For this week’s special “choose your own adventure” reading, I selected Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Frankenberg was a social scientist by trade and earned her PhD in the History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary field. Her first book, White Women, Race Matters, takes a decidedly interdisciplinary approach to the subject, making extensive use of oral history methodology.
In light of recent class discussion, one of my first areas of interest when reading this work was Frankenberg’s treatment of oral history sources. The book’s interview appendix offers some insight here, as we can see that Frankenberg assigned pseudonyms and omitted details that could trace back to the narrators. There are often significant (and productive) conversations regarding the use of the narrator’s words around challenging subjects. While the pseudonyms and redactions in Frankenberg’s co-authored texts are likely to prevent anyone save close friends (should those friends happen to read the book) from linking the narrator’s words to the narrator herself, I am interested in what the narrators may have thought upon reading the completed work.
Additionally, I believe that, given the class project, much of the discussion around using narrators’ words during their lives on “challenging” subjects revolves around a more surmountable challenge than one many oral historians may face. In Frankenberg’s case, the challenge was righting the course of feminism, now caught in the throes of implicit racism, fundamentally failing to meet its intent. This is no small challenge, so what might the relationship be between the potential injurious nature of using the narrator’s words and the severity of the challenge? I am certain that I have no clear answer to that question, especially since “injurious” has a range of severity as well.
I was also interested in Frankenberg’s grounding of her subjects within her narrative. Are the narrators used only as discourse, or are they embodied within the narrative? I find her methodology in obtaining her narrators important here, since all thirty were chosen with significant deliberation. There is also no doubt that taking a discursive track favors Frankenberg’s argument, which centered on feminist discourse itself.
Missing from the work’s appendix of interviews is archival information, though this was not a universal practice at the time. Sadly, without that archival information, we cannot locate the recordings of these interviews. However, audio recordings seem to become more complex in such a setting as this. The narrators have pseudonyms, and the transcripts are redacted, but how should audio recordings be treated in the modern day? How well should they be protected? Should the audio recording be scrubbed of any potentially injurious information as is done to the transcript? I see a significant area of concern with the interconnectedness of smartphones and smart devices. How could an oral historian even account for the number of digital copies made between downloading the file from the recorder and its final archiving? I do believe that there is additional care warranted in the handling of recordings and, by extension, keeping track of digital copies.
Perhaps the challenge of limiting the distribution of copies would be easier to overcome by investing in more vintage tech–there would certainly be a lower chance of inadvertently sharing an actual cassette tape. Naturally, this particular concern with protecting information in the interconnected world of today resides more so in subjects who could face legal challenges, or even the threat of violence, if connected to their words in a recording or on a transcript.
Abigail Perkiss’s Hurricane Sandy: On New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore provides a vivid recount of New Jersey’s people and community in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Reflecting on my own upbringing in Florida (close enough to the coast to remember worry about the dangers of hurricanes but not close enough to live in fear of storm surges literally washing away our home), I felt particularly moved by the way Perkiss relates a broad array of oral history interviews. In summarizing popular opinion in the Bayshore after the (small) wake of Hurricane Irene, Perkiss states, “[they] were frustrated and felt like the government cried wolf, creating unnecessary frenzy and needless stress” (p. 10). This is a feeling with which I am all too familiar, hurricanes being ever-present during my upbringing and yet rarely impactful in and of themselves. Rather, grocery stores and gas stations run empty, scarcely a pack of bottled water may be found without driving an hour inland, and the spaghetti lines on the TV screen constantly shift until the storm makes landfall, the lights flicker, and I venture outside the next morning to a beautiful, sunny day.
This meme, though humorous, represents the exact frustration articulated by Perkiss in the Bayshore area subsequent Hurricane Irene.
Hurricane Ivan marked a departure for my family from the “frenzy” providing greater challenge than the storm itself. Ivan was one of nine named storms during the 2004 hurricane season, six of which were hurricanes. While my childhood home was spared from the destruction impacting so many families, I distinctly recall the night the storm made landfall—we “slept” in our home’s most central hallway. We watched the power flicker out and come back again three times before it shut off for good, and we listened to what sounded like several freight trains simultaneously passing right outside our home. Oddly enough, that night, September 2nd, 2004, was the first time my little brother, born not three months earlier in June, slept all the way through the night. When the sun rose the next morning (a beautiful, sunny day), trees blocked off vehicle access to our street. A large oak tree in the back yard of our suburban home had been split cleanly in two, one half of it still standing. The power turned back on a week later.
