On Saturday, February 7, 2009, Australian officials recorded more than 400 individual bushfires burning in the countryside of the state of Victoria. Although the countryside would continue to burn for weeks afterwards, February 7, 2009 became known as “Black Saturday” because 173 people lost their lives to the fires on that day. For this reason, the Black Saturday bushfires are among the most vigorously documented wildfires in history.

Dr. Peg Fraser earned her Master’s Degree in Public History and Heritage at the University of Melbourne in 2008. By 2010, she had joined Museum Victoria as a curator. She started the process of earning her PhD (also in History) at Monash University in 2011. While working on her PhD, Fraser, in her capacity as a museum curator, began collecting oral history interviews for the Victoria Bushfires Collection. Later, after graduating with her PhD in 2015, Dr. Fraser used more than twenty-seven of her interviews from the Victoria Bushfires Collection as the basis for her book.

Published in 2018, Black Saturday: Not The End of the Story is primarily a cultural history of the town of Strathewen, one of the many small settlements outside Melbourne unlucky enough to exist in the bushfire’s path. Limiting her oral testimony to those from one town sacrifices breadth for depth, allowing Fraser to explore the greater context of Strathewen’s existence prior to the fires in a level of detail which would prove challenging to fit in a documentary. Although Fraser’s approach bears fruit, this reviewer can only wonder how similarly or differently the other towns experienced the fires and aftermath. Perhaps future scholars will take up those explorations.

Fraser mixes Black Saturday’s oral and editorial primary sources with papers from local historians and settler families, along with an intriguing analysis of material culture. For secondary sources, she draws from scholarly literature on Australian environmental history (bushfires), memory studies (memorials), feminist literature (gender and disaster), and trauma studies. Rejecting the idea that she needed to find a master narrative of the bushfire, Fraser chose to focus more on analyzing how the survivors told their stories and what that means for both the storytellers and their listeners. Dr. Fraser’s background as a public historian and museum curator, and especially her interest in material culture, is easy to spot within Black Saturday. Featured in the book’s eight main chapters are eight photographed objects, artifacts touched by or directly related to the bushfires, that provide readers with entry points into the broader themes of Fraser’s narrative.

A broken Trewhella jack, for example, which is an obsolete tool previously used in the sawmills established in the bush outside Melbourne in the early days of Strathewen’s history, allows Fraser to dive into the history of Strathewen’s settler origins, the rise and fall of the apple orchard industry, and the gradual encroachment of urban culture from Melbourne.

A map showing the fire line (how far fire reached before changing directions and dying out), hand-drawn by a Strathewen survivor shortly after the blaze, prompts Fraser to analyze how survivors dealt with the aftermath of the fire. Survivors’ experiences of the aftermath were varied. Some lost more than others, leading to complicated emotions existing between survivors, but as Dr. Fraser aptly argues, “Everyone in the bushfire zone, to one degree or another, is burnt” (226).

Fraser uses a burned tree, covered with poems written and posted by Strathewen’s survivors in the immediate aftermath of the fire, to explore how the memorialization process produced flattened narratives of an idyllic, harmonious Strathewen that never actually existed. This tree, referred to as the Poetry Tree, was eventually ‘replaced’ with a permanent memorial conveying the same sort of message. Fraser argues that memorials like the Poetry Tree are not meant to express an accurate snapshot of history; they are instead designed to put forward a story that helps grieving people find the strength and inspiration to continue with their lives. “We just have to remember,” writes Fraser, “especially when reminded by those whose experiences contradict the harmonizing narrative, that it is not the whole story” (226).

