Looseleaf History

As the draft during World War II removed men from male-coded spaces and sent them off to swell the ranks of the US Military, women had a unique opportunity to engage in spaces that would have–and did–exclude women. Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift: “All Girl” Bands of the 1940s offers unique insight into a brief moment in “recent” history during which women were provided a de facto greater agency in challenging barriers placed by social and cultural constructs and ideas of gender contamination in music and among many cultural spaces in the domestic United States during World War II. Tucker’s book provides fascinating insight into the lives and stories of the “all-girl” bands (the subtitle having a story of transformation of its own throughout Tucker’s research). Additionally, her article “When the Subjects Won’t Come Out” asks probing questions about the nature of what isn’t said, what is implied, what is said outright that may not be repeated, and how to find meaning out of all of it.

Tucker broaches an interesting point in the sixth chapter of Swing Shift, when a band’s sound “was frequently described as ‘masculine’ by the women I interviewed, especially those who appreciated the band’s style. . . . considering the masculine norm in the jazz scene, it is understandable that even women musicians would consider feminine a pejorative description . . .”¹ We see the jazz scene as gender-coded to the point that descriptions of “good” performances are inherently masculine. This leads to the consideration of present-day equivalents, especially with the intense social and cultural changes experienced inter- and post-COVID. As gender-coded spaces were forcibly evacuated for weeks, months, etc., what new norms and new spaces came to be?

The sheet music in the cover photo is John Cage’s 4’33”, published and allegedly performed (though there is no audio record of that performance) in 1952. 4’33” subverts the agency of the performer and the composer by focusing on the absence of traditional music, providing what may be the finest crystallization of the concept of reading between the lines. Although Cage’s work continues to receive derisive reviews from musicians and historians,² the theme taken by Tucker in “When the Subjects Won’t Come Out” draws on similar ideas of the power and the meaning of silence.

I found the article remarkable in its dealing with the ethical dilemmas and pitfalls facing historians in the conduct of oral history. The theme of confirmation bias abounds throughout the article, culminating with an especially telling exchange between Tucker and her advisor. Tucker interviews two elderly women and, despite her best ethical efforts, cannot garner concrete evidence as to their sexuality. She relates the following story during a tour of their apartment.

“‘Now this is a sure sign of something,’ I say to myself, pretending to admire the paint in the second bedroom. ‘Either it is a sign that they are not lesbians but they know that I think they might be lesbians, or it is a sign that they are lesbians who are showing me their beds so that I will think they are not lesbians.'”³

After the interview, Tucker receives a check mailed by the interviewees for payment of a tape that Tucker gave to them. While Tucker promptly returns the check, she first alerts her advisor that she found a clear code for defining the interviewees’ sexuality: a joint checking account.⁴ Tucker realizes that she has not, in fact, found clear evidence, but the story goes to show the challenge in reading between the lines in an oral interview. I am consistently reminded of the knife-edge walked by historians as we interpret, reconstruct, and imagine and invent during our construction of the narrative. Too far to one side, and we have a history absent all-girl bands during the 1940s, let alone a history of sexuality in all-girl bands during the 1940s. Too far to the other side, and we create a narrative that misrepresents the past or devolves into historical fiction.

1. Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Duke University Press, 2000. pp. 290 ↩︎
2. Ellenberg, Claude. “I Deride John Cage’s 4’33” as Both a Musician and a Historian: The Synthesis of Pretentiousness” Unpublished, 2025. ↩︎
3. Tucker, Sherrie. “When the Subjects Won’t Come Out” in Queer Episodes in Modern History. University of Illinois Press, 2002. pp. 299. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎

In 1977, Rob Rosenthal conducted interviews in Seattle, WA, while researching for his MA thesis. He studied the 1919 general strike in Seattle, interviewing the men and women who were present or had valuable knowledge of the 1919 strike. The interviews generally follow a typical layout of prescribed questions. Still, one interview stands out as remarkable, if not for its invaluable information regarding the interviewee’s experience during the 1919 strike (he may not have been there), then for the interviewee’s life experience in labor unions during the early 20^th century and, more generally, the ability for oral history projects to unearth fascinating information even if the information found isn’t quite what was searched for.  

George Hastings (a pseudonym) was, at the time of the 1977 interview, 87 years old and full of vigor, regaling Rob Rosenthall with his life story for nearly two and a half hours. Each interview includes a synopsis, likely from Rosenthal’s field notes. These synopses are more so word pictures than they are biographical in nature, and Hasting’s synopsis reads as follows: 

“Age in 1919:29 — Occupation: Uncertain, probably lumber camps Not even clear if he was in Seattle during the Strike. But a Wobbly with a tremendous amount to say about all sorts of things tied to labor struggles of the day.”  