Perhaps the most poignant aspect of recovery from “natural” disasters, as Perkiss brings to life in her book, is the months- or years-long battle to reclaim and rebuild. Perkiss deftly conveys the agonizing process through which individuals and communities had to navigate, often to no happy ending, in their attempts to rebuild their lives. “In turn, [Cavillo’s] adjuster said, ‘that’s called erosion, and we don’t pay for erosion” (p. 52). In similar ways to New Jersey’s coastal communities post-Sandy, blue tarps were scattered over roofs in my hometown for years following hurricane Ivan—nobody wanted to pay up. Indeed, Hurricane Sandy contributes significantly to the preservation of memory surrounding that storm’s impact and, in many ways, is representative of far more than simply one place’s response to a natural disaster.
One may wonder, however, how broad the scope of an oral history project must be to encapsulate the thoughts, feelings, and memory in general of place and time so impactful as a community’s response to a natural disaster of the proportion brought on by hurricane Sandy. How does the oral historian manage the relationship between the story that, in the historian’s mind, is waiting to be co-authored, and the availability of the archive itself? Perkiss comments in Appendix B, “resources were limited, and the timeline was tight” (p. 91). Certainly, Perkiss’s assembly and management of an undergraduate team to assist her in the co-authoring of these stories represents an elegant solution to the challenge of limited resources and tight timelines. However, are there facets of the story that Perkiss believes were not able to be captured due to the limitations of the project? The origin of the project itself—a phone call—is also not always the norm. How may the oral historian identify areas in need of research in the moment, before the opportunity passes by? Finally, the oral history interviews took place between 2013 and 2015. Is there a method through which the oral historian can identify a temporal “sweet spot” (if indeed such a thing exists)? What are the means through which the historian may ascertain that enough time has passed to allow potential interviewees to recover from traumatic experiences before being interviewed?
This oral history methodology statement serves to outline and, in some relatively shallow depth, to expound on the methodology intended for use during the conduct of an interview with a selected subject pursuant to the oral history class. The statement attempts a modicum of synthesis of the readings covered during the class. It is structured around the idea of a checklist because, as this is the first real undertaking of an oral history interview on the part of this interviewer, checklists may be followed in the heat of the moment. This structure inherently limits some aspects of the statement in the interest of a sense of brevity that, in theory, will allow for greater adherence to the statement during the conduct of the interview. Additionally, this statement is generally applicable to any subject but includes specific references to the interviewer’s role in the class project, specifically one interview with an employee of one institution. Finally, one must accept the primary limitation of checklists in this context. They seek to simplify that which is complex but cannot do so completely and, in some cases, run the risk of introducing errors into the process of producing oral history. Therefore, this methodological statement must be understood as an amateur’s playbook; a bare minimum serving as a foundation for a far more complex superstructure that emerges during the course of the interview.
The overarching intent of this methodology is to achieve the following. First, to co-author usable historical texts with the subject of the interview. This involves several components. Since oral texts are co-authored and therefore subject in part to the limitations (or, conversely, overreaching or overcorrection) of the interviewer, care must be taken to prepare a thematic organization of questions conducive to the subject matter.1 Second, to deliberately provide a space for the subject’s “autonomous discourse,” 2 recognizing the integral link between the conversational vector established by the interviewer and the subject’s narrativity. Third, and related to the class project, is to establish rapport with the subject to facilitate future interviews. both with the subject and, through the subject’s discourse in their own professional sphere, to enable effective relationships with future subjects in the interest of the longevity of this project. This aim involves peripheral attention to establishing and maintaining community links between the academic institution and the interview’s subjects.