A poster declaring “THERE IS NO HEIRARCHY WITH GRIEF AND LOSS”, which was displayed after the fire at a nearby relief center for Strathewen’s survivors, ushers readers into the tangled social hierarchies by which survivors measured both their losses and their willingness to accept help from official and unofficial channels. Survivors dealt not only with callous attitudes and comments from outsiders, but also with judgment and gossip from their own fellow survivors. Strathewen’s survivors collected many of the callous comments they received from outsiders and wrote them down on posters like the one featured in this chapter, which ultimately transformed the hurtful sentiments into something survivors could bond over and laugh about. By “repudiating a hierarchy of grief and loss,” according to Fraser, the posters “were acknowledging its existence” (97).

One Strathewen survivor’s old cellphone, blackened and partially melted from the heat of the fire, provides Fraser with a doorway into how the survivors made sense of and told their stories. People processed the trauma and interpreted it differently. Longtime residents of Strathewen, particularly the descendants of the original settler families, had experienced major bushfires before and tended to view their experience through narratives of loss, endurance, and renewal. People who had only recently moved to Strathewen, who did not have a deep familial connection to the bush or experience with wildfires, tended to view Black Saturday as a catastrophic end-of-the-world event that rendered the past unrecoverable, similar to being cast out of Eden. Some survivors told stories about how Strathewen came together as a community; others, who did not enjoy good standing in the community, instead invoked national narratives, such as that of Australian resilience (a narrative Fraser links to Australia’s dismal failures in the Gallipoli Campaign of World War One).

A child’s drawing of a chook (a chicken or fowl) introduces the Chook Project; a local initiative in which some of the women of Strathewen sewed chook cushions to distribute to any fellow survivors who wanted them. The fact that only women worked on this project launches Fraser’s analysis of the role played by gender in the survivors’ experience of the disaster. “On Black Saturday,” Fraser concludes, “some decisions to stay and defend (or to stay and be defended) were made not according to an assessment of risk and preparedness but according to gendered emotional concerns and relationship dynamics” (228). Binary gender roles among white settlers in the Australian bush usually show up as men working the land while women work the home. Because men are the ones traditionally expected to defend their homes from bushfire, staying to protect one’s home became entangled with notions of masculinity, making it more challenging for women to assert themselves during Black Saturday.

Black Saturday does not follow Frisch’s model of shared authority. Despite feeling guilty for not doing so, Fraser defends her choice by asserting that if she had followed the shared authority model, Black Saturday “would have resulted in a very different book” (260). She does not elaborate upon how her methods diverged from those espoused by Frisch, but I assume it means her narrators did not have input into the form Fraser’s book took or into the narrative Fraser adopted. I can understand her reluctance. Shared Authority is difficult to implement. A person’s relationship to and understanding of any event morphs greatly over time, and this is amplified when dealing with traumatic memories. Some of Fraser’s narrators tended to embellish or distort the facts because, to them, crafting narratives that provide meaning for why their friends and family members died took greater precedence over telling the story as it actually happened. Attempting to co-create a book so soon after the fires with a grieving, overwhelmed community might have ended disastrously. Still, I can only wonder what form Black Saturday might have taken had Frisch’s model been implemented.

This week, we read Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, by Abigail Perkiss. Drawn from more than sixty oral history interviews conducted as part of the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project, Perkiss’s book tells the complex story of how residents of New Jersey’s Bayshore area survived Hurricane Sandy. With the hurricane itself present only within the first two chapters, Perkiss focuses more on the storm’s aftermath. Some of the interviews give the impression that surviving Hurricane Sandy was easier than dealing with insurance companies in the months and years to follow. Perkiss shows how “neighborhood pride, the impulse to keep busy, and the slow pace of bureaucracy” prompted communities to rally and support each other without waiting for the government to catch up.

