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“Oral history . . . can be a means for transforming both the content and purpose of history. It can be used to change the focus of history itself, and open up new areas of inquiry; it can break down barriers between teachers and students, between generations, between educational institutions and the world outside; and in the writing of history—whether in books, or museums, or radio and film—it can give back to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place.” —PaulThompson,TheVoice of the Past:Oral History Oral history levels the playing field of historical research.You don’t have to be a professional historian or a political moverand -shaker to do it.Anyone with the interest, time, resources, and some training can undertake interviews for an oral history project—in a community, school, senior center, church, mosque, or temple. Changes in technology have made quality digital audio recorders and video camcorders available and affordable.There are no age barriers; oral history projects have been done by sixth-graders and octogenarians. Most important , there are no educational barriers; you do not need a PhD to interview doctors, farmers, computer scientists, coal miners, or quilters, and to present your interviews in a book, documentary , or exhibition.The democratic nature of oral history also has a profound impact on the topics covered. Communitybased historians are likely to select topics that resonate with their own lives and with the memories and experiences of people like themselves—their work, family, traditions, and beliefs. vii Preface This sense of connection is important because so often history can seem distant and unrelated to our lives, work, family, or community.That’s hardly surprising because of the way history has been taught in many countries. Children are asked to remember and recite in chronological order lists of monarchs, presidents, wars, treaties, laws, and national events.The problem with history, in the oft-quoted phrase, is that it’s “one damned thing after another.”1 Or, as David Lowenthal more elegantly put it in The Past Is a Foreign Country, “It is so customary to think of the historical past in terms of narratives, sequences , dates and chronologies that we are apt to suppose these things are attributes of the past itself. But they are not; we ourselves put them there.”2 Indeed, we did. Inhabitants of fourteenth-century France did not realize they were living in the Middle Ages. The four hundred thousand young people who gathered for a four-day music festival in August  did not know they were part of theWoodstock Generation, a label that came to represent a set of social and cultural values, until journalists and historians told them they were. Even if we still find the past easiest to describe in epochal lumps—from the Renaissance to today’s global society—at least we’ve moved beyond the great man-significant event view of history, where most of the actors were male and white and performed on a national or international stage. The study of history in U.S. schools and universities now devotes more attention to social, economic, and cultural trends and to issues of gender, ethnicity, class, family, and community. Indeed, some critics claim that the pendulum has swung too far and that political , military, and diplomatic history are now so neglected that some college-educated Americans confuse the two world wars and do not know which side the United States backed inVietnam. Almost all this history is written by academics and journalists or by the historical actors themselves—the politicians, generals , social activists, and pop-culture icons.As history, it can be viii F  read, learned, debated, or adapted into aTV documentary or drama. But it’s still the work of experts with PhDs, careers in public service, or some claim to popular fame or notoriety. It’s not history that most people can practice. Enabling more people to practice history has always been the mission of the authors of this guide.We are committed to help people—from professional historians to community volunteers —add oral history skills to their toolkit of methods and give them the confidence to take on new projects.That’s the primary audience for Catching Stories—people who want to research the histories of their families, neighborhoods, businesses , religious, professional and social groups.The guide will also be useful to college professors and students who plan to use interviews in their research. There are excellent books that examine oral...

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