The thematic organization of questions referenced earlier serves to enable both the natural progression of conversation and its consistent (though not absolute) vector in the interest of this project. This form of organization emphasizes oral history as “the process of historical interpretation.”3 It requires both deliberate structure to capitalize on its nuances as the process of reconstruction, but also the freedom to detour down unseen (to the interviewer’s mind) paths in ways that relate stories that are both parallel to and deeper in meaning than initially envisioned.4 Thereby, this method bolsters the shared authority of the project.5
An essential component of this method is the balance in the interviewer/interviewee dynamic. Taking lessons learned from other students during a recent oral history interview exercise and chapter eight of Lynn Abrams’ Oral History Theory, care must be taken to strike up the proper dimensionality within the power dynamic.6 Given the information previously gathered on our proposed subject, I do not anticipate a significant struggle to establish an appropriate balance (the subject is neither dispossessed nor in a position of vertical institutional power over the interviewers). However, one can never be too careful. To this end, I propose an established package of rapport-building questions that, in addition, enable the subject to relate relevant information about their life history. Subsequent to this introductory phase, we may naturally progress to the thematic constellation of questions essential to the project.
The real-world execution of this interview involves two interviewers. Therefore, I propose a careful mix of synchronization and agency. Predetermining which interviewer will be asking which questions may allow for more thoughtful note-taking. Again, since this will be the first official oral history interview, dividing cognitive load between such tasks as note-taking, monitoring recording equipment, checking the time remaining to keep the interview on track (should there be significant divergence from the plan), and asking questions and planning follow-ups on specific topics reduces the interviewer’s propensity for error. Additionally, the “co-co-authoring” (that being two interviewers to one interviewee) significantly expands the interviewers’ capacity for identifying important avenues of questioning. This enables a more optimized co-authoring of the text.
Finally, and in keeping with one of the overarching ideas for this methodology, we must reinforce the positive relationship with the subject (in this case, not in all), and thank them for their time. Abram’s Oral History Theory mentions either thanking the subject or sending a thank-you letter 16 times. It may be difficult to understate the importance of this final part of the interview process.
Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, 1991, p. 54 ↩︎
Halpern, Rick. “Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-Five Years.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 598 ↩︎
Michael Frisch. “From a Shared Authority: To the Digital Kitchen, and Back” in Hearing Voices: Sharing Authority through Oral History. Ed. Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski. Left Coast Press, 2011. p. 126 ↩︎
Abrams, Lynn. Oral History Theory, 2nd Ed. Routledge, 2016. pp. 153-174. ↩︎
William Faulkner at his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1950.
The theme of dancing about architecture abides in our oral history readings. Too, the theme of reconstructing memory and all its organic challenges. Perhaps a dozen years ago, I visited Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS, William Faulkner’s home and now a museum. I draw on that and other experiences in interpreting some of these themes.
Abrams says, “it is more realistic to accept that there can only be a semblance of similarity—a verisimilitude—between a narrative as told and a narrative written down; something happens in the process of speech being translated into text.” (p. 13). Something does indeed happen in the process of writing down what is said. I have often heard the phrase that there are three sides to any story: what you said, what they said, and—somewhere in the middle—the truth. Bearing in mind a professor of history’s recent assertion (Dr. Bruggeman, guest speaking in this class) that the historian’s goal is to, “provide the best approximation of the truth,” it may be helpful, from a theoretical perspective, to parse out the layers between the truth and the verisimilitude, that being, the transcript. But then again, it may be too time-consuming to do so. Consider that there is, perhaps, a “truth” somewhere in the middle. This may imply the existence of the absolute truth, which may require a reconstruction of the entire history of everything, so we shall leave that aside. Instead, let us constrain ourselves to an interpretive reconstruction of your story and their story and, between the two, the possible reconstruction of the best approximation of the truth.
