“Although most practitioners now see oral history as a useful tool, much remains to be done,” declared Rick Halpern in 1998, “not simply in terms of restoring the experience of various neglected groups to their place within working class history but also in moving toward a greater degree of theoretical awareness and methodological sophistication.” Sherrie Tucker may have taken these words to heart as she was writing Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s at that time. Published in 2000, Swing Shift seeks to fill silences in the historical record by blending interviews with former members of WWII-era All-Girl bands with a patchwork of written (mostly editorial in nature) sources.

The absence of women in jazz narratives despite the abundance of available living sources, Tucker argues, has occurred due to “uncritical reproduction of dominant gender ideology” as opposed to “careless omission” (Tucker, Swing Shift, 6). Tucker also exhibits keen awareness of the theoretical landscape in which she worked, commenting that she wrote Swing Shift while understanding “gender to be constructed, historically contingent, and inextricably intersected by other social categories such as race, class, and sexuality” (Tucker, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” 293). On race and class, Swing Shift has plenty to say, but Tucker treads lightly on sexuality because her oral sources did not give her permission to discuss their sexuality.

Filling silences and challenging established narratives is a primary theme in Swing Shift. Also present throughout the text is “The Closet,” looming quietly in the background as Tucker’s narrative walks on eggshells to steer clear of discussing her oral sources’ sexuality. Ironically, Tucker would ‘fill silences and challenge established narratives’ for her own work just two years later in 2002, when she published an article titled “When Subjects Don’t Come Out.” In this article, Tucker tackles The Closet head-on. She acknowledges flaws inherent within one of her initial goals, which was to ‘discover’ lesbians in all-girl bands and historicize them as “lesbian foremothers” to the gay liberation movement (Tucker, “Subjects,” 300). Although none of Tucker’s oral sources were willing to out themselves, she reveals many of them were more than happy to out each other. The Closet is usually interpreted as a false ultimatum: keep your sexuality hidden or reveal it to everyone. Invoking Sedgwick, Tucker points to a vast middle ground between those two extremes, reframing The Closet as a factor that continuously shapes the lives of non-heterosexuals who constantly enter new contexts in which their sexuality is not common knowledge. By that logic, the only way to truly leave the closet for good would be to find a way to inform every cognizant human being on Earth of your sexual identity. A daunting prospect. How will you tell the people of North Sentinel Island?

The biggest lesson I took away from these readings was to not give up when oral sources redact their recollections. It need not be the end of the world, because as Tucker has demonstrated, there are creative ways to write around the edges of a redaction. I think Tucker’s later article would have worked very well as a chapter or epilogue within Swing Shift, which makes me wonder why she did not include something like it. Was she concerned that even a peripheral discussion of what Tucker’s oral sources didn’t say about their sexuality might complicate the publishing of her book? Then she changed her mind? Is it okay to share summarized versions of redacted oral material, so long as identifying information is removed and exact quotes are not used?

The 1970s was a pivotal period of time in the historiography of oral history. Halpern points to the publications of the Lynds’ Rank and File and Friedlander’s Emergence of a UAW Local in 1973 and ’75 respectively as heralds of subsequent decades of scholarship about “the history of the industrial union upsurge of the 1930s and its ultimate failure to alter significantly the trajectory of American capitalism.” (Halpern, Historiographic Assessment, 597). Concurrently, from 1972 thru ’76, Dr. Herbert Gutman of the City College of New York (CCNY) led the New York City Immigrant Labor History Project and organized interviews (which he did not personally conduct) of more than two hundred people.

I listened to an interview of Antonio Buono, who immigrated to New York City in 1934 and worked as a longshoreman. An unidentified friend, whose presence both streamlined and complicated the interview, occasionally helped Mr. Buono understand the interviewer’s questions. Sometimes this friend stepped outside the role of translator, however, and answered the interviewer’s questions instead of Buono. The interviewer and both interviewees frequently spoke over each other, diminishing the audio quality and transcript clarity. The unidentified interviewer, a younger woman, spent considerable time struggling to comprehend Mr. Buono’s broken English. She could understand nothing Buono said when he spoke Italian with his friend, which he did frequently. Would conducting the interview in Italian have produced a more fruitful exchange? The error-ridden transcript strongly resembles the work of speech-to-text software and excludes entirely any Italian spoken between the two sources, suggesting Dr. Gutman’s team did not bother to archive their interviews with official transcripts.

