Individual resources may be more limited than those of a group project, but many an individual researcher is no less concerned about making interviews fully usable. Since researchers are the primary users of the information they collect, they ought to set their own standards to at least equal, if not surpass, those of an oral history project or archives. Both projects and individual researchers want to collect oral documentation that is complete, accurate, and reliable; but researchers scrutinize even more intensely than do project interviewers what they hear in the interviews they conduct and apply a higher degree of professional skepticism to them. They seek verification in other sources for information gathered through interviews, and they evaluate contradictory material to draw their own conclusions.
Despite their focused efforts and self-defined goals, individuals doing their own interviewing bear definite professional responsibilities. The American Historical Association has issued the following recommendations for individual interviewers:
1. Interviews should be recorded on tape but only after the person to be interviewed has been informed of the mutual rights and responsibilities involved in oral history, such as editing, confidentiality, disposition, and dissemination of all forms of the record. Interviewers should obtain legal releases and document any agreements with interviewees.
2. The interviewer should strive to prompt informative dialogue through challenging and perceptive inquiry, should be grounded in the background and experiences of the person being interviewed, and, if possible, should review the sources relating to the interviewee before conducting the interview.
3. To the extent practicable, interviewers should extend the inquiry beyond their immediate needs to make each interview as complete as possible for the benefit of others.
4. The interviewer should guard against possible social injury to or exploitation of interviewees and should conduct interviews with respect for human dignity.
5. Interviewers should be responsible for proper citation of oral history sources in creative works, including permanent location.
6. Interviewers should arrange to deposit their interviews in an archival repository that is capable of both preserving the interviews and making them available for general research. Additionally, the interviewer should work with the repository in determining the necessary legal arrangements.
7. As teachers, historians are obligated to inform students of their responsibilities in regard to interviewing and to encourage adherence to the guidelines set forth here.1
After years of scribbling notes during class lectures, many researchers feel perfectly able to take coherent notes during an interview. They consider a recorder an unnecessary expense, a bother to worry about, and a possible barrier to a candid interview—whether with public figures, who may be overly cautious about having their words recorded, or with nonpublic figures, who may be intimidated by talking into a microphone. Some researchers consider note taking superior to tape recording. Barbara Tuchman, for instance, complained that tape recorders simply encouraged people to “ramble effortlessly and endlessly.” She described note taking as a “crystallizing process” in which the writer automatically distinguishes the significant from the insignificant. Others have cited the risk of the recorder breaking down at crucial moments as their rationale for not recording.2
Such responses combine cogent truths and unnecessary rationalizations. Audio and video recorders are no longer such an expense or a novelty. They can be purchased for a reasonable cost, are easy to operate, and have become so commonplace that few interviewees will be surprised or uncomfortable to see one. More important, recording radically expands and improves any interview. The longer interviews last, the more interviewers tire and miss nuances. Later, when listening to the recording, interviewers inevitably hear more than they did during the interview itself. Note takers may make honest mistakes in what they hear or find their handwriting hard to decipher. Note takers also run the risk of hearing only what they want to hear rather than what the interviewee actually says—a recurring phenomenon to which anyone interviewed by the media can readily attest.
Note taking makes some researchers feel more comfortable because it helps focus their attention—as they listen to what is being said—on the exact points they anticipate later using. But there is no reason not to record and take notes at the same time. The notes can serve as the recording’s index, which is especially useful if a full transcript cannot be made.
Recording is the researcher’s best means of self-protection. Interviewees may object to how they were quoted or may not be willing to stand behind statements they made in their interviews. A recording of the interview provides the documentation to defend against such reactions. Some interviewees, especially the more prominent, may be so skittish about being misquoted that they will insist that the interview be recorded. For his biography of Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson interviewed former President Richard M. Nixon. Isaacson took notes, while Nixon recorded the interview. When the tape recorder broke down, Nixon commented, “I’ve never been very good with these things.”3
Interviewers operate under ground rules that interviewees set. For an oral history project, such an objection would likely cause that person stricken from the list of potential interviewees, since there usually remains little reason to conduct an oral history if it cannot be recorded. But the individual researcher may consider the person a critically important source, regardless of the ground rules. Notes may be inferior to a recording, but they are better than nothing. As soon as the interview session is over, the interviewer needs to write down as full an account as notes and memory permit.
An interviewee may decline to be recorded out of fear or vanity, emotions that can sometimes be overcome by some reassurances and flattery. The late historian Gordon Prange, whose ego matched the monumental books he wrote on the Second World War, refused to be recorded during an interview on the grounds that Gen. Douglas MacArthur had never allowed his interviews to be recorded. The interviewer took notes for a few minutes and then injected, “What a shame that this isn’t being recorded, Professor Prange, because my notes will never do justice to your cogent thoughts and beautifully crafted sentences.” Accepting that as a point well taken, Prange permitted the recorder to run for the rest of the interview.4
You can make notes from your own recordings without having to transcribe them entirely. Having the recording allows you to quote accurately and to pick up nuances you may have missed during the interview. The recording can be quoted, cited, deposited in a library, and referred back to for proof should any queries arise about the accuracy of the material.
Transcripts are costly and time-consuming to create, but they increase the usefulness of an interviewer to everyone, including the original interviewer. Researchers planning to conduct extensive interviews for a dissertation, book, or other project should seek a logical repository, whether it be a university library, a state archives or historical society, or a community library, to donate the completed tapes. The repository will have legal release forms that the interviewer can use. If the interviews meet the repository’s standards, it may be able to have its own staff transcribe the interviews or join the interviewer in seeking a grant for transcription.
Researchers have a professional obligation to preserve the unique documentation they collected, both to leave a record for future investigators and to protect their own reputations. Political scientist Alexander Lamis interviewed the political operative Lee Atwater, who offered a crude and candid assessment of the racial aspects of modern southern politics. Lamis first published the interview anonymously. After Atwater died, he included the interview in another book, this time attributing the incendiary remarks to him. After Lamis died, critics charged that he had fabricated the quotation. His widow released the recording to show that her husband’s use of the quotation had been accurate and scholarly rather than politically motivated.5
Scholars have a professional obligation to permit access to their sources. A footnote citing “personal interview in the author’s possession” leaves much open to question, especially if the interviewee has died. Readers may question how accurately the researcher quoted or paraphrased the interview. Even when a researcher quotes an interview meticulously, in all probability he or she needs to cite only a small portion of it. Future researchers may make different use of the same material.