In her analysis of why the storm impacted the Bayshore area so horrendously, Perkiss turns to both political and environmental history. “The environmental history of the state [of New Jersey] is at once a story of industrial growth and shoreline development and one of vast green space and fierce coastal protection,” argues Perkiss. The absence of environmental alongside the economic considerations of shoreline development has resulted in what Neil Maher has coined “ecological schizophrenia.” Wetlands are natural “sponges,” possessing the ability to absorb and store stormwater. When wetlands are destroyed and replaced with beach houses, boardwalks, and other development, the coastline loses its ability to absorb water, resulting in the kind of flooding experienced during Hurricane Sandy. Even the plans to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy demonstrated “ecological schizophrenia” by failing to meaningfully address the need to protect wetlands and opting instead to simply continue building and rebuilding new structures on flood plains.

Politically, Perkiss indicts the disaster response after Hurricane Sandy as suffering “from a federal emergency-management system that privileged homeland security over natural hazards.” FEMA, ever since it was gobbled up by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, gradually became more equipped to respond to terrorist attacks instead of natural disasters, resulting in the Bush Administration’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most of Perkiss’s narrators felt FEMA under the Obama Administration had learned from its mistakes in New Orleans, but these sentiments soured when the recovery stalled.

I’m not sure how effectively undergraduate students (or graduate students, to be frank) can be prepared for interviewing traumatized people who describe traumatic events, unless the student has already experienced and passed through something similar. Exposing undergraduate students to trauma with minimal training just for the sake of applying theory, gaining practical experience, or furthering education seems unethical. What strikes me as a mitigating factor in this case is the personal connection Perkiss’s student interviewers shared with the storm. The Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project was based out of Kean University, located not far away from the Bayshore area. The students who participated in the project experienced the storm firsthand. Kean University students experienced significant disruption from the storm. For at least two of the student interviewers, Hurricane Sandy “had brought terror to their homes and families.” I think the interviewers’ personal connection to the storm went a long way towards helping the students conduct interviews sensitively while remaining sensitive to the narrators’ traumas.

Question: Should oral historians offer professional support to survivor-narrators who are being interviewed about traumatic events? Was any offered to the Hurricane Sandy narrators?

Question: How did the interviewers deal with transference? The transference of intensity/wounding from a trauma survivor to a listener?

Question: “If the subject benefits from the process” of oral history, writes Lynn Abrams, “this is a happy but unintended outcome.” How did the subjects benefit from this project?

In previous weeks, we have explored the foundations of oral history from several practical angles, including the history of oral history and the nature of shared authority. Then, in order to bring these definitions to life and see oral history put into practice, we examined concrete examples of labor oral history interviews. Reading Swing Shift allowed us to experience the analysis-driven final intended product of an interview-gathering process. With foundations laid and our feet now firmly planted, this week we look up to the sky, so to speak, by focusing on Theory. In Oral History Theory, our assigned reading for this week, Lynn Abrams surveys the range of different theoretical frameworks with which oral history may be more thoughtfully and effectively conducted. This class is officially named “The Theory and Practice of Oral History,” and one might assume at first glance that these two facets exist in isolation, but Abrams argues that “practice and analysis cannot be separated” when conducting oral history, and that “the process of interviewing cannot be disaggregated from the outcome.”

Theoretical Promiscuity, to borrow from Abrams’s terminology, describes a key theme throughout her book. According to Abrams, oral history is “a discipline with undisciplined tendencies, continually drawing upon other disciplinary approaches, and in flux as it defines accept able practices and modes of theorising. It is at the same time profoundly interdisciplinary, a promiscuous practice that, jackdaw-like, picks up the shiny, attractive theories which have originated elsewhere and applies them to its own field of study.”[1] In other words, the mutability of oral history-making pushes scholars to analyze oral sources in multilayered ways using theoretical frameworks derived from linguistic (orality), literary (narrative), psychiatric (memory), neurological (trauma), and other non-historical disciplines of study.

