Upon my first reading of both introductory chapters in Sommer & Quinlan’s The Oral History Manual and Donald Ritchie’s Doing Oral History, it’s clear that my preconceived notion of what oral history entails is both broader than reality and yet simultaneously insufficient to describe it. Prior to this class, I thought that “oral history” was the general term for spoken/recorded stories and histories – interviews, stories, oral traditions, and the like. It was especially interesting to read the definition that both readings supported: “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 product.”
One particular thing to note is Sommer and Quinlan’s distinction between oral history and the interview-based research done by scholars for specific historical projects. The key difference comes in the accessibility of the interviews: they say that oral history must be available to the public and those who gave them needed to have given consent to donate their words and stories. But Ritchie’s definition seems to be broader – he casts a relatively wide net in terms of what is and isn’t oral history, even if he does specify and rule out a number of methodologies and techniques such as journalistic interviews done for a specific purpose and publication.
In a lot of ways, Ritchie defines oral history as a counter to “great man” history and other, more traditional methodologies. He quotes Joseph Gould, a lost pioneer of the discipline: “What people say is history… What we used to think was history… is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.” Though Gould did not see success, his definition – a people’s history – comes up often and prominently in Ritchie’s work. Where Sommer and Quinlan focus on the technical aspects of conducting oral histories, Ritchie in this first chapter appears more concerned with the purpose, results, and implications of oral history.
One question I do have, however, is about presentation, something that the two articles appear to disagree on. For example – Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus is a harrowing tale of a Holocaust survivor based on audio interviews taken from Spiegelman’s own father Vladek. If presented simply as the audio recordings of a survivor, it would be a perfect example of a life interview – a historical tale told through the perspective and the real words of a single person. Of the five steps in the oral History life cycle, Spiegelman’s book – and others like it – display four of the five basic “benchmarks” as described by Comner and Quinlan. Though the idea is plain, the plan (if often improvised) followed, the interviews conducted, and his work preserved in graphic novel form, it does fall short in terms of Access/Use; as far as I know, the full interviews conducted by Spiegelman are not available to the public, instead being presented in comic form.
But Ritchie seems to use a slightly different and more broad definition, what Sommer and Quinlan might call “vernacular” – he includes things like Zhou dynasty court records, Herodotus’s often inaccurate writings, and the Spanish records of their conquered peoples as types of early oral history. The big difference between the two perspectives appears to be in the Access/Use section – where Sommer and Quinlan would likely say that the interviews themselves need to be available in full as an archive to be considered a proper oral history, Ritchie’s definition appears to be more flexible in how these interviews are presented. To that end – would books or other media like Maus be considered an oral history based in Ritchie’s definition? I would call it likely.