While writing her doctoral dissertation on the Office of War Information Holly Cowan Shulman discovered that another historian had conducted an interview with a key official of the agency. Her graduate advisor, however, dissuaded her from asking to see a copy of the interview, on the grounds that it was someone else’s work. Although she complied at the time, she came to feel that it had been wrong not to examine the interview for her research since interviews “were a piece of historical evidence just as much as letters or diaries.” Seeking to raise the consciousness of the historical profession on the issue, Shulman has argued:
When we conduct interviews, we are creating evidence. When the next historian comes along interested in another aspect or interpretation of the same topic, he or she should have access to the interviews we did. This is the very nature of the rules of history. Otherwise, I could hide all of my evidence to protect myself from competition and argument. Or I could make up anything I wanted and assert its truth citing interviews I supposedly conducted but would let no one else see. In other words, if we historians don’t treat interviews seriously, we raise a series of problems which could hurt the profession as a whole.6
The use of archived interviews has been more closely linked to historical research than to the social sciences. Although social scientists accumulate a great deal of qualitative data, including interviews, field notes and correspondence, many are reluctant to conduct secondary analysis of this information. Ethnographers have raised concerns over the disconnect with the original researcher, and because it ran against “the ethnographic principles of seeking to understand settings or people in their own terms.” After considerable debate, however, the practice has become more acceptable, especially after scholars realized that the process of using secondary data was so similar to using their own interviews.7
Yes, because both publishers and archives will want to determine who owns the copyright to the interviews. If you intend to publish anything extensively drawn from an interview, you will need to assure the publisher that you have obtained the interviewee’s permission. If not, publishers will send you back with their own legal releases—usually formidable documents—for the interviewees’ signature.
A legal release is also essential if you intend to deposit the recording or transcript in a library or archive. By signing a legal release, the interviewee indicates that he or she understood what the interview would be used for and establishes its ownership. Just having recorded another person’s words does not give the interviewer copyright on those words, and making quotations beyond “fair use” length might stimulate a legal challenge. The problem may not come from the interviewee but from the interviewee’s heirs, who may seek compensation for the interview’s publication.
Failing to obtain releases limits the interview’s future use. While depositing the interviews in an archives, the interviewer must go back to get signatures on legal releases. Sometimes interviewees have died and their next of kin must be located. It is always easier to have the legal releases signed when the interview is conducted.
Researchers at many universities must also deal with institutional review boards that want to see evidence of the interviewee’s “informed consent.” Standard oral history release forms should suffice, indicating that the interviewee understands and approves of the purpose and intended uses of the interviews. Some institutional review boards further require release forms to stipulate that the interviewee can decline to participate, can choose to remain anonymous, and understands the potential risks involved in participation—factors more applicable to medical and behavioral science projects than to oral history. (See chapter 7 for further issues relating to institutional review boards.)
Researchers understandably think of interviews as filling in gaps in their work or expanding their own knowledge of the particulars and want to ask questions precisely about that area and nothing else. But this attitude is counterproductive in a number of ways. First, the interviewee’s memory may not immediately be able to dredge up the specific information that the interviewer is seeking. Interviewers need to spend some time establishing rapport, building up to the central issue, and understanding its context in the interviewee’s life. Interviewers need to be sensitive to the feelings of interviewees and to not dismiss other areas of their life they may consider relevant to the interviewer’s questions.
Paul Thompson began interviewing in the 1970s for a study of Edwardian England. He conducted a large survey but asked about people’s experiences only up to 1918, not about what happened to them afterward. “Now, failing to do that was a very large mistake,” he later concluded, “because it meant that there were all sorts of things that we could have asked of those people that we failed to ask.” There were many more questions he wished he had raised for his subsequent research, but by then it was too late; that generation had passed. Thompson encourages researchers to be willing to divert from their narrow interests to a broader picture of those they are interviewing: “I think it’s much better to have a life story interview rather than one which just focused on a particular period of somebody’s life.”8
In 1974, I interviewed the New Deal official Benjamin V. Cohen about his role in creating the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. Watergate was the news when the interview took place, and Cohen wanted to talk about Nixon. But for my dissertation, I needed to hear about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not willing to follow his tangents, I constantly steered the interview back to my immediate interests. Not until later did I realize that I had missed the opportunity to capture Cohen’s thoughts about Watergate and to find out whether the development of the “imperial presidency” had in any way changed his opinion about the expansion of the executive branch during the 1930s.
Often within a few years of completion of an oral history project, many of the older interviewees will die. There is no guarantee that these people will have been interviewed by any other programs A researcher’s notes, recordings, and transcripts of interviews therefore become valuable sources for other researchers, who no longer have access to the deceased.
Anyone working on a specific book or article becomes far more steeped in the subject matter and has a much more personal stake in the process. Their interviews lead to publication and promote their professional advancement, perhaps even earn them royalties. Researchers can verge on obsession with their projects, wanting to know everything. They press interviewees to go into greater detail than does an interviewer for a more general project. A number of interviewers participated in the Former Members of Congress oral history project, and, not surprisingly, one of the lengthiest and most detailed interviews was conducted by an interviewer who was also writing a doctoral dissertation on the senatorial interviewee. The interviewer pressed the senator on any number of issues, even persuading him to sing his campaign song.9
Individual researchers may express disappointment with the project-directed interviews they read in oral history archives because the project interviewers did not dig deep enough into the subject. The main themes may have been covered, but not enough of the smaller details are included. Because individual researchers generally are seeking answers to specific questions, they may undervalue the parts of an archival interview that do not directly address their needs. The curse of oral history is failure to pursue details.
There are differences between interviews conducted for one researcher’s express purposes and those conducted as oral histories for general use. Oral histories are broadly conceived and conducted, then processed, preserved, and made available to other scholars in archives. Research interviews fill the narrow needs of the individual interviewer, are rarely recorded or transcribed, and generally wind up in the interviewer’s file cabinets or in boxes in basements and attics.10
These distinctions blur when a researcher’s interviews are recorded or transcribed and deposited somewhere so that other researchers can use them. Oral historians have long objected to the use of the term “oral history” to describe every interview, regardless of whether it was recorded or simply handwritten notes were taken. “Historians have been interviewing people for hundreds of years; there’s nothing new about that, and I don’t think they’ve been doing oral history,” observed Philip Brooks of the Harry S. Truman Library in 1966. “I think there’s a real distinction here between a researcher who interviews people for his own purpose to derive information for his own book, and that of what I sometimes call a ‘pure’ oral historian, who is accumulating a stock of evidence for the use of other researchers, any and all researchers, as we do in an archival agency, I think this is related somewhat to the question of objectivity.” More recently, oral historians have conceded that all interviewing—archival or individual—is subjective, and that the earlier distinctions posed a false dichotomy.11
Some interviews may not be worthy of permanent preservation, particularly if the researcher has not followed other criteria for oral history interviewing, preparation, and processing or has not been sensitive to oral history ethical considerations. Still, in the long run, institutions—whether public libraries soliciting and collecting family history interviews for their local history sections or major research libraries working with authors and documentary film producers to collect oral history project interviews—stand to gain from a closer partnership with individual researchers.
