September 1, 2025 – Happy Labor Day!
Engaging with Sommer and Quinlan alongside Richie underscored the complexity of oral history as both a methodology and a product, but also made clear how structured the practice has to be to qualify as oral history at all. Oral history is not simply recording memories or hosting conversations; it is the deliberate creation of primary sources within a framework that emphasizes preservation, accessibility, and reliability. Sommer and Quinlan’s “benchmarks” for the oral history cycle—conceptualization, planning, interviewing, preservation, and access—make it clear that oral history must be intentional and sustained. Without these steps, as they point out, one risks producing something anecdotal rather than something with long-term scholarly or community value.
Richie complicates this somewhat by highlighting the choices and interpretive work required of the oral historian. His discussion of paradoxes—particularly around memory—reminded me that oral history is not about pristine accuracy but about context, meaning, and perspective. Memory’s limitations are well known, but Richie’s examples of narrators who, even with memory loss, retain remarkable insight decades later forced me to consider memory as more nuanced than simply reliable or unreliable. This perspective recalled, for me, the jury instructions given in courts: credibility is judged not only by whether details are precise but also by whether testimony is consistent, plausible, and corroborated. In this way, memory in oral history can be both fragile and authoritative, depending on how it is framed and interpreted.
Another dimension that struck me is oral history’s power to challenge existing hierarchies of knowledge. Both Sommer and Quinlan, and Richie in particular, emphasize that oral history’s value lies in elevating voices otherwise left out of the archive. Richie’s point that the most illuminating insights may come not from those in positions of leadership but from employees or community members without formal authority complicates the assumption that “official” records provide the best evidence of the past. Oral history can correct misconceptions, supplement gaps, and re-center perspectives, producing histories that are more inclusive and, in many ways, more accurate to lived experience.
The organizational dossiers we read followed Sommer and Quinlan’s cycle of oral history work: they began with a clear research idea, developed a plan for gathering information, identified candidates for interviews, and drafted preliminary questions that would focus the conversation but that were broad enough not to stifle reflection and commentary. I was especially struck by how the organizational histories presented institutions almost biographically, with traits, aspirations, challenges, and defining episodes. Reading them felt like encountering characters whose stories were far from static, they were animated, dynamic, and multi-voiced.
Taken together, the readings and dossiers suggest that oral history’s rigor derives as much from its methodology as from its interpretive choices. It requires attention to formality—release forms, preservation standards, archival planning—but it also demands reflexivity about the role of subjectivity and the responsibilities of the interviewer. In this sense, oral history is both disciplined and creative, situated between documentation and interpretation. What makes it compelling is precisely this dual nature: it insists on fidelity to process while simultaneously recognizing that memory and narrative are not fixed but negotiated. That balance itself gives oral history its particular strength as a historical method.