I hadn’t realized how much oral history, as both process and product, is subject to continuous change. Narrators first translate their stories and experiences into suitable responses to the interviewer’s questions, and this process is greatly shaped by the quality of an interviewer’s questions. The interviewer constructs their own understanding of what is shared, ideally striking a balance between engaging with broader research questions while giving narrators enough space to tell their stories. The resulting conversation is then winnowed through a transcription process laden with its own pitfalls (is it ethical to render dialects into more standardized forms speech for the sake of easier comprehension by a wider audience?), after which the narrator has the opportunity to redact any of their own words. Finally, the oral historian breaks apart this already much-transformed product, sprinkling fragments of many interviews into a scholarly book or article, holding them up against available archival and written sources, and binding everything together with analysis.

And it doesn’t stop there. Step outside of the process of oral history-making, and we can see how oral history itself, the theories and methods used to create it, also evolves over time. The study of trauma within oral history, for example, its effects on narrators and interviewers alike, is a newly emerging field within oral history which will help inform how best to approach projects involving survivors of war, genocide, natural disasters, or other traumatizing experiences. In the first edition of Oral History Theory (2010), Abrams plants the seeds for the second edition by examining (in the chapters about Memory and Narrative) how trauma can leave holes in a narrator’s memory and prevent narrators from arranging memory into cohesive narratives. The second edition (2018), however, features a new chapter devoted entirely to trauma, the ethics of working with traumatized narrators, and a painstakingly navigated distinction between viewing oral history as therapeutic for traumatized narrators (ill-advised) versus acknowledging that oral history is not inherently therapeutic (despite whatever Freud might say), but catharsis can sometimes happen as an unintended byproduct. The evolution of Abrams’s own book reflects the evolution of crisis oral history into a sub-field of oral history in its own right.

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[1] Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2018), 32.

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Biographical Introduction.

Meredith A. Behm, née Weber, was born in Easton, Pennsylvania in 1957. Her father briefly worked as a Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College before his ordination as a minister at First Presbyterian Church of Springfield (NJ). Her mother took an active role in her church community by serving as a deacon. The second of three sisters, she grew up initially in Springfield, New Jersey, where she lived between the ages of 2 and 10. Springfield, originally her mother’s hometown, was segregated into distinctly white and Black neighborhoods, with a sizable Jewish population. Because there weren’t enough students available to keep school open on Jewish holidays, she often took the extra time to go roller-skating with her older sister. At the age of 10, she moved to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, also known as the mushroom capital of the world, where more than half of all mushrooms produced in the United States are grown. Although schools were integrated by that time, Kennett Square’s neighborhoods remained segregated into predominantly white and Black communities, along with a recently-arrived Puerto Rican community consisting primarily of the families of laborers who picked mushrooms on local farms. She volunteered at her father’s church on Tuesday evenings, running the dishwasher while kids from all over town came to partake in food, games, and help with schoolwork. She graduated from Kennett High School in 1975. An avid reader and lover of quiet spaces, Meredith earned a BA in History at Gettysburg College, followed by a master’s degree in library and information science from Drexel University. Graduating from Drexel in 1980, she moved near Downingtown, Pennsylvania, where she gained employment as a librarian at Chester County Library. During this time, she met her husband, whom she would marry after two years of dating. She stepped back from work when her daughter was born in 1989, followed by a son in 1993, and spent ten years focused on raising her children. Against the objections of her husband’s parents, she returned to work in 1999 as an assistant librarian at Lionville Elementary School, where she remained until retiring in 2023. She and her husband have lived in the same house for more than forty years, and she enjoys taking frequent trips to the beach.

The concept of “Shared Authority” dominates our two readings for this week, both of which were written by Michael Frisch. First, we read Frisch’s chapter titled “Urban Public History in Celebratory Contexts: The Example of the “Philadelphia’s Moving Past” Project” in A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, published in 1990. Then we moved on to Frisch’s article titled “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back” in Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, published a generation later in 2011. Frisch examines Shared Authority in the first article from a project-planning angle, then in the second article from the perspective of digital content management.