It would be a mistake to define oral history so narrowly that it applied only to large archival collections. But to do oral history, interviewers must live up to its standards and assume its legal, ethical, and methodological responsibilities, including that of making their interviews available to other researchers for verification and further use.
There is no set formula. Historians have found that conducting interviews during the early stages of research can help them determine what to look for in the archives and give them a sense of what was likely not written down. Interviews conducting during the later stages of research can fill in gaps in the record, add flavor to the story compiled from the archives, and may be more fully informed by archival research. As a general rule, however, the more research performed in advance, the better the interview.12
A White House aide interviewed for a book once cautioned: “Everybody has a different recollection, sometimes of the same facts.” The interviewer agreed, noting that “sources lie. They embellish. They omit. They have agendas, hidden or not. They exaggerate their own prescience and the folly of their rivals. And sometimes their memories honestly fail them.” That was why he also asked his sources for relevant documents. But the aide pointed out, “Documents are sometimes misleading, too.”13
Treat oral evidence as cautiously as any other form of evidence. Documents written at the time have an immediacy about them and are not influenced by subsequent events, and yet those documents can be incomplete, in error, or created to mislead. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson invited the television critic Jack Gould to meet with him in the Oval Office. A memo from a White House aide later reported to Johnson that Gould had stopped at his office after the meeting and wondered, “Why doesn’t the President appear on television the same way he talked to me—the President is so gracious, affable and well informed.” Subsequently, scholars have frequently cited that memo when writing about Johnson and the media. Gould’s son, a historian, came across the quote in the mid-1980s and asked his father about the incident. Gould recalled that he had left the White House immediately after the interview, had not seen the aide, and had not said what was credited to him in the memo. The episode impressed his son as “a cautionary tale about relying on archival material without double-checking the sources used.”14
Autobiographies written years after the events occurred may present an inflated self-image. “Half the fascination of studying the memoirs of the past is the endeavor, by making allowance for the prejudices and predilections of the writer, to sift truth from falsehood,” wrote Duff Cooper, the biographer of the French diplomat Talleyrand, who left him much to sift. Similarly, Maya Jasanoff, after searching through the personal narratives written by Loyalists who had been forced into exile by the American Revolution, concluded: “No sources of this kind are ever purely objective. But the way people tell their stories—what they emphasize, what they leave out—can tell the historian as much about their times as the concrete details they provide.”15
Statements are not necessarily truer if written down at the time, written in later memoirs, or recalled in testimony. Whether written or oral, evidence must be convincing and verifiable. A federal court jury on which I served was presented with a written statement that the prosecutor described as the defendant’s “signed confession.” The defense insisted that the prosecution had misinterpreted the statement, whose many grammatical errors obscured its meaning. In the jury room, jurors repeatedly read the statement, trying to decipher exactly what it meant, before concluding that it failed the test of convincing evidence.
Oral history can be unconvincing. Some interviewees’ remarks are self-serving; they remember selectively, recall only events that cast themselves in a good light, and seem to always get the better of opponents. Interviewers may be too polite or too timid to ask probing questions about events that did not turn out well. Sometimes interviewees honestly cannot remember. They jumble names and dates and confuse people and places. Sometimes they deliberately recast their past to fit their current self and public image. Whole series of interviews can be faulted for paying attention to only one side of the issue or for interviewing only those people who would speak positively about the individual who was the subject of the project.16
A biographer seeking to reconstruct the life of the labor journalist Eva McDonald Valesh found that although few of her letters had survived, she had given an interview to the Columbia Oral History Research Office a few years before her death. The interview was largely factual in the details of her public life, and other evidence bolstered her opinions, but her account of her private life proved misleading. Valesh told the interviewer that her husbands had died, which was “true only in the sense that they were dead at the time of the interview.” Research revealed that she had been twice divorced, not twice widowed. “There are some minor problems with telescoping of time. And, yes, she lied about her age. She did that more than half her life, so it is with great consistency and with the excuse that she did look younger than her age.”17
Enough bad oral histories have been done to satisfy the worst suspicions of traditionalists, and yet enough good interviews have been conducted to validate the process. Properly done, an oral history helps interpret and define written records and makes sense of the most obscure decisions and events. An interview with a thoughtful participant and perceptive eyewitness can generate new ideas and avenues of inquiry that a researcher might have never thought of pursuing. Interviews can explore the use of language by subgroup—such as jazz slang, black English, shop-floor jargon, and even the acronyms of government bureaucrats—and discover word meanings that might otherwise have eluded researchers outside the subgroup.
Oral evidence does not always derive from oral history. The French historian Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie published what amounted to an oral history of a fourteenth-century village in the Pyrennes, Montaillou. His sources were depositions taken during the Inquisition by Bishop Jacques Fournier, who interrogated some 500 suspected heretics between 1318 and 1325. Scribes copied down the questions and answers and gave the accused the opportunity to correct the transcripts. The final copies were deposited in the Vatican archives, where six centuries later they enabled Ladurie to quote the words of the common folk of Montaillou, people who stood in stark contrast to the nobles who dominate the chronicles of the Middle Ages. Montaillou (1979) became a best seller in France and elsewhere, possibly because of its explicit accounts of sexual relations within the village. Prurient interests aside, the first-person accounts make the book compelling reading for even nonmedievalists.18
Similarly, the pension application process for militiamen in the American Revolutionary War amounted to what the historian John C. Dann has called “one of the largest oral history projects ever undertaken.” In 1832, when Congress agreed to pay a yearly pension to any militiamen who served for more than six months in the Revolution, thousands of elderly veterans applied. Since written records were scarce, the government required them to dictate their reminiscences to court reporters, giving as many names, dates, and other details as possible. Government clerks then scrutinized these testimonies to determine their accuracy. Selecting from a great mass of applications a century and a half later, Dann published the first-person eyewitness accounts of foot soldiers, runaway slaves, and women who followed their husbands into combat. Their accounts authentically describe not only combat but also everyday life in the camps, wounds, diseases, and the whole social setting of the Revolutionary War.19
Oral history makes a critical addition to oral evidence: a trained interviewer who can guide an interviewee’s recital of events that he or she may not have thought about for years but can recall vividly when asked. Questions prompt interviewees to discuss issues they might otherwise have skipped over. Interviewers can question inconsistencies between the oral account and written documentation. A good oral history can present and preserve convincing evidence and put it in quotable, first-person prose that enlivens historical narratives. But oral history should not stand alone as a single source. Researchers need to seek out available material to substantiate both written and oral evidence. If written and oral information contradict each other, then the researcher must dig even deeper to determine which is more accurate.
