{"id":17,"date":"2025-09-09T16:54:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T20:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/?p=17"},"modified":"2025-09-09T16:55:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T20:55:09","slug":"week-3-the-history-of-oral-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/2025\/09\/09\/week-3-the-history-of-oral-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 3: The History of Oral History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week, we explored the WPA Slave Narrative Collection and read several articles. Two articles, \u201cOral History: How and Why it was Born\u201d and \u201cOral History\u201d by Allan Nevins and Louis Starr, respectively, serve as the first and second chapters of Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology<\/em>. We read both chapters this week, along with Rick Halpern\u2019s \u201cOral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-Five Years\u201d from The Journal of American History<\/em>, as well as \u201cWhat Makes Oral History Different\u201d from Alessandro Portelli\u2019s book titled The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick Halpern\u2019s historiographic survey provides the clearest timeline of oral history\u2019s development. He splits oral history into two threads that diverged in the early 1970s: a more scholarly, empirical strand sparked by the Lynd duo\u2019s Rank and File<\/em> project; and a more theory-heavy, interviewer-as-a-participant strand launched by Peter Friedlander\u2019s The Emergence of a UAW Local<\/em>. Both projects explored the prominence of labor unions in the 1930s and those unions\u2019 failure to alter the momentum of American capitalism. Both projects endured criticism due to methodological shortcomings; haphazard interview-collecting in the Lynds\u2019 case, and excessive theorizing in Friedlander\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Dr. Allan Nevins, Columbia University<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Allen Nevins, who established the Oral History Research Office in 1948, declares that \u201coral history was born of modern invention and technology,\u201d (Nevins, Oral History<\/em>, 30). As the pace of daily life accelerates with technology, free time and attention spans plummet, reducing a person\u2019s ability to settle at a desk long enough to produce the rich ego documents characteristic of earlier centuries. Louis Starr echoes Nevins\u2019s point, expressing a more pessimistic view of the present state of affairs. \u201cOral history has failed to receive the critical attention it needs if it is to fulfill its potentialities,\u201d 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<\/em>, 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: \u201cThe most literal translation is hardly ever the best, and a truly faithful translation always implies a certain amount of invention\u201d (Portelli, Luigi Trastulli<\/em>, 47).<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Death of Luigi Trastulli, by Alessandro Portelli<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, we explored the WPA Slave Narrative Collection and read several articles. Two articles, \u201cOral History: How and Why it was Born\u201d and \u201cOral History\u201d 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 … Continue reading Week 3: The History of Oral History<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37370,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37370"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/cbehmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}