The layers of the truth, then, as I count them in chronological order, are as follows. First, something happened that created a memory, already reconstructed in the mind of the historian as being worth the effort of research, that should be further researched. Second, there is research done by the historian in the interest of becoming a fully capable interviewer, which further shapes that memory in the mind of the historian. Third, the historian researches possible interviewees. Fourth, there are the questions composed by the historian that may be influenced through interaction with interviewees, further changing and shaping the project. Fifth, there is the setting of the interview. Besides the simple, bare necessities of a quiet space and adequate audio or audio and visual recording equipment, the interview may be set in places that the interviewer believes may contribute to enhancing the ability of the interviewee to reconstruct their memory, which may be constrained or enabled by time, availability, funding, etc. (transporting interviewees to an overseas base and interviewing beneath a work of art have both been mentioned in class). Sixth, at last, is the interviewee’s reaction to questions within the interview’s setting. Seventh is the historian’s reaction to the interviewee’s response that may bring up additional questions or ways in which the interviewer asks questions (oh, what a tangled web we weave!), eighth is the interviewee’s reaction to the historian’s reaction . . .*
Perhaps this exercise will serve to further complicate the issue. Regardless, there are many steps taken before a transcript is made, and nothing springs to mind quite so neatly (neatly in example but messy in practice) as my experience at Rowan Oak.
Many years ago, I visited William Faulkner’s home in Mississippi. During my visit, I had the opportunity to listen to an exhibit featuring Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Mostly alone in the museum, I listened to it many times before leaving. Re-listening to the speech in conjunction with its official transcript this week, I was struck by a profound realization: “that’s not right!” The speech I remember hearing, along with its profound emotional import, was not the speech I heard this week.
This brings us to the second point of this post, that “oral history is a three-way conversation: the interviewee engages in a conversation with his or herself, with the interviewer and with culture” (p. 76). If asked to recount Faulkner’s speech, I could do so. However, I realize that my recounting differs from the speech I heard online earlier this week. What is to be made of this? Perhaps that is the central question to the theory of oral history.
Lynn Roberts states, “Experimental research has demonstrated that it is quite easy to induce subjects to make false reports. . . . people are very susceptible to suggestion” (p. 85). This calls into question the nature of the interviewer in the process of making oral history. Certainly, many things shaped my reconstruction of the memory of listening to Faulkner’s speech in Rowan Oak. That speech was re-listened to many times mentally between then and my re-listening to the original (I questioned if the renditions currently online were not altered somehow).
How can we minimize confirmation bias in our interviews? How can we neutralize (in one sense–notwithstanding the importance of “taking sides”) the subjective views of the interviewer? How would my questions have changed from a dozen years ago to now if I interviewed subjects on their experience in listening to that speech? Naturally, a broad reading of numerous sources prior to the interview itself can lend itself to an air of impartiality. On the other hand, would not a cohesive view of the project lend itself to preconceived notions of the truth and, by extension, the development of attitudes and questions in the interest of gaining proof for that truth in an interview?
Lastly, as in the book, let us discuss trauma. Lynn Abrams’ Oral History Theory deals with trauma in the subject of an interview, which is vitally important to the ethical conduct of oral history. Indeed, the contents of this chapter would have been a wonderful aid in many interviews in my professional conduct as an investigator. However, I would add to Roberts’ previous assertion that, “oral history is a three-way interview.” Not only does the interviewee converse with themselves during the interview, but so does the interviewer. During a recent project, I found myself inexplicably challenged in asking particular questions of a subject regarding the death of a loved one (essential questions that would have greatly aided my project!). After much rumination on the possibility that I may have experienced a reversed power dynamic of feeling unable to ask particular questions due to the subject’s position of power in an institution relative to mine, I realized the possibility of an additional concern. I had personal questions for the subject that were also quite personal to me, and, therefore, I didn’t ask them of the subject because I would rather not have them asked of myself.
This is an extreme example of an interviewer’s inability to ask important questions and, admittedly, one that would have had less impact with prior realization and preparation. Regardless, I believe this raises an important point, although one that, at its barest personal level, is anything but self-evident prior to its crystallization: our ability to identify personal trauma (and bias) has a direct impact on our ability to conduct an interview (I am applying the ideas of personal bias and trauma in the sense that they may be invisible to the interviewer until a crystallizing moment). What is to be made of this? Perhaps that is a tangential question to the practice of oral history. **
Roberts, Lynn. Oral History Theory. 2nd Edition. Routledge, 2016.
