Comment

When I was first approached about this project it seemed modest enough—a session at the fiftieth anniversary meeting of the Oral History Association (OHA) in Long Beach, where a group of historians familiar with some of my writings or projects I had worked on would offer a few comments centered on that writing and that work in light of the evolution of oral history and public history. Then I would make some brief comments. That panel has morphed into quite a different creature, a set of essays that demand a more formal response.

After giving some thought to this process, my response, necessarily I suppose, touches upon a problem that has bedeviled oral historians since the origins of the practice: the interplay of memory and history. Memory will be on full display here, with the caveat that these memories are for the most part a present-day imaginative reconstruction of who I think we used to be.¹

Before moving on, some general comments: It is important to remind everyone that almost everything claimed about my work, and many of the memories I will add, were always part of collective or cooperative projects. Putting together a panel on oral history for the 1972 meeting of the Organization of American Historians, the presentations of which became the heart of Envelopes of Sound, would have been impossible without the encouragement and support of Charles Morrissey and Alice Kessler-Harris or the close conversations with many people, especially my old graduate student friend, Henry Shapiro, who was a longtime member of the history department at the University of Cincinnati. My work at the New Jersey Historical Commission was as part of a team of rather genial and remarkable colleagues. The Commission and the folks I worked with gave me a platform that in many ways was unique. When I was president of the Oral History Association in 1988, Andor Skotnes and Spencer Crew organized the program in Baltimore that, I think, opened the OHA to a variety of new communities. I really had little to do with it. My close friendship with Luisa Passerini and my involvement in the international oral history—dare I call it a movement?—was part of a much larger intellectual journey that we undertook with many others, most of whom agreed to join the editorial board of the International Journal of Oral History when Alan Meckler of Meckler Publishing approached me about editing this new journal.² At Columbia University, Elizabeth Mason, Andor (again), and then Mary Marshall Clark were more than equal partners. At every turn I was rewarded with real comrades. Life really is lived in a cloud of social relations. A few years ago I was interviewed by a group of German graduate students who were conducting a set of life history interviews concentrating on the early international oral history meetings. I opened by telling them, with all the usual caveats, that I felt I belonged to a lucky generation. I firmly believe that working with those friends was part of a lucky life.³

When people ask me how I got into oral history, and why I continued, I usually tell them, jokingly but with a tinge of seriousness, that I got into oral history because I had the sneaking suspicion that somewhere there were people who led far more interesting lives than I did; I stayed because I found out that this was true. So, I really don't recognize the chap that these friends talked about then and write about now. Mostly I am a historian and an interviewer and my basic interest is how people construct their history in an oral history interview. It is a combination of the lessons about the creation and the importance of a usable past that I learned from Warren Susman at Rutgers University and my own experiences of oral history interviewing. Everything else follows. Although Mary Marshall and other friends might yet convince me that I am wrong and, as Jack Tchen has noted here, while I am interested in theory, I do not consider myself a theorist. Yes, I am interested in theory, but only as...