While preparing to interview Stuart McClure, the former chief clerk of the Senate Labor, Education, and Public Welfare Committee, much of the research centered on the National Defense Education Act. In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, McClure wrote a memo to the committee’s chairman, Lister Hill, suggesting that the public attention generated by Sputnik might help pass the education bill that had stalled in Congress—if they called it a “defense education act.” One account of the bill’s passage devoted a chapter to the fight between the Senate, which wanted to make the money available as grants in the form of scholarships, and the House, which insisted on making it available as loans. During the interview, when asked why the Senate lost the battle, McClure laughed and replied:
Oh, that was another clever, clever ploy. That was done on the House side. They narrowed the issue. There were millions of dollars for all kinds of other things, but Carl Elliott [the Alabama representative who chaired the House subcommittee on education] and his guys narrowed the issue to whether we should have the federal government hand out scholarships or loans....The House denounced scholarships, it was a waste of money and socialism and all of that. And the minute the damn scholarship issue was done for, dead, the bill swooped through. I don’t thing anybody had read any other title in it. Oh, that was clever stuff. Carl Elliott was a brilliant strategist, as good as Lister Hill in his way, in different houses.20
Here oral history exposed a legislative ploy that not only fooled most members of the House of Representatives but also the scholar who had published a history based on official documentation. The debate over loans versus scholarships had been a subterfuge designed to allow the House, which had previously defeated federal education bills, to save face and claim victory. McClure’s story has the ring of credibility—first, because it is logical, and second, because Senate staff rarely give credit to House members, except to express sheer admiration for a brilliant legislative strategy.
Without the interviewee being present for cross-examination, courts generally regard the recording or transcript of an oral history as hearsay. Nevertheless, they have permitted oral histories to be subpoenaed as evidence and have accepted oral traditions in rendering verdicts. In dealing with land claims of native peoples, courts in several nations have acknowledged the inadequacy of written documents—although legal obstacles to those native claims remain formidable. When those fighting a land claim in Canadian courts argued that oral histories “did not accurately convey historical truth,” the chief justice of the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that “stories matter” and that the legal convention of hearsay could be waived in regard to the oral traditions of Canada’s “first people.”21
When South Africa established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine past government tactics used to suppress resistance to Apartheid, critics of the commission argued that the oral history it gathered was unreliable and grossly inaccurate. The stories that victims told were subjective, they charged, telling “their understanding of what happened to them and not necessarily what happened.” A minority report asserted: “Exaggeration is a natural consequence of human suffering.” These critics assumed that when the alleged perpetrators took the stand, having been granted amnesty, they would refute the victims’ claims of human rights violations. Instead, the perpetrators confirmed the most outrageous of the stories and affirmed the reliability of the oral history.22
It depends on the information. Max Hastings, who interviewed hundreds of World War II veterans around the world for his books, argued that even when they played a small role in events their memories “contribute to a sense of mood, time, and place that can make an important contribution to a portrait of how things seemed to contemporary participants.” A personal description, the expression of an opinion, or the telling of a colorful anecdote would permit citation of the interview as the single source. But the more controversial the subject, the less an interview can stand alone. Critics would question the authority of the interviewee. Was that person in a position to know, or does the interview constitute simply secondhand speculation? When in doubt, employ the journalist’s practice of seeking at least two witnesses before asserting a statement of fact—if, indeed, a second witness is still alive.23
Independent researchers can also borrow from journalists the practice of having one interviewee comment on what another has said. A novice reporter, sent to cover a dispute involving a local developer, interviewed the developer and wrote his story. “Did you talk to the architect?” asked his editor. The reporter dutifully interviewed the architect and added his comments to the story, but his editor was still not satisfied. “Take what the architect said back to the developer and get him to respond,” the editor instructed, “then take what the developer said back to the architect, and after they’ve answered each other’s charges, then you write your story.”
In cultural resource-management projects that included oral history interviews, despite the misgivings of archaeologists and others on the team who were not oral historians, efforts have been made to determine the quality of evidence that the interviews gathered. The oral historian Dan Utley described how, in one project collecting information about a defunct farming community, each interviewee was encouraged to talk at length about the annual hog killing, a universal experience within the community. “The hog killing stories were then compared and used as a rough guide to evaluate the memories, descriptive abilities, and involvement of the interviewees,” he explained. “It was not easy to sit through numerous descriptions of the slaughter process, especially after breakfast, but they did provide an important comparative dimension to the overall project.”24
People naturally recount events and personalities anecdotally, in small self-contained stories that illuminate or instruct. Anecdotes often focus on humorous situations and characteristics and in conversation are designed to stimulate a smile or a laugh. In many ways, the anecdote is a writer’s freshest material. The term derives from the Greek word anekdota, meaning “things unpublished,” and it is often the telling stories taken from interviews that make a book original and different from previously published sources. Anecdotal is not synonymous with apocryphal, meaning spurious or unverifiable information. Names, dates, and other facts can usually be more reliably obtained elsewhere, but each interviewee has a unique store of anecdotes.
Although scholars sometimes denigrate anecdotes as the antithesis of analysis, these accounts can actually be informative, offering their analysis in a vivid and colorful manner and enlivening a narrative, often with a touch of humor. Good writers have an eye and an ear for a lively and believable anecdote that can make their points both memorably and compactly. Critics also dismiss oral history and other forms of narrative history because anecdotal information, by its nature, is randomly gathered and not statistically significant enough to make generalizations from. Social scientists look to census data, marriage licenses, death certificates, and voting statistics rather than to interviews, unless they are using a standard questionnaire and questioning a large, representative sample. Oral historians tailor their questions for individual interviewees, and time and financial limitations tend to restrict their pool of interviewees.
Although anecdotal information has a personal flavor, the collected stories from a group reinforce each other and show common threads in the lives of the group’s members. Mixing anecdotal information with the hard data of statistical abstracts, the skilled researcher and writer can re-create a colorful as well as a convincing portrait of the past.25
Individual researchers have more liberty than archival oral historians to inject the interviews with their own opinions and to challenge the interviewees. Remember, however, that all interviews are voluntary and last only as long as the interviewee desires. Keep in mind that too forceful an intervention by the interviewer may also distort the interviewee’s responses.
