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Chapter Eleven. Sharing Oral History
- Ohio University Press
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You’ve collected oral history interviews. Now what will you do with them? Since oral history’s inception, researchers and others have used these histories in a multitude of ways.They were originally used mainly by people researching material for publication . Scholars in particular have long treated oral histories as primary sources,although there is still some controversy over their value as historical evidence.While publications are the most obvious outlet for oral histories, in recent years interviews have gone beyond the print medium.Technologies old and new make use of oral history interviews in exciting and novel ways. In some cases, the interviews were used in ways never intended by their creators. In others, the interviews were collected for a specific purpose. No matter how they are used, making oral history accessible to as many people as possible in any media is as important as collecting the interviews themselves. StudsTerkel, Chicago broadcaster turned historian, was one of the first to use oral history in popular publications. Beginning F Chapter Eleven Sharing Oral History By Donna M. DeBlasio with HardTimes:An Oral History of the Great Depression in , Terkel used interviews, many with ordinary people, to tell the story of one of the most traumatic eras inAmerican (and world) history. He followed Hard Times with other oral history-based works that include the highly acclaimed Working: People Talk AboutWhat They Do All Day and How They Feel AboutWhat They Do () and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Good War: An Oral History ofWorldWar II (), which painted a complex picture of World War II and the people who lived through it. Terkel’s publications were enormously successful, reached a very broad audience, publicized oral history, and encouraged many to begin collecting their own interviews. Terkel’s works are among the best known that use oral history , at least to the general public. Many others have made judicious use of oral history interviews, including publications that pair words with photographs. One such recent work is The ItalianAmerican Experience in New Haven:Images and Oral Histories byAnthonyV. Riccio ().This lavish coffee-table book, while meant for popular consumption, is grounded in scholarship and provides an insightful and fascinating look into the everyday lives of the members of this immigrant community. By juxtaposing images of the interviewees and their families, neighborhoods, and other local landmarks with the interviews, the reader can really gain an understanding of and appreciation for New Haven’s Italian Americans. Scholars in various fields have also made excellent use of oral histories that often challenge existing notions of personalities and events. One of oral history’s most important uses has been to illuminate the lives of people who do not fit into traditional histories. The working class, for example, has only recently become widely studied. In works such as Like a Family:The Making of a Southern Cotton MillWorld by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, The Face of Decline:The Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Mining Region in the Twentieth Century by Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, and Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Sharing Oral History F Segregation,Unionism,and the Freedom Struggle by Michael Honey, oral histories play a key role in interpreting the lives of the working class and greatly expanding the knowledge of the field of labor history. Steven High uses oral histories to help document the story of deindustrialization and its impact on rust belt communities in North America in Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, –. Native Americans , many of whom transmitted their past through the oral tradition, have also been the subjects of recent publications that use oral history interviews. Nations Remembered: An Oral History of the Five CivilizedTribes, – byTheda Perdu is just one example of a scholarly work dealing with Native American history.Women’s history has greatly benefited from the use of oral history interviews as primary sources. A sample of these works includes HomesteadingWomen: An Oral History of Colorado,– by Julie Jones-Eddy,Rosie the Riveter Revisited :Women,the War,and Social Change by Sherna Berger Gluck, and Work,Family,and Faith:Rural SouthernWomen in theTwentieth Century edited by MelissaWalker and Rebecca Sharpless. Oral history has also enriched the story of men and women during wartime, whether in the military or in civilian life.The interviews inAl Santoli’s EverythingWe Had:An Oral History of the Vietnam War put a human face on America’s longest and one of its most divisive wars. He interviewed not only soldiers but also nurses...