Rosenthal appears to take a different approach in this interview than in others, refraining from following his scripted questions with as much care to the structure of the interview, in this case allowing Hastings to, in the wide sense of the word, ramble on for a considerable duration before any attempt is made to focus on the 1919 strike or even labor in general. This leads us to some questions regarding the inclusion of this interview in the project. Acknowledging that Hastings may not have even been in Washington at the time of the Seattle General Strike and finding nowhere in the interview suggesting that Hastings was involved in organizing that strike, what does his story have to bear on the strike? In his interview with Virginia Redding, Rosenthal spends fifteen minutes asking questions before determining that Redding has nothing more to say regarding his project, and the interview ends. How then do we have two and a half hours of everything under the sun with Hastings? Perhaps Rosenthal felt the need to listen to an aged man waxing eloquent about his life, or perhaps he believed that there was vital information in Hastings’ story. I believe the latter. To put it succinctly, we get to listen to the lifecycle of one self-professed revolutionary. I use the term lifecycle here deliberately, with Hastings recounting his upbringing, education, how his views differed from classmates and teachers, his experience in the armed forces, his introduction to influential labor unions such as the IWW (the “wobblies”), advocating for free speech, being thrown in prison, and gradually becoming dissatisfied with the middling resolution of what he viewed as a labor revolution. 

The logistics of the interview are limited by circumstance, with this one taking place in what is most likely a union retiree club or retirement home. A radio or television plays in the background, other voices are heard, and the microphone occasionally disappears, perhaps into the fold of a suit or the cushion of a couch. These minor details aside, it appears that Hastings had far more to say than Rosenthal was prepared to receive. This is no slight against Rosenthal; he went in for a discussion of the 1919 Seattle General Strike and got Hastings’ life story with sidebars ranging from manned gliders to the IWW organizing strikes in North Dakota. Taking seriously the ability of the expert interviewer to improve the subject’s memory and focus, it becomes apparent that a more fully prepared interviewer could have engaged in either greater breadth or greater depth (or both, if the interviewer had many, many hours to spare) than what Hastings was able to provide in his mostly stream-of-consciousness manner.  

At the end of the interview, perhaps like Rob Rosenthal in 1977, I’d love to hear more of what Mr. Hastings has to say. In fact, I am sure that we both have some follow-up questions for him.  

Interviews: Oral Histories – Seattle General Strike Project

As the George Hastings interview has no transcript, some (but certainly not all) of the interesting points are transcribed below. Timestamps are approximate.

12:15:  

Hastings: I am far to the left, as they say, how can anyone with nothing left to lose, lose? I am receiving honors … for the things that I was condemned and oftentimes in prison for in years gone past… 

Rosenthal: I hope you’ll tell me that story later. 

Hastings: What?  

Rosenthal: [somewhat louder] I hope you’ll tell me that story later.  

Hastings: You know, times move… I am writing my editorial for July–I always try to tie it in with a time and I tied it in with July Fourth… [long pause] The first man who advocated that the colonies be independent of the British crown was a rebel… He was not well thought of in his community.  

1:10:00 

Hastings: The next step from tribe to clan to nation didn’t take one-twelfth the time from the family to the tribe from the building of cities to the forming of a nation with all the political structures and from city to kingdom from kingdom to empire, all of that has occurred within the last twelve thousand years. And to think! When we don’t know how many thousands of years man existed before the first city was built, before the first tribe was born! You can see how this is accelerating logarithmically rather than arithmetically or even geometrically.  

Rosenthal: What sort of things did you do when you joined the social party?  

1:18:00, after a discussion about some sort of glider, which Mr. Hastings helped to push, “with a tremendous ceiling of about 500 feet.”  

Hastings: While I was there I heard about the free speech fight . . . which was started in Minot [North Dakota] now this developed around the fact that they were building, well there was, I think it must have been oats or something but the thing was they were building a normal school, teacher’s college we call it now, at Minot and the contractor taking advantage of the fact that there were hundreds and hundreds of harvesters waiting for the harvest and cut the wages down … I don’t know the actual wage paid, but perhaps something like a dollar fifty cents, a dollar twenty-five, a dollar fifty cents a day, something like that, just not even a subsistence wage… but the IWW came in there and they got the jobs done, they got the job and organized a strike, which didn’t suit the city one bit. They began to round up the IWW and drive them out of town… to break the strike.  

2:18:00 Did you remain a wobbly all that time?  