Deliberate carefully when trying to decide whether interviewees’ stories are accurate, misleading, or erroneous. An individual researcher usually approaches an interview with a thesis to prove and may assume that anything contradicting that thesis is wrong. Give the speaker a fair hearing, and then challenge any inconsistencies in the testimony with other sources. When pressed, the interviewee may provide some additional rationale or even hard evidence to support previously unsubstantiated assertions. An impaired ability to listen can be a dangerous affliction for interviewers.26
“Research involves the shedding, not the confirmation, of our preconceptions,” the historian Blair Worden has asserted. “If historians go to the archives expecting certain answers to their questions, careful study of the evidence will almost invariably change their minds.” Living sources can magnify this condition by looking interviewers in the eye and telling them they are wrong and by revealing unexpected information. Interviewees may see things entirely differently from the researcher, and although interviewees might be biased or just plain wrong, so might the researcher’s thesis. The best information to emerge from an oral history is often completely unexpected: a different way of looking at something, turning preconceived notions upside down. An interviewer may want to argue points with an interviewee, but it is self-defeating to seek out people to interview and then ignore what they have to say. Or as Lyndon Johnson used to say, “I ain’t never learned nothin’ talkin’.”27
Although interviewers strive to take a neutral role during the interview, neutrality may not be acceptable in its publication. When James Green published his interview with the historian C. Vann Woodward in the Radical History Review, it stimulated a series of angry letters to the editor expressing outrage that Green had not rebutted Woodward’s critical remarks about the Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker. The opinions had been Woodward’s, but Green took the blame for his silence and apologized for not challenging Woodward’s assertions. “My purpose in interviewing Woodward for RHR was not, however, to expose our political differences,” Green explained, “but to examine his contribution to the Left’s understanding of Southern history and to the study of race, class and region in U.S. history.”28
Some caution is always advisable. A best-selling book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (2010), received superlative reviews and was considered for production as a movie, until reports surfaced that a key source had been an imposter who fabricated his role in the bombing and made up events out of whole cloth. The author said he was stunned, and the publisher stopped selling the book.29
The emphasis on interviewing “from the bottom up” has presumed that interviewers at least admire their interviewees even when they do not agree with them. But some researchers record the lives of people whose politics and ideologies they find “unsavory, dangerous, or deliberately deceptive.” The sociologist Kathleen Blee, who interviewed former Ku Klux Klan members from Indiana, has no sympathy for the Klan’s anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and racist politics, and violent attitudes. She found it unnecessary to appear empathetic when interviewing Klan members and made little effort to shy away from controversial topics. She anticipated “no rapport, no shared assumptions, no commonality of thought or experience” and expected her interviewees to be too wary of her to reveal their true attitudes. But her expectations proved groundless. Not only did the former Klan members seem at ease during their interviews, but they assumed that she, “a native of Indiana and a white person,” had to agree, even if secretly, with their views. “Even challenging their beliefs had no effect on their willingness to talk,” Blee noted, concluding that despite profound differences, rapport was disturbingly easy to achieve.30
Interviewers may encounter people with whom they disagree profoundly but who can expand their perspectives on an issue. After publishing an article on the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, Pamela Sugiman received an angry e-mail from Lois Hashimoto, a woman who had lived in the relocation camps but did not see herself as a victim. In Hashimoto’s mind, those who had been interned had not only survived but also flourished in triumph over their unjust treatment. Rather than dismiss the criticism, Sugiman contacted Hashimoto and interviewed her—even if listening to such views made Sugiman squirm. Although neither one changed her opinion, they built a warm relationship. Sugiman reasoned that researchers “cannot exclude memories from our accounts because they are inconsistent with public memory or from what we view as historical truth.” To best understand the complexities of the past, oral historians must remain open to hearing and learning from other perspectives, no matter how much they might conflict with our own views.31
A certain amount of intellectual seduction—interviewees trying to make interviewers agree with them—may take place. Sitting down to talk with prominent figures can be a heady experience, and it is all too easy to slip into a false sense of intimacy that can diminish scholarly distance and detachment. The makers and shakers who spend their careers assiduously trying to manipulate the media may treat historical researchers in much the same manner. They want the researcher to see events from their perspective to validate their positions. Some of them are campaigning for historical vindication just as energetically as they did for public office.
Researchers can also be captivated by less prominent individuals who have lived noble lives, suffered oppression, or been crusading spirits. Empathy helps greatly in conducting interviews. Allan Nevins once said that an interviewer needs gemutlichkeit, an “obvious sympathy with the person whom he interviews, friendliness and tact, as well as courage.” But researchers much also demonstrate scholarly skepticism. Interviewees were players and partisans in the events and often have positions and reputations to defend. Researchers are observers, not players, and must not let personal admiration keep them from weighing the evidence dispassionately and creating a convincing account of people, movements, and past events.32
Although researchers may feel an impulse to grab a recorder and begin interviewing for themselves, the best place to start is with oral histories that have already been collected, transcribed, and opened. Many authors have used these collections and many books have cited them, but only a small portion of these vast resources have been tapped.
Internet search engines have greatly facilitated locating oral history interviews thus boosting their use. Many oral history archives have posted their directories and catalogs online, sometimes accompanying them with full transcripts and audio and video clips. The websites of the various national and regional oral history associations include links to many of these repositories.
As researchers’ periods of study move further into the past and survivors are no longer available to interview, they have to rely more on “second-generation” use of oral history, reexamining interviews that were conducted for other publications. The original interviewer may have cited only portions of the material or may have overlooked significant clues buried in the testimony. Seemingly innocent remarks may take on new meaning in light of later developments. New trends in historical research may highlight issues that earlier researchers considered marginal or insignificant. Second-generation research potential increases the importance of depositing and preserving interviews in libraries and archives—for verification, reinterpretation, and reuse long after the interviewee and the interviewer are gone.
When Mark Stoler wrote his concise biography of General George C. Marshall, he worked in the shadow of Forrest Pogue’s monumental four-volume biography of Marshall. Although General Marshall had steadfastly refused lucrative offers to write his memoirs in the 1950s, Pogue persuaded him to give interviews. Eventually, Marshall warmed to being interviewed and left behind a rich, reflective commentary on his impressive career, particularly his earlier years. Since General Marshall died years before Stoler began his research, the historian made use of Pogue’s interviews at the Marshall Research Foundation in Lexington, Virginia. Repeatedly, Stoler quoted from Pogue’s interviews for Marshall’s evaluations of his colleagues and self-assessments of his actions. Although drawing from the same sources that had been available to Pogue, Stohler’s book was a fresh interpretation of the material Marshall shared with the earlier researcher.33
People often recall events in the form of conversation (“so she said to me...”). They remember the words of presidents and other famous people they have met; they remember arguments, warnings, humorous and ironic remarks, and beautifully turned phrases. People reconstruct dialogue not only in oral histories but also in their letters and diaries; the results can be colorful but treacherous.
