 118

Newseum, 260, 262

New-York Historical Society, 26

New York Times Foundation, 164–166, 166

Nicolay, John, 11

Ninham, Sally, 100

Nixon, Richard, 52, 105, 108

Norkunas, Martha, 220

Norman, Elizabeth, 85

North Carolina State Student Leadership Initiative, 223

Northern Arizona University, 237

Northern Virginia Community College, 224

Northwestern University Medical School, 257

Nostalgia, 19–21.

See also Memory

Nursing homes, 256

Objectivity, 10, 109, 124, 152, 261, 267.

See also Memory; Subjectivity

O’Brien, Lawrence, 27

Observation, continuing/personal, 99–100, 120

Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP), 230, 231

“Off-the-record,” 88–89

Oklahoma State University, 264

Online Catalog Library Center (OCLC), 70, 179

Online databases, 179–180

Oral historian, requirements for, 8–9

Oral historians, marketing by, 30–31

Oral history

citations for, 71, 104, 114, 120–121, 133–134, 181

defined, 1

folklore vs., 23–24

Interviews vs., 109–110

multidisciplinary nature of, 8–9

preserving, 110, 143–144, 148–154, 161–164, 171–177

publications, 129–136

public history connection, 28–34

reliability of, 9–10

research use of, 152–154

reviews, 132–133

“second generation,” 118–119

skeptics, 10–11

term derivation, 3–6.

See also Videoing oral history

Oral History and American Music Project, Yale University, 139

Oral History Association, 5, 9, 49, 87, 121, 129, 140, 156, 165, 197, 226, 230, 238

Oral History Association publications, 91, 273–276

Oral History in the Digital Age, 240

Oral history projects

advisory committee for, 42

budgeting and funding for, 38–42, 143–144

corporate, 30–33, 38–42, 144, 162, 260

documentation for, 148

objectives, 35–38

staffing, 41–42.

See also Equipment for oral history; Funding oral history; Professing oral history; Videoing oral history

Oral History Society, 5

Oregon Historical Society, 27

Oshinsky, David, 184

Our Voices Oral History Project, 242

Ouse Project, 248–249

Oxford University, 6

Paige, Satchel, 97

Painter, Nell Irvin, 60

Parks, Rosa, 215

Parks Canada, 262–263

Passamaquoddy tribe, 66

Passerini, Luisa, 122

Payment of interviewees, 101.

See also Interviewees

Pearl Harbor, 17, 26

Pecora, Ferdinand, 89

People of Cleveland, 269

Performance and oral history, 65–66, 138, 139, 250–251, 267–272, 331–332

Perkiss, Abigail, 225

Perks, Rob, 32

Perlis, Vivian, 139

Petty, Audrey, 246

Photographs and oral history, 52, 61, 65, 70, 74, 90–91, 143, 177, 190–191, 195, 215, 225, 236, 242–243, 251, 260.

See also Videoing oral history

Pilling, Paticia, 38

Plagiarism, 72

Poetry, 271

Pogue, Forrest C., 4, 50, 119, 174

Polishuk, Sandy, 219

Political oral history, 28–30, 50, 121

Popular Memory Group, 126

Portelli, Alessandro, 10, 21–22, 246

Prange, Gordon, 105

Prescott, Renata, 222

Preuss, Gene, 265–266

Price, Charles, 198

Price, Dolours, 68

Principles and Best Practices (OHA), 91, 273–276

Prison inmate interviews, 269

Privacy Act, 169

Processing oral history

abstracting, 52, 53

accents and dialects, 60

editing transcripts, 54–59, 129–132

format of transcripts, 61

indexing, 52–53, 61–62, 151–152, 239–240

students, 211–212

transcription, 45, 46, 51–61, 105–106, 176–177, 180, 239–240

Project Jukebox, 180, 236

Psychology, 123, 128

Public history, 28–34, 190–192, 223–224.