What is “Shared Authority?” This is a term which has appeared in several readings from previous weeks. Admittedly, when I first read the term, I thought shared authority was something the oral historian extended to the interviewee. A historian working with documents claims the authority to interpret the meaning of those documents, especially ones with deceased authors. The work of interpreting and analyzing written sources can take place while alone in a quiet room. Oral history, on the other hand, is co-creative and unable to exist without dialogue, so naturally I thought oral historians shared some of their authority as interpreters of historical meaning/significance with those whom they interviewed. Thinking of Brecher’s imperative to “regard your source as someone who is at least your equal,” I thought it was primarily about having respect for your sources.[1]

Well, Frisch took me to task this week.

“We don’t have authority to give away,” Frisch bluntly declares, reminding readers that historians are not the sole interpreters in oral and public history. When oral history is conducted properly, Shared Authority is inherent within the process and emanates equally from interviewer and interviewee.[2]

In Frisch’s 1990 essay, he favors experimenting with an unconventional social-scientific approach to public history, describing an ambitious project for Philadelphia’s tricentennial. The project called for a decentralized, modular project which would interpret Philadelphian history on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, starting with a street festival where community members could contribute data to interactive exhibits. The festival would have served as the launch pad for establishing sustained interactions among six Philadelphian neighborhoods, broader analysis of patterns which arose from the data-gathering, creating a “Historymobile” vehicle which could travel between those neighborhoods to deploy interactive exhibits directly onto the street, and a starting a program of cross-neighborhood discussion-group tours. This hypothetical project is a good example of Shared Authority because it relied on community participation to gather the data it needed, and also because it avoided flattening neighborhood histories or shoehorning them into city-wide narratives. Unfortunately, most of the project would not come to pass.

Examples of resistance to Shared Authority from within academic circles can be found in both readings. Because Frisch could not secure crucial grant funding, most of his Philly tricentennial project was scrapped, leaving the Historymobile as the sole surviving remnant. Chief among the complaints levied by panelists who responded negatively to Frisch’s proposal was the well-entrenched belief that “a public street festival was not a serious locale for historical presentation, in contrast presumably to a museum.”[3] In Frisch’s more recent article, he elaborates upon his definition of Shared Authority as something which is not only inherent, but also exists in degrees. In other words, the Shared Authority inherent within an oral or public history project can be strengthened or weakened. As an example, Frisch recalls attending a program about railroad workers in which the workers spoke for the first half, a panel of scholars spoke for the second half, and at no point did the program place the workers in dialogue with the scholars. The railroad workers and scholars still co-created the event, but allowing them to converse directly with each other would have strengthened the project’s Shared Authority.[4]

Lack of easy accessibility and the crudeness of data-navigation tools hinder historians from getting the most out of oral history. Frisch laments the absence of acceptable middle ground between the opposing extremes of “raw” oral history audio/transcripts bursting at the seams with unorganized data versus “cooked” scholarly products with plenty of analysis but only a tiny fraction of the available data. Perhaps the kitchen, where scholars transform “raw” materials into “cooked” products, need not be such a liminal space? Should oral history projects exist primarily to provide material for academic publications, or should the ability of scholars to produce academic work from “raw” oral history be considered more of a mutually reinforcing byproduct? In the future, could a more refined AI assistant, capable of drawing more abstract associations between data-points compared to a search engine which requires specific keywords and phrases, “listen” to countless hours of audio and provide the kind of non-linear, non-alphabetic, theme-based access Frisch dreams of?

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[1] Jeremy Brecher, “How I Learned To Quit Worrying And Love Community History: A ‘Pet Outsider’s’ Report On The Brass Workers History Project,” Radical History Review 1984, nos. 28–30 (1984): 197, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1984-28-30-187.

[2] Michael Frisch, “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back,” in Letting Go?, 1st ed., ed. Bill Adair et al. (Routledge, 2020), 127, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429333743-14.

[3] Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (State University of New York Press, 1990), 233.

[4] Frisch, “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back,” 128.

“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