*I am brought back to my experience leading a Military Working Dog Detachment and the challenges faced by working dog handlers in training their dogs (collectively referred to as MWD teams). MWD teams may go through months of training, showing steady progression, only to fail during certification. Often, certification failure is attributed to the handler’s nervousness under the pressure of certification. Indeed, the working dog’s strength is more in their sense of smell than in the strength of their jaw, and the dog can smell their handler’s stress hormones coming “down the leash,” leading them to adopt a nervous and excitable state. The dogs become reactionary. Sometimes, however, the team’s failure is attributed to the dog chasing a flock of geese, because that’s what a dog might do when a pond-full of geese flies away. MWD teams achieving success in certification are often given the backhanded but good-humored compliment, “dog did good.” The back-handedness of the compliment, naturally, references the dog’s success despite the handler (and it may have cultural implications about the military and its use of modes of reinforcement). Perhaps there is a parallel to the interviewer’s role in oral history. Sometimes, an interview may go well despite the interviewer’s powerful ability to disrupt. Other times, a flock of geese might be flying away.
**My apologies to my professor for a post that is over twice the required length. I had four more sections from the book that I wanted to cover and elected to exclude them from this already long-winded post. Good book! Happy Wednesday!
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.
Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Duke University Press, 2000. pp. 290 ↩︎
Ellenberg, Claude. “I Deride John Cage’s 4’33” as Both a Musician and a Historian: The Synthesis of Pretentiousness” Unpublished, 2025. ↩︎
Tucker, Sherrie. “When the Subjects Won’t Come Out” in Queer Episodes in Modern History. University of Illinois Press, 2002. pp. 299. ↩︎
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 20th 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.
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]
Does new* technology have a place in oral history?
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?
Dunaway, David, K, Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. AltaMira Press, 1996, 37. ↩︎
Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, 1991, 54. ↩︎
Dunaway, David, K, Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1996, 35. ↩︎
Portelli, Alessandro, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, 1991, 46. ↩︎
Halpern, Rick. “Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-FiveYears.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 598. ↩︎
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 Historyregarding 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.
My primary research interest is anti-Americanism in Guatemala from 1950-1960, analyzing political correspondence, media, and artistic expressions leading up to and following the 1954 coup. By examining both US and Guatemalan perspectives, I seek to enlighten the multi-layered perceptions that shaped the era and to understand not only what happened but why it happened.
My goals for this class, in part, echo the syllabus—to expand my understanding of the ethical and legal best practices of oral history projects and to apply my “skills in a real curatorial world capacity.” Throughout my career in the Army, I have led many investigations, as a Military Police Soldier investigating criminal acts, as a commander directing investigations into insubordination or misconduct, and as a disinterested third-party investigating non-criminal misconduct. I worked with subject matter experts and lawyers to assist me in, depending upon the type of investigation, the pursuit of “the preponderance of evidence” or “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The principal components of these investigations were obtaining, recording, analyzing, and archiving statements. I developed a repertoire that enabled rapport-building, encouraged over-communication, and put interviewees at ease. I am beyond excited to use these skills in a different way. I am excited to contribute to the making of history.
I competed in piano performance for 13 years before beginning my collegiate journey as a music performance major in 2014. I was captivated by how music conveys emotion and story. Music allowed me to explore the minds of composers, and as I immersed myself in these stories, I understood that my true passion lay in understanding the human motivations that drive our history. By the end of my 14th year of piano performance and my first year at the collegiate level, I knew that my passion was not in the pursuit of a career in music, but in history. Studying history would enable my desire to explore and better understand the narratives of people, their stories, their challenges, and their actions.
Once I committed to majoring in history, I sought out stories that went beyond events to reveal individual perspectives. Firsthand accounts like those of Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier and Battleground Iraq inspired my interest in stories about lived experiences, while Miguel Angel Asturias’ The President and Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain encouraged my interest in Latin American history and reinforced my love of storytelling.
After college, I received a commission into the Army Military Police Corps. My experience in active-duty service shaped my approach to historical research. Leading Soldiers in diverse, often challenging situations taught me the importance of understanding others’ perspectives–not just how they act but how they think and how they feel. A primary career aspiration, and one upon which I have already embarked, is to return to school and earn an appointment to teach History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. I intend to pursue a permanent assignment at the Academy following my tour as an instructor. Regardless of my assignment, however, I am thankful for the opportunity to do what I love, that is, to lead Soldiers.