See also Documentaries; Museums and oral history

Public memory, 21–22.

See also Memory

Public presentations of oral history

archives and libraries, 200, 213

documentaries, 154–158, 244

Internet, 156, 159–160

museum exhibits, 158–159, 201, 250, 258–264

performances, 65–66, 138, 139, 213, 250–251, 270

radio broadcasts, 25–26, 213, 214, 249–250

secondary school, 207–215

students, 210–211, 213–215, 223

Public Radio International, 265

Publishing oral history, 129–136

Purdue University, 153

QR Codes, 263–264

Quantitative v. qualitative interviewing, 93–94, 123, 127, 228

Questions

audio v. video, 141–142

chronological v. topical, 80–82

embarrassing, 87–88

evaluating, 83

follow-up, 94–95

including in transcriptions, 130

loaded, 82–83

open ended v. specific, 81–82

personal, 85–85

preparing, 76

question-and-answer format, 83

questionnaires, 93–94

Quincy Museum, 201

Race and civil rights oral histories, 215, 242, 265, 332

Radical History Review, 116

Radio and oral history, 25–26, 213, 214, 249–250, 264–268

Raines, Howell, 8

Randforce Associates, 151, 171

Ranke, Leopold von, 3

Rashomon, 17

Recordings

digital, 45–47, 144, 145–146, 149, 171–177

labeling of, 168

life span of, 149–150

preservation of, 171–177

recordings v. note taking, 104–105

recordings v. transcripts, 54–59

sound quality of, 45, 58, 80, 99, 142, 145, 171, 173, 178, 209, 211, 236, 267

video, 137–140, 142–154, 158–159

Red Cross, 26

Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), 67, 99, 152–153, 164–165, 217, 237

Reminiscence Groups, 255

Reminiscence Theatre, 271

Reminiscence Therapy, 255

Rescue Geography.project, 264

Researchers, individual/independent

advantages of, 109, 116

needs of, 152

responsibilities of, 103–104, 106–108

Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), 70, 179

Respondents. See Interviewees

Restrictions on use of oral histories, 47, 57, 63, 65, 148, 167, 170, 174, 176, 181, 186–189.