No, first of all I became dissatisfied… I was an organizer, an advocate if you please. As when things just were static and peaceable and nothing–no struggle to carry on or being carried on, then I began in ordinary intellectual abilities and so on there didn’t seem to be anything to do and I began to disapprove of some of the things I saw, and maybe I was wrong. But I could not be a member of the IWW as a simple labor union–as a labor union pure and simple. When the revolutionary concept was no longer practiced, then I no longer… because from the time I first come into contact with the social party and all through my subsequent experience I felt the necessity for change, and that man is a conscious contributor to that change. It’s by the knowing and realizing the forces which control society and the economic structure we have some… we have the knowledge of these forces, we have some chance to somewhat control them just as we use the wind to drive windmills and ships for sailing, you see. We use the force of gravity to distribute… So, in economic forces we can somewhat be in control of them. But the only–I want social change, I want that form of society in which the welfare of the whole is the paramount issue. I want–I hope to see–I hope the world, the people of the world are moving towards that place where inequity and injustice are not perpetrated. They may occur infrequently from unrighteous causes but were the… and that is going to take first, the realization that all the working groups, all of the people who are working for wages are under the control of any sort of American tax, have a common purpose, that they have common interests, that injury inflicted upon any one is a concern for all of us and that we must unite as one–nobody else can do it–it must come from this, the lower class [recording ends] 

Between October 1977 and May 1981, the Louis B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky conducted, as part of an oral history project on Robert Penn Warren, forty-three interviews of Warren and his friends, family, and colleagues.¹ The Louis B. Nunn Center processed, transcribed, archived, and published the project over the course of the next twenty years. In the early 1990s, my mother participated in this project, working in the University of Kentucky library’s collection development under the direction of Terry Birdwhistell, an archivist and oral historian. As my mother fondly relates, a student assistant came to her with the startling observation that, as the student discovered during her transcribing of one of Penn’s interviews, he referred to somebody as a “rack of turd.” Whatever was to be done about including such vulgar (and so very odd) language in the transcription? Who would have thought that a Pulitzer-winning author would be so crass? In assisting the student with the transcription, my mother realized Robert Penn Warren actually said raconteur. As the story goes, Warren had been imbibing a glass of “iced tea” that had the peculiar effect of reducing his ability to enunciate as the interview went on. Mirthful as the story is, it illustrates a number of challenges one might encounter in the making of oral history.

The practice of oral history introduces factors not always found in other methods or practices. Interviews offer a space for human intimacy absent from written records in an archive. Indeed, Allan Nevins provides many examples of how a good oral historian can build a closer approximation of the truth than could the subject themselves without an “earnest, courageous interviewer.”² Allessandro Portelli voices a parallel assertion that, to take full advantage of the uniquely human elements of oral history, the interviewer should pay no mind to remaining neutral.³ Taking sides, then, may be yet another ad hoc question with an ad hoc answer.⁴ Nevins and his colleagues expound at length on the challenges of oral history, one of which is to understand not what somebody said but the way they said it. Central to the story of the raconteur is a student mishearing Warren’s turn of phrase while transcribing an interview, and it suggests deeper insight than a simple error of the ear.

Allessandro Portelli states, in plain language, “Oral sources are oral sources.”⁵ A portion of his argument may be summarized, in a parallel fashion, by a phrase widely attributed to several different origins: “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Is transcribed oral history just “dancing about architecture”? Portelli stops short of ascribing quite such negativity, though he details the many ways in which a transcribed account loses significant portions of its value, in no small part due to the structure of the written word that is necessarily imposed upon the oral source in the process of transcription. Similarly, Halpern asserts that “remembering should be seen as a process of historical interpretation”⁶ and that oral sources are unique in their ability to shape interpretation by the very nature of being oral.

Perhaps, then, transcribing oral history is akin to describing a piece of music. Despite this, the oral historian of 2025 and beyond has a far more comprehensive toolkit for the making of oral history than that available to historians of the ’90s. While I accept Portelli’s assertion that the oral source reigns supreme in oral history, I take the liberty of critiquing his claim that the oral historian should take no further efforts to find better methods of transcription.⁷ As large-language, generative, and other AI models progress, perhaps historians will find their use in the processing and dissemination of history. Much in the same way that an archaeologist, a biologist, and a forensic artist may digitally recreate a face from a bare skull, might the oral historian, with enough data and collaboration, recreate the oral from the written word? Would such an endeavor be more Hollywood than history? Perhaps we will find out.

As we draw to a conclusion, I harken back to the idea that the “earnest, courageous interviewer” can better approximate the truth than the autobiographer. In a cursory sense, this is true. If one takes part in an event worthy of a story, say, at dinner with friends, one will gladly interject, “Oh! Don’t forget…” as your friend regales the crowd with the story. Is this the role of the oral historian? No, for the necessity of an earnest, courageous interviewer implies the existence of struggle and danger. Where, in the making of oral history, do we find the struggle and danger that necessitate courage?