Interviewers hear only one party’s version of a conversation, generally years after it took place. In evaluating such evidence, think about whether the comments are characteristic of the person to whom they are attributed and whether they make sense in the context of the time and place of the conversation. Be suspicious of interviewees who always managed to get the last work or administer the perfect squelch. They may be recalling what they wish they had said or may be claiming credit for lines spoken to them rather than by them. The humorist Garrison Keillor once confessed in a radio monologue that his childhood reminiscence about an overripe tomato thrown with perfect aim was absolutely true—except that his sister had thrown it at him, not the other way around.
The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noted that remembered dialogue helps “impart immediacy to narrative” but warned that such information should only be used when the remarks are “plausibly supported by context or other evidence.” He added: “I have extended this tolerance to oral history and employed the literary convention with the same critical caution I hope illustrious predecessors have applied to written documents. It remains a convention.” 34
Disciplines that emphasize fieldwork and participatory observation regularly construct pseudonyms to conceal the identities and protect the privacy of the communities they observe. Anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists may interview people as representatives of types rather than as identifiable individuals. Their fieldwork techniques permit the creation of fictional identities for people and places. They believe that anonymity encourages interviewees to speak more candidly and that it protects interviewees, their families, and their jobs from retribution. This does not mean that they hide the purpose of their research from their interviewees. A sociologist who studied watermen in the Chesapeake Bay for a dissertation never admitted to the families who took her into their homes that she was using them for her research and secretly recording their conversations. Protests over her book prompted the American Sociological Association to approve more stringent guidelines for professional conduct in fieldwork. Oral historians agree that deception is never justified.35
Some anthropologists have found that even when they anticipated using anonymity, their participants were willing and eager to be named. That was the case when Penny Robinson studied Pakeha women in New Zealand. Since she was also photographing them, “it seemed rather a farce to not name them.” Those doing visual anthropology regard it as contradictory to include people’s faces and villages while concocting pseudonyms for them.36
Oral historians influenced by the social sciences have felt a similarly strong need to protect interviewees’ well-being by not revealing their names. They feel that sometimes the general message carries more significance than the particular speaker. For instance, the historian Sherna Gluck regretted that the political climate in the Middle East prevented her from revealing the real names of the Palestinian women she interviewed. “They have made it clear, however, that this personal recognition is less important to them than making their story public.”37
Yet anonymity clashes with some of oral history’s most fundamental objectives. Having sought to give “voice to the voiceless,” it is inconsistent to render them nameless. Oral historians conduct life review biographical interviews because they consider interviewees important as individuals and want to record their unique experiences and perceptions. Future historians using those interviews will also expect some verification of sources. They will want to know where the information came from and what biases might have affected the testimony. Just as critics of journalistic practices have complained that unbridled anonymity allows public officials to evade responsibility for their views, oral historians believe that their interviewees should be held accountable for what they say for the record. Nothing based on anonymous sources can be proven, and the evidence remains at the level of rumor and innuendo. “When sources choose anonymity,” the oral historian William W. Moss warned, “whether out of privacy, humility, or fear, the record produced not only suffers the loss of user confidence that accompanies any anonymous testimony, but the primacy assertion of oral history that the individual indeed matters is also lost.”38
Sensitive interviews can be sealed for safe periods of time, but the Oral History Association has recommended anonymity only in extremely sensitive circumstances.39 By accepting anonymity under dire circumstances, oral historians indicate that it should never be a routine practice. When authors claim that their books are based on hundreds of interviews and cite none specifically, or assert that none of their interviewees chose to be identified, there is a strong suspicion that anonymity was part of the researcher’s design and that interviewees were never encouraged or given the opportunity to speak for the record. The use of blanket anonymity also raises the question of the expiration of that anonymity. Was the promise of anonymity eternal, or can the interviewees’ identities be restored to them at some safe point in the future?
One solution for writers seeking to balance their interviewees’ anonymity with scholarly verification is to deposit the recordings and transcripts in a library or archives with provisions for identifying the interviewees after a safe interval. The political scientist Richard Fenno gave his interviews with members of Congress to the National Archives. Since these interviewees had left public life, they could be identified without fear of political embarrassment, thereby enhancing the future research value of the collection. A history of the U.S. space program drew heavily from interviews with past and present employees of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), asking about their personal backgrounds, the type of work they did in the space program, and their perspectives on how the agency changed over time. Given that many of the interviewees were still NASA employees, they were assured that their names would not appear next to any quotations used in the published history—which identified each interview only by number—but that the transcripts, linking names to the numbers, would be preserved in the NASA History Office.40
The impulse to post interviews promptly online clashes with the reality that candid accounts may make the interviewees vulnerable. Applicants for schools and jobs, undocumented immigrants, and members of ethnic and religious minorities may be penalized for exposing their life stories to online searches. The easiest solution is to hold the collection in an archives for future release rather than to post it right away. Some projects, however, are eager to disseminate their findings to promote their causes and are thus unwilling to wait. The Student Liberation Activist Movement (SLAM!) oral history project, which conducted interviews with young radical political protestors, chose to post the audio interviews without the transcripts, to make them less searchable, and to use only the first names of the interviewees online.41
Any interview involves an interpretation of the past. People will remember events and express opinions from their own particular viewpoints. Interviewers will ask questions about things they consider significant. Those processing the interviews will index or otherwise highlight the major themes to facilitate future use. Researchers will then interpret the interviews to draw out meaning for their own purposes. Some oral historians manage to combine all of those roles. Whatever your connection to the process, it is useful to consider the range of theories that have developed regarding the interpretation of oral history.