See also Legal releases

Revere, Paul, 2

Ritter, Lawrence, 15

Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie, 223

Robello, Lucy, 91

Robinson, Penny, 120

Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 87–88

Rockefeller Foundation, 166

Rodgers, Ruth, 152

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 49

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 4, 17, 108

Rosengarten, Theodore, 93, 175

Rosenzweig, Roy, 235–236

Rothstein, Edward, 11

Rouverol, Alicia, 269

Royal Bank of Scotland, 31–32

Royal Phillips Electronics, 31

Russell, Betrand, 83

Russell, Johnnie, 162

Russell, Thelma, 244

Russian and Eastern European Institute, 11

Ryant, Carl, 254

Santayana, George, 272

Sawatsky, John, 9

Schacter, Daniel, 125–126

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 119–120, 131, 132, 160

Schneider, William, 25, 177

Scholarly Technology Group, Brown University, 213

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 138

Schorr, Daniel, 156

Schweitzer, Mary, 219

Science, technology and oral history, 332–333

Seaman, David, 152

Seattle Museum of History and Technology, 271–272

Senate Historical Office, 26–27, 65

Sennett, Richard, 86

Sensitive subjects, 66, 67, 121–122, 130, 181

September 11 oral histories, 26–27, 50, 127–128, 166, 269–270

Seven sins of memory, 125

Shalett, Sidney, 65

Shapiro, Edith, 255

Shoah Foundation, 151–152

Shopes, Linda, 19, 126, 133, 239–240, 241, 253–254

Shulman, Holly Cowan, 106–107

Silva, Nikki, 266

Silver, Nate, 14–15

Simmons College, 222

Skype, 99

Slaughter, J. Robert, 20

Sloan, Stephen, 209–210

Smalley, Burt, 245

Smith, Graham, 60, 217

Smithsonian Archives, 150, 187

Smithsonian Institution, 142, 187, 251, 259–262

Smokejumping and Forest Fire Fighting oral history, 191

Snowball sampling, 43

Social history, 5, 12, 20, 29, 207, 333

Social media, 39, 43, 74, 159–160, 189, 238

Society for History in the Federal Government, 28–29

Society of American Archivists, 179

Sociologists, 22, 24, 82, 93–94, 120, 123, 228

Sophia Smith Collecton, 66

Sophia University, 67

Sound environment, 80

Sound recordings, 171–177

South Africa, 6, 114, 175–176

Southern Folklife Collection, 175

Southern Oral History Program, 20, 217

Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA), 179

Speaking of Seattle program, 272

Spielberg, Steven, 138

Stage plays. See Public presentations of oral history

Stark, Harold, 17

Starr, Louis, 5, 172

State humanities councils, 39, 165

Stearns, Peter, 207

Steele, Ronald, 85

Stoler, Mark, 119

StoryCorps, 25–26, 267

Storytelling, 24–25, 242

St. Paul History Theatre, 269

Student Liberation Activist Movement (SLAM!) oral history project, 121–122

Students

interviewers, 196, 199–201, 203–206, 209–213, 212, 217–219

tech ability, 138

Subjectivity, 3, 10, 110, 114, 124.

See also Objectivity

Subpoenaed oral history, 68, 114, 150, 163, 186, 188

Sugiman, Pamela, 117

Sullivan, Charles, 34

Survivors of Shoah Visual History Foundation, 138, 237

Sussex University, 248–249

Sweden, 216

Sweterlitsch, Richard, 137, 155

Talbot, Liza, 189

Talleyrand, 111

Tames, George, 65

Tape recorders, 45, 46, 47, 104, 173

Taylor, A.J.P., 10

Taylor, Mark, 270

Teaching oral history, 193–194, 198–199

college and graduate school, 216–226

continuing education, 196, 226–227

elementary school, 199–201

Internet resources, 196–197

secondary school, 194–196, 201–207.

See also Institutional Review Boards

Television, 147, 153–154, 156

Teller, Edward, 88

Temple University Discovering Community Project, 243–244, 246

Terkel, Studs, 7, 12, 73, 83, 129, 269

Terminal illness, 258

Terry, Wallace, 8

Text-searching software, 46, 51, 61, 171

Thatcher, Elaine, 205

Theory

application of, 123–124

grounded theory, 123

memory theory, 123–126

narrative theory, 123–125

role of, 13–14, 122–123

Therapeutic uses of oral history, 229, 254–258

Thompson, Paul, 6, 108, 181, 235

Thucydides, 2

Thuy Vo Dang, 21

Toffler, Alvin, 177

Tragedy. See Trauma

Transcription, 45, 46, 51–61, 105–106, 130, 176–177, 211–212, 239–240.

See also Processing oral history

Transcription equipment, 45, 46

Translators, 100–101

Trastuli, Luigi, 21–22

Trauma, 26–27, 126–128, 211, 229, 255, 333.

See also September 11 oral histories

Trexler, Harrison, 3–4

Troop, David, 268

Truman, Harry S., 129–130

Truman, Harry S. Library, 5

Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South African, 114

Tuchman, Barbara, 104, 162–163

Turkey, 224

Tuskegee Airmen, 227

Tye, Larry, 97

Unfinished thoughts, 56

United Indian Traders Association, 237

United Kingdom, 40, 165

University of Alabama, 265

University of Alaska at Fairbanks, 177, 180, 182, 236

University of Birmingham, 126

University of Buffalo, 151, 171

University of California at Berkeley, 5, 187, 225–226.