I suspect the interviewer was a student (undergraduate and graduate students conducted many of these interviews) who lacked people skills, which might explain why she struggled to establish rapport with her source and did not fully leverage unexpected common ground which arose between them. When the interviewer revealed that she had visited her source’s hometown of Ischia, Mr. Buono (who tended to speak only when spoken to) lit up and made unprompted remarks about the beauty of Ischia and its pubs. Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t bite, stifling anything else Buono had to say about his upbringing by skipping ahead to his departure from Italy. Then she neglected to ask about Ellis Island. The questions were all over the place, but in the interviewer’s defense, Buono challenged her by offering very short answers. When asked what he brought with him during passage to the United States, Buono simply responded, “a suitcase,” and did not elaborate (“Clothes … wine and stuff”) until pressed for more details. As Ritchie noted more than a generation later, “people remember what they think is important, not necessarily what the interviewer thinks is most consequential” (Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 32). The interviewer’s habit of asking conversationally infertile yes-or-no questions to keep Mr. Buono talking caused her to miss enticing opportunities to pivot to Buono’s involvement in organized labor; the project’s entire point.

The most interesting part of the interview came from Mr. Buono’s unnamed friend, who briefly described how Italian immigrant communities in the New York City of his youth presented a united front at work while becoming more “clannish” outside the workplace (Sicilians sticking with Sicilians, Calabrians with Calabrians, Barese with Barese, etc). Strangely, the interviewer did not ask Mr. Buono about how this “clannish” dynamic played out in the labor unions. Perhaps she doubted Mr. Buono’s ability to comment on such a complex subject due to his lack of higher education? For Brecher, “respect is the alpha and omega of good interviewing technique,” and a good oral historian will view their sources as equals “from whom you have a great deal to learn” (Brecher, Quit Worrying, 197).

Overall, Antonio Buono’s interview reconstructs a fascinating life story. I especially appreciated the interviewer’s choice to conduct the interview in a bustling public space, which likely helped Mr. Buono open up in ways the sterility of an isolated, sound-proofed room might have discouraged. By failing to move beyond the basic task of gathering details of Mr. Buono’s life story, however, the interview lacked critical dialogue and could have engaged more significantly with the NYC Immigrant Labor History Project’s mission. Portelli, who believes in oral history’s inherent partiality, would think Mr. Buono’s interviewer shouldn’t try so hard to remain aloof because “oral history can never be told without taking sides, since the “sides” exist inside the telling.” (Portelli, Oral History, 57). The co-creative nature of an oral history interview should be embraced, and if your interviewee is having a good time, reciprocating won’t stop Earth from spinning.

This week, we explored the WPA Slave Narrative Collection and read several articles. Two articles, “Oral History: How and Why it was Born” and “Oral History” by Allan Nevins and Louis Starr, respectively, serve as the first and second chapters of Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. We read both chapters this week, along with Rick Halpern’s “Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-Five Years” from The Journal of American History, as well as “What Makes Oral History Different” from Alessandro Portelli’s book titled The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories. Each of these pieces speaks in some way to the history of oral history, how it began, and how it grew over the course of the twentieth century.

Rick Halpern’s historiographic survey provides the clearest timeline of oral history’s development. He splits oral history into two threads that diverged in the early 1970s: a more scholarly, empirical strand sparked by the Lynd duo’s Rank and File project; and a more theory-heavy, interviewer-as-a-participant strand launched by Peter Friedlander’s The Emergence of a UAW Local. Both projects explored the prominence of labor unions in the 1930s and those unions’ failure to alter the momentum of American capitalism. Both projects endured criticism due to methodological shortcomings; haphazard interview-collecting in the Lynds’ case, and excessive theorizing in Friedlander’s.

Allen Nevins, who established the Oral History Research Office in 1948, declares that “oral history was born of modern invention and technology,” (Nevins, Oral History, 30). As the pace of daily life accelerates with technology, free time and attention spans plummet, reducing a person’s ability to settle at a desk long enough to produce the rich ego documents characteristic of earlier centuries. Louis Starr echoes Nevins’s point, expressing a more pessimistic view of the present state of affairs. “Oral history has failed to receive the critical attention it needs if it is to fulfill its potentialities,” he declares, lamenting the difficulty in getting academic peers to fully take oral history seriously even after convincing them of its merits (Starr, Oral History, 55). Alessandro Portelli, fascinated by the fallibility of human memory, takes aim at anti-oral prejudice against by reminding readers that written records, like any oral record, are products of imperfect translation: “The most literal translation is hardly ever the best, and a truly faithful translation always implies a certain amount of invention” (Portelli, Luigi Trastulli, 47).

