Editor’s Introduction

Issue 41.1 of the Oral History Review leads off with Alexander Freund’s “‘Confessing Animals’: Toward a Longue Durée History of the Oral History Interview,” an exploration of how we might think more expansively about the history of the oral history interview. Freund uses the concept of confession and the history of its evolving practice over many centuries to anchor a probing analysis of the nature of interviewing, one that should leave us asking critical questions about the central tool of our practice.

“Living with Schizophrenia: Coping, Resilience, and Purpose,” by Lynda Crane and Tracy McDonough, describes their Schizophrenia Oral History Project and its effort to use oral history to counter the stigma associated with schizophrenia. It also validates, in a clinical setting and by both mental health professionals and patients themselves, the therapeutic value of oral history and its potential importance in mental health-care delivery. The article features seven embedded audio excerpts from interviews with patient-narrators, a multimedia feature that grew out of the authors’ conviction that it is not so much the narrators’ words as their voices that make the case for the “coping, resilience, and purpose” of those with schizophrenia.

The next two articles explore the problematic of oral history used in history making. Judith Ridner and Susan Clemens-Bruder’s “Taking Their Place Among the Giants: Performing Oral Histories of Pennsylvania’s Black Freedom Struggle” traces the transformation that happened as oral history interviews passed through the creative process into theatrical performance. Most tellingly, they identify the ways in which the master narrative of the civil rights movement came to override the nuance and specificity of the interviews on which the performance was originally based. Their article also features multimedia content: an excerpt of the performance as embedded video. Abigail Perkiss’s “Reclaiming the Past: Oral History and the Legacy of Integration in West Mount Airy, Philadelphia” similarly considers the ways in which an oral history project can come to reify an official history. Perkiss’s case is all the more telling because the oral history project she considers was designed to be used as a tool for community organizing; in the end, however, it led to a sanctioned and even sanitized history. Both articles thus offer cautionary tales: in the first case, the oral histories were overtaken by a larger and more pervasive narrative; in the second, they were silenced from within.

The last article—“Loose Bits of Shrapnel: War Stories, Photographs, and the Peculiarities of Postmemory” by Sean Field—is both personal essay and intellectual engagement as Field takes up several of the most vibrant areas of inquiry in oral history today: the nature of trauma, the concept of postmemory, and the visual turn in oral history. His piece is something of a bookend to Freund’s: whereas Freund ranges over centuries and disciplines so as to offer a critical perspective on the oral history interview, Field burrows into one family’s dynamics and unpacks generational memories of war and its legacies. Read together, they suggest something of the breadth and depth of oral history practice today.

With Issue 41.1, the editorial team welcomes David Caruso to our ranks as book review editor. Dave worked with John Wolford to produce the book reviews for issue 40.2 and is now thoroughly ensconced as book review editor. In keeping with past practice, Dave has assembled reviews that capture the content and import of each book, while also assessing the work’s value and contribution to our collective understanding of oral history. A featured review in this issue is a composite review of Douglas A. Boyd’s Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community. (Doug serves as the Oral History Review’s digital initiatives editor, and it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to review his scholarly work.) Jennifer Abraham Cramer, media/nonprint review editor, inaugurated the composite review in her section of issue 40.2, and Dave brings that same feature to the book review section. For 41.1, Jen’s media/nonprint review section features two documentary films, an online oral history exhibit, and the multifaceted Apollo Theater Oral...