See also Regional Oral History Office (ROHO)

University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), 5

University of Delaware, 228

University of Hawaii, 30, 269

University of Kentucky, 65, 144, 154, 223

University of Maryland, 153

University of Massachusetts at Boston, 222

University of Mississippi, 102, 265

University of Natal Theology School, 257

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 175, 217, 221–222, 268

University of Southern Mississippi, 39

University of Texas, 220, 249

University of Texas School of Journalism, 223

University of Virginia, 50

University of Wyoming, 243

U.S. Bureau of Ethnography, 3

U.S. Forest Service, 29

U.S. Holocaust Museum, 158, 237, 262

U.S. Latinos and Latina WWII Oral History Project, 249

U.S. Marine Corps, 178

U.S. Navy, 165

Utley, Dan, 115, 245–246

Valesh, Eva McDonald, 111–112

Valk, Anne, 19

Vanderbilt Television New Archives, 153

Veterans History Project, 29, 241

Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Initiative, 267

Vidal, Gore, 10

Video Bulletin Boards, 159

Videoing oral history

audio v. video, 137–140

budgeting and funding for, 143–144

digital video recordings, 144, 145–146, 149–150

equipment and crew for, 142–148

Internet resources, 333–334

preservation of video recordings, 143–144, 148–154

“talking heads,” 138, 143, 159

uses of, 158–159.

See also Documentaries

Vietnam veterans, 22–23, 92–93, 178

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 21

Vietnam War, 8, 154–155, 178, 222, 270

Villanova University, 219

Virginia Tech, 191

Virtual Oral/Aural History Archives, 180, 239

Voices from the Grave, 68

Voices of Feminism project, 66

Voltaire, 2

Volunteers, use of, 38, 42, 43–44, 64, 191, 256.

See also Interviewers

Von Plato, Alexander, 96

Voris, Sally, 251

Walker, Alice, 194

Wallace, Jim, 246

Wall Street Journal, 27

Walt Disney Archives, 184

Washington Post, 87, 262

Washington Press Club Foundation Women in Journalism project, 28, 49, 141, 237

Wayne State University, 179

Websites, 235–242, 249.

See also Internet

Weindruch, Bruce, 30

Whitman, Glenn, 208, 210

Wichita State University, 255

Wilde, Oscar, 88

Williams, Brien, 160

Wolford, John, 101

Women in Journalism oral history project, 28, 49, 237

Women Miners Project, 257

Women’s oral history, 120, 222, 334

Woodward, C. Vann, 116–117

Woodward, Ken, 214

Worden, Blair, 116

Workshops, oral history, 196, 226, 242

Works Progress Administration (WPA), 4, 91, 237

World Intellectual Property Organization, 65

World Trade Towers. See September 11 oral histories

World War II, 50, 96, 114, 117, 126, 154, 159–160, 241, 242, 255, 260.

See also Holocaust oral history

Yale University Oral History and American Music Project, 139

Yeager, Chuck, 65

Young, Abe Louise, 99

Young, Brigham, 3

Yukon-Charley National Preserve, 236

THE OXFORD ORAL HISTORY SERIES

J. Todd Moye (University of North Texas)

Donald A. Ritchie,

Kathryn Nasstrom (University of San Francisco)

Senior Advisor

Robert Perks (The British Library),

Series Editors

Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations Edited by Jürgen Matthäus

A Guide to Oral History and the Law John A. Neuenschwander

Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals David K. Dunaway and Molly Beer

Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II J. Todd Moye

Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History, Second Edition Michael L. Gillette

The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi Gary Bruce

The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder Alan Rosen

They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History Alessandro Portelli

The Oxford Handbook of Oral History Edited by Donald A. Ritchie

Habits of Change: An Oral History of American Nuns Carole Garibaldi Rogers

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation Donald J. Raleigh

Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History Edited by Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez

Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History Michael L. Gillette

Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns Abbie Reese

Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis Edited by Mark Cave and Stephen M. Sloan

Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves

Peipei Qiu, with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei

Doing Oral History, Third Edition Donald A. Ritchie