I made a career centered on arguing and deciding what counts as credible historical evidence. Just because evidence is subjective or partial doesn’t make it incredible. Oral history’s subjectivity and partiality are often framed as weaknesses, but this week’s readings expound those traits as oral history’s distinctive strengths. Oral history does not pretend to provide a seamless, objective record of the past. Instead, it documents memory, interpretation, and meaning. That recognition helps us see oral history as not “less credible” but differently credible.
Nevins’s account highlights oral history’s roots in technology and journalism, and its growth into a practice that democratized history by capturing voices outside elite institutions. His reflections on the role of the interviewer also remind us that oral history is never a neutral record (is there really such a thing in the first place?). The interviewer arrives with preparation, biases, and strategies for eliciting certain responses, and then later shapes the narrative through transcription, editing, and presentation. Oral history therefore contains traces of both participants—the subject’s memories and the historian’s questions and interpretive choices. I found myself thinking about this when revisiting the WPA Slave Narratives. Those interviews do not stand apart from the context in which they were created: white interviewers in the 1930s trying to capture the stories of elderly African Americans. The transcription of dialect, often filtered through racist assumptions about what constituted “usual” speech, makes clear how much interviewer presence shaped the record.
Halpern’s discussion of oral history and labor history helped me situate oral history in relation to social change. I was struck by the idea that oral history was meant to recover the voices of working-class people and to empower them by involving them in writing their own histories. Yet, as Halpern shows, oral history in labor studies did not always live up to this promise because of methodological shortcomings and uneven integration with archival evidence. Still, the power of first-person testimony—especially when used in dialogue with written sources—illustrates how oral history complicates and enriches traditional historical narratives. I especially liked the idea of oral history as a “usable past,” a resource for ongoing struggles for justice.
Portelli’s essay was my favorite. His insistence that oral history tells us less about the bare facts of events and more about the meaning people attach to them was profound. I loved his observations about how transcription flattens spoken language. Tone, rhythm, and intonation carry social meaning that cannot easily be reduced to punctuation marks on a page. His point reminded me of the “My Cousin Vinny” example I use in teaching evidence: how a line transcribed with a period instead of a question mark can completely change its meaning. Reading Portelli also made me think about my mother’s experience being criticized for speaking her regional Italian dialect. Just as oral history resists being flattened into a uniform record, dialects resist being subsumed under the “proper” language. Both preserve the texture of lived experience “from below.”
Finally, looking at the WPA Slave Narratives with these insights made me more critical of what those documents tell us. They reveal not only the lives of formerly enslaved people but also how the interviewers chose to represent them. I wished I could hear those voices, not just read the transcripts, because the intonation and cadence would carry meaning the text alone cannot. At the same time, the handwritten notes/corrections and archival indexing remind me that oral history is never raw data—it is mediated, preserved, and structured in ways that reflect choices, biases, and incredible labor.
Oral history’s subjectivity is not a flaw to be corrected but a central feature to be embraced. It is precisely in its incompleteness, partiality, and dialogue between narrator and interviewer that oral history creates some of its most enduring truths.