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APPENDIX 1 A NOTE ON ORAL HISTORY AND EDITING INTERVIEWS Oral history is the oldest tool of the historical profession. Before there was written history, there were stories—voices from the past intended to guide the present and future. Written history superseded oral tradition for a number of reasons. In an era before mass literacy, elites could control the writing of history and thus the history that was written. Yet written history was not simply an e√ort to harness the past to the agenda of present-day elites. The documentation of written history allowed for verification not always attainable with oral tradition. It was still possible to tell tall tales with documentary evidence, but it was not nearly as easy to get away with it.∞ The advent of sound recordings in the twentieth century lent documentary power to oral tradition, while democratic social movements inspired historians to tell more than just the stories of ‘‘great men.’’ The u.s. government launched a massive oral history project during the Great Depression to provide work for unemployed writers and also to record the experiences of exslaves who still had memories of their time in bondage. This slave narrative project undertaken by the Works Progress Administration could be seen as a precursor to the Veterans History Project, though (much to my chagrin) the Veterans History Project does not pay its interviewers as the wpa once did. Oral history projects gradually emerged at Columbia University, the University of California, and other institutions of higher education, but public support and professional interest in oral history largely languished in the years after World War II. Journalists, who had long relied on interviews for source material, were at the forefront of the oral history revolution in the 1960s and 70s. Studs Terkel and Alex Haley wove masterful interviews into social documents , biographies, and even historical novels.≤ Professional historians also returned to oral history around this same time in an attempt to tell the stories of individuals and groups who left few written records. Since the 1970s, academic contributions to the field of oral history have only multiplied, producing some excellent models not only of how to conduct interviews, but also of how to edit them for publication.≥ Oral history is as much art as it is social science. This is most apparent in the actual process of the interview and editing for publication. The process of each interview is a dialogue; the questions are as important as the answers. For 256 appendix 1 this project, I tried to ask simple, straightforward, but open-ended questions that let the veterans set the story-telling agenda as much as possible. I did not have a set script for each interview, but a core list of about fifteen to twenty prepared questions with five to ten additional ones unique to each interview. Another ten to fifteen spontaneous, follow-up questions usually emerged during the interviews. The core questions that I asked included variations on the following list: When and where were you born? What did your parents do for a living? Why did you decide to join the military? How did your family and friends feel about your joining the military? Had any of your relatives served? What was basic training like for you? What was your first assignment and where were you stationed? What was the average day like on base (or shipboard)? Did you ever feel that your life was in danger? What was your most memorable experience? How did your sexuality a√ect your military service? Did you know other service personnel who were gay or lesbian? Did you or others that you knew face discrimination because of your sexuality? How was the ban on homosexual service personnel enforced when you served? What did you think of the passage of ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’? Why did you leave the military? How did military service a√ect your life? Is there anything that I did not ask that you’d like to talk about? By editing the questions from the interviews included in this volume, I aimed for a book that read more like a collective autobiography than a series of conversations. I wanted to keep the focus on the interviewees, not on the interviewer. With this in mind, I have included interview questions only when a transition from topic to topic seemed too jarring or di≈cult to follow without acknowledging the query that inspired it. Early on in the project, I spoke...

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