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SPRING 2012 3 Introduction Oral History and the Modern Ohio Valley Tracy E. K’Meyer F or over forty years people around the Ohio Valley have been taking taperecorders to the doors of older residents, asking them to tell their life stories . The resulting tapes have made their way into libraries on either side of the river, and into the hands of historians and folklorists who have used them to expand our knowledge of the steel and quarry industries in Ohio, family farming, main street businesses, and the civil rights movement in Kentucky—among a wide variety of other subjects. Indeed, oral history is helping scholars to write the story of the Ohio Valley in the twentieth century. This special issue is dedicated to spotlighting the efforts of those recorder-wielding researchers, their products, and the new histories based on them. According to the Oral History Association, oral history is a “method of recording and preserving oral testimony” and the “product of that process.”1 It consists of a recorded conversation in which a researcher poses open-ended questions to a narrator in ways that invite her to share the story of her participation in historic events. Often oral history seeks to elicit a full life story, but sometimes can focus on a particular event or subject. The interview creates a piece of historic evidence, either a recording or a typed transcript of it, that if preserved becomes a potential building block in the writing and presentation of the stories of the past. Most notably, oral history preserves the history of men and women who otherwise might be absent from the historic narrative because they do not produce or preserve written documents. Such first-person testimony also allows access to topics, like childhood, personal beliefs, and sexuality usually not found in other sources. History comes alive through the eye-witness observations of people who lived through great moments, or just by recovering the day-to-day experience of life in the past. Most important, oral history gives everyday people the opportunity to share their stories and thereby shape the way we understand the past. Since ancient times and in cultures across the globe, those who write about the past have relied on the accounts of first-person witnesses. Before the discipline professionalized in the late nineteenth century, some American historians set out to record the memories of pioneers in order to preserve the early history of the nation. The modern use of oral history to document the U.S. past has roots ORAL HISTORY AND THE MODERN OHIO VALLEY 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY in the New Deal era, when federal government programs hired unemployed writers and teachers to travel the country and capture the stories of former slaves, immigrants, coal miners, sharecroppers, and others. That precedent helped spark the military’s efforts during World War II to record the experiences of soldiers during and immediately after combat. After the war, Allan Nevins founded the Columbia University oral history program and the practice of oral history took off. The turn toward social history in the 1960s and 1970s fostered its growth, as historians used the new method to get at the stories of marginalized groups in society. The founding of the Oral History Association in 1966 gave the field shape and leadership. In recent years scholars from around the globe and in disciplines ranging from history and folklore to gerontology and theater arts have made the ranks of those who conduct and use oral histories increasingly diverse.2 The Ohio Valley has long been an important center of American oral history . As historian Elizabeth Perkins notes, parts of the Draper Papers—a significant manuscript collection documenting the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods—represent an early example of oral history, offering written transcripts of conversations with early settlers to the Ohio Valley that capture the daily hardships and the idioms and forms of speech of these early interviewees . Kentuckians also contributed to the modern development of the field. Crittenden County native Forrest C. Pogue was one of the first Army staff interviewers during World War II, while folklorist Lynwood Montell showed how oral history and folklore combined to produce a “folk...

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