Image: Ebay listing, 1970s Lloyd’s Compact Cassette Tape Counter Recorder Model V117 Vintage Player | eBay

1. Robert Penn Warren Oral History Project · SPOKEdb ↩︎
2. Dunaway, David, K, Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. AltaMira Press, 1996, 37. ↩︎
3. Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, 1991, 54. ↩︎
4. Dunaway, David, K, Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1996, 35. ↩︎
5. Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, 1991, 46. ↩︎
6. Halpern, Rick. “Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-FiveYears.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 598. ↩︎
7. Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, 1991, 46. ↩︎

*Despite Arnold Schwarzenegger’s starring role in the 1984 blockbuster “Terminator,” I believe we can agree that “AI” in the ’90s was more “fi” than “sci” to the point that “AI” was of no consideration in Portelli’s argument. Perhaps the modern oral historian should not search for the better, faster, or stronger way to transcribe oral history, but the new way. “New” technology, in this case, comprises the advancements that are fundamentally different from those of the ’90s, i.e., not a faster horse, but a car. What, then, is our horse?

The Sci-Fi genre has, since my youth, played a prominent role in my extracurricular reading. I took a particular liking to Isaac Asimov’s works, and I often find myself rereading his Foundation series, a major plot point of which is the concept of psychohistory, co-developed by the character Hari Seldon. This fictional study, not to be confused with the very real interdisciplinary study that goes by the same name, proffers the idea that if you study a large enough group of people–say, an entire galaxy’s worth–you can predict the future actions of those people. As the centuries pass, the reader finds that (spoiler alert!) Seldon’s predictions fail before the course of history is righted by a secret foundation of psychohistorians, after which that same secret foundation is supplanted by another (and likewise secret) society. As we deal with the complexity of the study and making of oral history, perhaps we can find a few helpful parallels and, like psychohistory, our oral history project will transform from something that may be messy to one that, rather than messy, is complex.

Donald Ritchie’s Doing Oral History provides an example of an oral history project conducted by faculty at Indiana University into the cause of declining birth rates in Russia after Stalin’s abortion ban. A fellow member of the faculty critiqued the study, and “yet even the dissenter agreed that oral sources, ‘may not tell you much about what Stalin was doing, but they were terribly useful in telling you about people’s minds.’”¹ Taken at face value, this comment indicates that oral history can be useful for something, but perhaps not the thing you set out to do or, perhaps, what you should be doing. There is also an air of finality to the critique, as if once the (at least at the time) more conventional history has been produced, other approaches will, if not detract from the established narrative, at least add noise that would be better left disregarded.

The idea that oral history may be useful but just not in the way a project sets out to may be true at some level. A historian cannot interrogate the archive until the archive is available, much like a psychohistorian must study the sum of humanity to reach a precise conclusion. Central to the practice of oral history is the making of the archive, so it follows that there is no guarantee that the conclusion of a project produces an archive that is complete with regards to the project’s intended scope. To clarify, I do not suggest writing an oral history research proposal outlining a plan to ask every single person every possible question (though that would be quite humorous). This brings up a similar challenge to that posed by the dissenting faculty member at Indiana University in that the archive, being in our case firsthand accounts, may not only be incomplete but inaccurate. However, inaccuracy implies that we both know what the target is and that it has already been hit. Along these lines, I am interested to read Alistair Thomson’s work mentioned in The Manual for Oral History regarding the understanding of subjectivity in oral history accounts.² 

Going back to last semester’s Managing History course (of which I was not a part), we can see students’ work in progressing through the first two steps in oral history outlined in The Oral History Manual; the idea and the plan.³ Of note, the “investigation” process of which I have so many times been a part in my professional career nearly exactly follows the five-step cycle, though of course the scope is vastly different and, I assume, my experience was filled with far more lawyers. Nevertheless, we find intensive study and research taking place long before the first interview. Perhaps the most (?) challenging aspect of the making of oral history is the planning of a project’s scope, and in identifying, if not a new target altogether, where the target hasn’t been hit. Then again, how can you really be sure where the target hasn’t been struck unless you can already see it up close?

At the surface, this appears to be an integral aspect of the nature of oral history—a healthy amount of flexibility between the intended outcome and the changes that inevitably occur throughout the span of a project. In this way, too, oral history and psychohistory are parallel. We will plan a project in great detail and the project will require significant revision, redirection, and maintenance before we see it through. However, I am confidently optimistic that we will not be supplanted by another (very secret) society.  

1. Donald A. Ritchie. 2015. Doing Oral History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://research-ebsco-com.libproxy.temple.edu/linkprocessor/plink?id=8dadfb6a-aa65-3e1c-b634-6bbbf15bd69e. p. 11 

2. Barbara Sommer, Mary Quinlan. 2018. The Oral History Manual. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/reader.action?docID=5423714&ppg=16&c=RVBVQg. p. 21.  

3. Ibid. pp. 15-17.