{"id":6,"date":"2025-09-03T10:37:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T14:37:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/?p=6"},"modified":"2025-09-03T10:37:24","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T14:37:24","slug":"blog-post-2-sommer-quinlan-ritchie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/2025\/09\/03\/blog-post-2-sommer-quinlan-ritchie\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post 2: Sommer, Quinlan & Ritchie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Upon my first reading of both introductory chapters in Sommer & Quinlan\u2019s The Oral History Manual<\/em> and Donald Ritchie\u2019s Doing Oral History,<\/em> it\u2019s 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 \u201coral history\u201d 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: \u201cOral 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One particular thing to note is Sommer and Quinlan\u2019s 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\u2019s definition seems to be broader – he casts a relatively wide net in terms of what is and isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a lot of ways, Ritchie defines oral history as a counter to \u201cgreat man\u201d history and other, more traditional methodologies. He quotes Joseph Gould, a lost pioneer of the discipline: \u201cWhat people say is history\u2026 What we used to think was history\u2026 is only formal history and largely false. I\u2019ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude\u2014what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows\u2014or I\u2019ll perish in the attempt.\u201d Though Gould did not see success, his definition – a people\u2019s history – comes up often and prominently in Ritchie\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One question I do have, however, is about presentation, something that the two articles appear to disagree on. For example – Art Spiegelman\u2019s graphic novel Maus<\/em> is a harrowing tale of a Holocaust survivor based on audio interviews taken from Spiegelman\u2019s 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\u2019s book – and others like it – display four of the five basic \u201cbenchmarks\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Ritchie seems to use a slightly different and more broad definition, what Sommer and Quinlan might call \u201cvernacular\u201d – he includes things like Zhou dynasty court records, Herodotus\u2019s 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\u2019s definition appears to be more flexible in how these interviews are presented. To that end – would books or other media like Maus<\/em> be considered an oral history based in Ritchie\u2019s definition? I would call it likely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Upon my first reading of both introductory chapters in Sommer & Quinlan\u2019s The Oral History Manual and Donald Ritchie\u2019s Doing Oral History, it\u2019s 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 \u201coral history\u201d was … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Blog Post 2: Sommer, Quinlan & Ritchie”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37290,"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-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}