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An Introduction to Oral History
From: Columbia University
| By:
Ronald J. Grele |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Oral history, the tradition of passing stories down from one generation to the next, is as old as civilization itself, but the systematic collection of recorded interviews originated at Columbia University. In this essay, Ronald Grele, former director of Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, tells the story of oral history's beginnings. History is no longer only a written chronicle of kings; it is a collection of voices that makes ordinary people part of the historical record. |
 eople have always passed their history down from generation to generation by telling stories. Oral history is as old as civilization itself. Until well into the nineteenth century, such memories told to others were a vital part of the study and writing of history. It is only with the development of "scientific" history in that century and the first half of the twentieth century that historians turned from the oral record to concentrate their efforts almost exclusively on written records. |
But many people continued to collect the spoken word. This was especially true of folklorists, anthropologists and sociologists. Well into the mid-twentieth century sociologists of the so-called "Chicago School" and workers for the Federal Writers Projects gathered large collections of what we would now call oral histories. This was especially true of the collections of slave narratives, which have recently proved to be so important in our understanding of American slavery. |
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| Columbia University's Oral History Reading Room in the 1950s. | |
Oral history, as it is now known, the systematic collection of tape-recorded memoirs by a historically informed interviewer, archived for future use by historians, had its origins at Columbia University, with the work of Allan Nevins. In 1948, he founded Columbia University's Oral History Research Office. |
Nevins was concerned that electronic communications, such as the telephone, and the tendency of modern life, which discouraged the keeping of diaries or writing memoirs, would present future historians with enormous gaps in the written record. He and his colleagues at Columbia began an organized effort to tape-record the memories of those who they felt had made significant contributions to the political and social life of the community. |
Three aspects of their efforts deserve mention. First, those interviewed were movers and shakers. Second, the interviews were organized as books, transcribed, edited (usually by the person interviewed) and indexed. Finally, the interviews were considered public records, open and available to others for examination and interpretation. |
Nevins, who directed the Columbia program until 1952, and his successor, Louis M. Starr, director until 1980, built a collection of more than 5,000 interviews and made the Columbia Oral History Research Office the world's major oral-history archive, encouraged the founding of other efforts around the world and helped establish the Oral History Association. The annual reports of Columbia's Oral History Research Office, especially those written by Starr, attested to the growing importance and popularity of oral history and the increasing number of historians who used the collection for their publications. |
During the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of oral history changed significantly. As social history grew more popular, more and more historians began to use interviews as a way to collect the histories of those who had never had their stories documented: African-Americans, women, members of the working class, members of isolated ethnic communities and members of sexual minorities. At the same time, the historical profession at large was called upon to engage in a degree of reflexivity about what it is to do history, and to justify its claims to objectivity. Oral history, as a quintessentially subjective document created by the dialectic interaction of the interviewer and the interviewee, was at the center of many of these debates. |
Oral history as a practice became increasingly important for both social history and cultural history. In social history, in which documents were either nonexistent or were the creations of those from outside the community under study, oral history was a way into the interior of those communities, a way to gain insight into the process of history from the viewpoint of those being studied. Thus historians were able to understand the ways in which racism or sexism or other historical processes were understood and explained by members of minority communities or women. Oral history thus expanded the range of historical inquiry. |
In cultural history, because interviews reveal not only what happened but also how what happened lives on in the lives of those interviewed, oral history became a tool for understanding history as a cultural construct. If properly understood, it was possible to see how people made their own histories, in the sense of constructing a story about their own pasts. With the kind of double vision presented by the interview, it was possible to ask a new set of questions about how people lived in history. It was also possible to use oral history in a variety of ways to teach history and involve people in creating their own histories through community history projects. In other cases, building upon the more subjective aspects of experience that were revealed in the interview, it was now possible to explore issues such as identity, memory, and ideology and consciousness. |
While most oral historians and most oral-history projects continue to devote their attention to building a record of past events, many are also deeply involved in new programs that, for example, document human-rights abuses, deal with trauma, and develop projects in reminiscence therapy or literacy. |
These changes are all to be seen in the various publications of the oral-history community--The Oral History Review in the United States, Oral History in the United Kingdom, and Historia y Fuente Oral in Spain--and in the programs of both the Oral History Association and the International Association of Oral History. |
Once seen as an ancillary activity for historical research, oral history has moved to the center of the debates over the nature of the study of history and its meaning. As more and more historians and other researchers are using oral-history interviews in their work, and as more and more students from grade school to graduate school are going out into the field as a way to increase the excitement of the study of history, the popularity of oral history seems secure. What began more than 50 years ago at Columbia has now become a worldwide practice and a way of learning about the past through personal involvement in documenting that past. |
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