These articles all inevitably veer into discussion of the most important part of oral history: methods. Even the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, which used amateur interviewers unequipped to engage in critical dialogue along with never making clear its criteria for selecting interviewees, stands as a great example of how an oral history project’s value can be negatively impacted by methodological shortcomings. Even as oral history becomes more accepted among academic historians, greater importance is still placed on archiving written transcripts of instead of an oral history interview’s audio. Portelli argued in favor of pairing written transcripts with audio by default, correctly believing both media to be stronger and more valuable together than they are apart. Much can be gleaned from someone’s tone, word-emphasis, and other patterns of speech. Perhaps it could further be argued that even audio tapes lack additional nuance which video footage could provide – facial language, micro-expressions, etc. Should a scholar who consults an oral source make sure they interpret that source through every possible available medium? When using words from an oral history transcript in our research, when is it appropriate to include or exclude tone of voice? Or body language, if the interview was videotaped?

This week features two selections which help introduce the concept of oral history. Chapter One of Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan’s The Oral History Manual briefly defines oral history and summarizes its origins. In addition, Chapter One of Donald A. Ritchie’s Doing Oral History provides a valuable survey of defining characteristics which distinguish oral history from other forms of interview.

“An interview becomes oral history,” according to Ritchie, “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.”

Ritchie’s definition of oral history harmonizes nicely with that of Sommer and Quinlan, who write: “Oral history is primary-source material created in an interview setting with a witness to or a participant in an event or a way of life for the purpose of preserving the information and making it available to others. The term refers both to the process and the interview itself.”

Clapping one’s hands in rhythm while declaring “Process, Process, Process!” playfully expresses the key theme shared by the above scholars. The methods an oral historian uses to prepare for and conduct an interview are as important as the interview itself, if not more so. An interview conducted with improper methods loses value as a primary source. Failure to conduct background research before conducting an interview, for example, can produce incomplete results because the interviewer should never presume infallibility on the part of the interviewee’s memory.

Securing numerous living sources for project interviews is essential because individual people will remember what they think is important, and that may not align with what the interviewer considers important. To illustrate this point, Ritchie highlights Diane Manning’s oral history project interviewing Texan teachers about the transition away from one-room school buildings. White teachers interviewed by Manning hardly ever spoke about non-white students or racial school integration, whereas Black teachers remembered it vividly. If Manning had not cultivated a diverse range of interview subjects, her findings would have been skewed. Once again, the methods are just as important as the interviews, if not more so.

Sommer and Quinlan divide oral history work into two categories: life interviews and project interviews. Life interviews focus on individual subjects and often consist of numerous interviews in order to allow the interviewee enough time and space to recount what amounts of a life story. Project interviews, on the other hand, focus on specific events and should involve multiple interview subjects in order to create a nuanced understanding of the subject event. Ritchie goes a step further by encouraging oral historians to prioritize life interviews when possible, adding that “even individual researchers need to look beyond their immediate interests when interviewing.”

I agree that life interviews represent the fullest and most ambitious use of oral history as a tool, but project interviews strike me as the format an oral historian is much more likely to encounter in the field. In project interviews, there needs to be a balance struck between knowing when to allow an interviewee to meander down memory lane and when to ask a more topic-related question to reel them back in. How best can an oral historian strike that balance?

I am a second-year Master’s student in Temple University’s Department of History. Ten years ago, I secured a B.A. degree in Theater with a concentration in Performance at West Chester University, and I did not realize how much I love history until after I graduated. Ever since, I have worked as a historical tour guide in Independence National Historical Park, where I enjoy telling people all about unconventional topics such as Ben Franklin’s family life or the destructive impact Independence Park’s construction had on adjacent neighborhoods. Currently, I am studying U.S. military history during the long nineteenth century with a focus on atrocities committed by the military, primarily against Native Americans, during that time.

I have zero previous experience with conducting professional oral history, but I have come close. At the age of 9 or 10, I recorded myself interviewing my grandparents about their upbringing during the Great Depression (for reasons which I have forgotten, my young grandfather had been compelled one day to scrub his front porch with a toothbrush, which is how my amused grandmother met him for the first time). Much more recently, last year in fact, I interviewed Mark Segal and Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, two queer elders who were involved in an effort (back in the 1970s) to end Temple University’s participation in conducting conversion therapy on gay Temple students and Philadelphians. I did not use high-quality recording equipment, nor have I deposited the interviews into an archive, so this work does not meet the definition of actual oral history, but it is the closest I have come so far. Turns out, I didn’t even know what oral history actually was until this week.

I have no specific career aspirations involving oral history at the moment, but I very much enjoyed the experience of interviewing people last year and I would like to learn how to do it properly. One day, I might go to South Philly and interview descendants of people who used to live in “The Neck,” a lost and mostly forgotten community which used to exist where the stadiums, FDR Park, and Navy Yard are today. Any remaining physical evidence of that community is now buried under ten feet of fill, and you would have no idea any of it was ever there if you visited the area today. It is a fascinating piece of Philadelphian history which no one seems to be writing about, and I’d like to change that in the future.

– Connor Behm

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