A critic once contended that the practice of oral history “claims to be self-effacing and world-revealing. How can a collection of interviews be anything else? But if you look closely at these oral histories, you can never forget who has shaped them and to what end.” Although meant as a negative—that oral histories actually reflect the perspectives of the interviewer as well as the interviewee, and that readers should be forewarned they are not dealing with “just a series of oral histories”—this assertion simply states a fact. Interviewers do indeed shape their interviews by whom they choose to interview, what questions they ask, and what extracts they select for publication. The role of the interviewer in steering the interview, the peculiarities of memory, and many other issues amply demonstrate that oral history goes far beyond holding up a mirror to society.42
Theorists pay attention to more than the information that interviewees provide. Such efforts began by questioning the validity and reliability of memory, and soon spread to other analytical issues. In Europe, oral historians encountered widespread silence and unwillingness to talk about past support of fascism. The Italian historian Luisa Passerini came to appreciate that her interviews were an expression of culture that mixed “the dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires.” She accepted the subjective nature of her sources: oral histories are not “static recollections of the past” but memories reworked according to the interviewees’ later experiences. Her realization led other oral historians to consider what people remember and forget and the ways in which those memories of the past are produced “through the prism of the present.”43
Because they create their sources, rather than rely exclusively on archival documents, oral historians saw the resemblance between their research methods and those in the social sciences who utilized fieldwork. They began studying how those disciplines analyzed interviews. For instance, anthropologists and sociologists considered individuals in the context of their communities and raised issues of how gender, race, and ethnicity determine how members of a community remember and retell the past. Linguists examined the structures of communication. Psychologists raised questions about memory and trauma.
Interpretation has become an inescapable feature of oral history at every stage. Interviewers engage in interpretation during the interview. (Why is this person evading the subject? Could I frame the question differently? What could that have meant?) The transcript prompts further interpretation between the transcriber and the interviewer who audit-edits. (What was that word? Is that an acronym? Where should the punctuation go?) The researchers who use the interviews—whether or not they conducted them—then seek to extract meaning from what was or was not said. Theory is therefore present in the process and its outcome, assisting the oral historian in doing the interview and in analyzing it later.
As opposed to the individual testimonies that oral historians conduct, anthropologists employ ethnography as a method of collecting data about groups of people and use interviews to examine a collective society (although these distinctions are often blurred). The anthropologist Heather Howard notes that “the art of good ethnography is precisely in how well the many layers of data are woven together.” Where anthropologists use interviewing to understanding different cultures from the perspectives of those within the culture, sociologists conduct interviews to link individual experiences with larger cultural and structural issues. These social sciences view the social world as patterned and predictable, which enables them to apply scientific methods to examine the variables and test their hypotheses. Traditionally, social scientists have conducted quantitative research, using standard questionnaires from which they could generalize, and promising anonymity to the participants. More recently, these disciplines have experimented with a type of qualitative interviewing that more closely resembles oral history practices. Once the social scientists finish their interviews they engage in data analysis. The cycles of interviewing and analysis that they conduct is called “grounded theory.” The idea behind it is that each cycle of analysis will inform the next round of interviews.44
Those theories most applicable to oral history involve narrative and memory. Narrative theory grew out of literary studies before it came to influence sociology, anthropology, and history. Memory theories began with experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, and spread into history, autobiography, and aging, while also influencing folk history, popular history, public history, and oral history. Memory studies have included autobiographical memory, aging, gender, and collective memory. In fact, there are so many themes and variations that one historian has dubbed them “the memory industry.”45
Oral history interviewees will often say, “You got me thinking.” Some of the stories they tell during interviews are well rehearsed from regular repetition. Other stories have been buried in their memory and will surprise people as they recall them. Rather than accepting all memory as true, oral historians consider what people remember, what they forget, and what they get wrong. Whenever possible they try to verify the information provided in an interview—seeking objectivity—but they have increasingly found the subjective nature of nature of memory worthy of study.46
The historian Lynn Abrams makes the point that it is “the practice rather than the content that marks out oral history as distinctive within historical research.” Oral history differs from other historical sources in that it exists only because the interviewer has selected the participants, conducted the interviews, and preserved the results. By asking questions and engaging in exchanges with the interviewees, the interviewer becomes a participant in the process. Recognizing this fact, oral historians looked to the social sciences, where researchers conduct fieldwork, and imported many of their interpretations about the narrators’ interactions with their interviewers.47
Narrative theory weighs the relationship between language and thought. It views an interview as a multilayered document that is the result of an interviewer and interviewee “negotiating and creating a text.” It also postulates that they way people tell stories follows “conventions of process and purpose, presentation and style, place and performance.” Instead of accepting outward behavior as having a rational purpose, those engaged in narrative theory believe it reflects underlying signs and symbols. Narrative theory has challenged the notion of objective history, seeing the past as recalled and recounted as simply a construction, shaped by the way it is told.48
Oral historians influenced by narrative theory grew less concerned about the factual accuracy of an interview than in trying to understand why the story was told that way. This meant that an oral history could be analyzed both for the information it provided about events as well as the narrator’s attitude toward those events. Rather than highlight the uniqueness of each narration, however, narrative theory focuses on the similarities among many stories, suggesting that the memories people retain are shaped by their cultural values and environment, reflecting a society’s collective memory.49
Although useful in interpreting oral testimony, narrative theory can distract from testimonies that do not fit collective patterns. Nor does narrative theory pay much attention to the ability of interviewees to reflect critically on their own experiences. “Human subjectivity is more active, engaged, and critical than contemporary theory permits,” the oral historian Anna Green has argued. “We must keep space for the resistant, curious, rebellious, thoughtful, purposeful human subjects.”50
Ten months after an airplane crash in Amsterdam—a story all over the news—Dutch psychologists interviewed residents of the city about what they remembered. When asked if they had seen the television coverage of the actual crash, more than half said yes and went on to describe it in detail, even though there had been no film of the accident. People were responding to blatantly suggestive questions. This incident serves as a reminder that the questions asked can unduly influence the answers received. Researchers who seek confirmation for ideas they have already formed and hope for specific answers, must be careful not to plant ideas by the way they frame their questions or even by their body language. It is always better to ask open-ended questions that do not presume the answers.51
Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology, has studied the way people remember and forget and categorized what he calls the “seven sins of memory.” He lists three sins of omission:
1. Transcience: the weakening of memory over time.
2. Absent-mindedness: the breakdown between attention and memory.
3. Blocking: thwarting information we are trying to retrieve; for example, when people say, “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
He also lists four sins of commission:
1. Misattribution: assigning a memory to the wrong source.
2. Suggestibilty: memories implanted from leading questions, comments, and suggestions.
3. Bias: rewriting our past experience to meet current beliefs.
4. Persistence: obsessing or ruminating on disturbing memories we would prefer to forget.
Among these “sins,” the most pervasive is transcience. Recent experiences block out memories of older ones. This is the same process that helps people sort out the humdrum from their more meaningful experiences—those memories last longer. Schacter warns us not to think of memory as snapshots from a family album that “if stored properly, could be retrieved in precisely the same condition in which they were put away.” Memories work differently, allowing us to extract key elements from our experiences and store them. Later we reconstruct memories of those experiences rather than retrieve exact copies of them. In the process of reconstructing we will likely express feelings, draw conclusions, and even add information obtained after the experience.52
Dwelling on memory’s imperfections might cast doubt on human memory as a valid source of historical information, but Schacter calls this view misguided. He points out that the problems raised actually reveal memory’s adaptability. Despite its sins of omission and commission, memory provides “the scaffolding upon which all mental life is constructed.” Memory allows us to draw on past experiences to inform the present, preserves present experiences for future reference, and permits us to revisit the past at will. Memory’s vices of memory are also its virtues: “elements of a bridge across time which allows us to link the mind with the world.”53
Oral historians are learning much from the scholarship on memory studies. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes observe that those conducting memory studies tend to frame their work differently than oral historians: “They ask questions about the broader social and cultural process at work in remembrance, and they are equally concerned with written forms of self-representation, from autobiography to blogging.” This approach helps remind oral historians to look beyond a narrow focus on an individual narrator’s life story and to appreciate that an interview is just “one form of memory taking.”54
Telling a story over and over again makes it more durable. A psychological study of people who experienced a major earthquake found no correlation between the accuracy of memories and their closeness to the epicenter. Living through such an event was “definitely worth talking about,” especially when friends and relatives called to check up on them. “Once you realize you have a story to tell,” the psychologist reasoned, “it’s hard to stop.” Frequent retelling helps consolidate the story in long-term memory. At the same time, the story becomes more rehearsed and polished. A form of reconstruction takes place in which the story changes with each retelling, sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly.
Remembering and retelling help people make sense of their personal experiences and locate them within the larger historical context. In the 1980s, the Popular Memory Group at the University of Birmingham studied the ways in which the British remembered World War II. The researchers compared private and public memories, and the ways in which some memories became dominant and others were marginalized. They could see that the state, the media, and educational institutions all influenced people’s memories of a collective experience, but they also found that individuals’ novel experiences played a role in generating different ways to explain that past. The retelling of one’s own personal stories helps those memories survive the onslaught of a national narrative.55
Traumatic events register differently from everyday experiences in people’s memories. Those who have interviewed survivors of hurricanes and other disasters report that the interviewees were “more focused on the rich details of the ‘how’ and ‘what’ when it comes to more recent memories,” which affected the way they answered questions. Interviewers should be prepared to deal with stories that are thicker in detail than usual.56
Oral historians who deal with trauma say that they work at the intersection between tragedy and memory. They must take care not to intrude on those who are trying to put their lives back together and not badger them about painful experiences. However, they often find that victims of traumatic events are eager to talk about their suffering. The act of remembering those events can help people make sense of them.57
Some painful memories are suppressed for years, and people only become willing to talk about them later in life. Other memories may be so painful that people cannot suppress them, even when they try. Those individuals become “stuck” or focused on the past, which can lead to psychological distress. Recollections of trauma can be disabling, but psychologists also call them protective, since they remind us of responses to life-threatening dangers.58
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, the Columbia Oral History Research Office set out to interview New Yorkers about their experiences before media coverage had a chance to shape the collective memory. They began by interviewing those who escaped from the World Trade Center, those who were in the immediate vicinity, those who lost family members, and those whose lives were indirectly traumatized, notably the city’s Muslim population. Seeking to understand how people constructed meaning out of what happened, they found great ambiguity in people’s minds and a reluctance to draw immediate conclusions. “A person might describe the horror of their experience and then go on to describe some aspect of the day of 9/11 that was very ordinary,” observed Mary Marshall Clark, who directs the project. “People had trouble integrating the experience, which tells us something about the impact of the trauma.” The project created one of the largest archives of qualitative interviewing on massive trauma, which scholars can use to assess the social and psychological impact of catastrophe.59
Beyond interviewing survivors of natural disasters, oral historians have focused on individuals and groups that were uprooted, exiled, repressed, and impoverished; on the impact of dictatorship and disease; and on oppression, struggle, vulnerability, suffering, discrimination, and contested identity. These themes are most notably evident in work taking place in regions that have undergone major political, social, and cultural changes, where researchers explore the roots of repression in past regimes.
The 9/11 project concluded that interviewers dealing with trauma must be able to connect “viscerally and emotionally” with those they interview. Beyond the usual concerns and practices of conducting an oral history, they need to create a neutral and supportive environment for the interview and not express excessive emotion over what they are hearing. Although they need to connect with the interviewee, they also need to avoid identifying with their interviewee’s experiences. One older woman who escaped the towers unharmed later collapsed from the stress and was bedridden for weeks. Her interviewer fell into a similarly depressed condition. After a visit to the project’s trauma specialist, the interviewer realized that she was identifying with the victim.60
Oral history is not psychology, but a clinical psychologist who does video interviews with Holocaust survivors has recommended using multiple interview sessions to draw out memories, thus conducting a deeper conversation rather than simply obtaining a testimony. In these sessions, questions help memories take shape and find words to express them. “One thought sparks another, and then another, that I may not have even thought I had,” marveled one survivor. “We’re learning together.”61
Those who have worked with victims of political repression and other traumas recommend conducting the interviews in their homes or another location where they will feel safe and making the interview more conversational. These are also factors in reminiscence therapy, which conducts end-of-life interviews that often involve personal anguish. Medical care givers sometimes worry that interviews will cause their patients emotional upset. Susanna Johnston has responded to this by arguing that older people can gain strength from sharing emotions and “take a pride or somber satisfaction in recalling the dangers and emotional upheavals they have survived.”62
Some interviewers have embraced oral history as a form of advocacy for groups that have been marginalized, oppressed, or otherwise excluded from the historical narrative. Lynn Abrams has called this “part of a more general move to encourage ‘victims’ to see themselves as ‘survivors.’” They see the interpretation of history as a power struggle and have sought to help such groups take control of memory and history. The overthrow of totalitarian regimes has also encouraged oral historians to conduct interviews that will rewrite the older, official histories and rethink commemorations—although opening this discourse usually has to wait until the regime has fallen. Those concerned with empowerment point to the power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee, and seek to shift the balance of power from the interviewer to the interviewee and thereby democratize the project’s product.63
Theories about empowerment view oral history as a form of social justice. By studying the culture, speech, and behavior of those on the periphery of society—including disabled people, individuals with mental problems, the homeless, and prisoners—researchers believe they can learn more about their own society as a whole and about themselves as individuals.64
Ronald Grele has cautioned against the notion that people’s lives will be changed by being interviewed or that they will somehow be introduced to historical consciousness. Interviewers may raise questions that interviewees might not have considered before, and lift the events of daily life to an object of investigation, but when the interview is over, both will go back to their separate spheres. “So I don’t know what this empowerment in the interview might mean,” Grele commented. In some cases it may cause people to question aspects of their lives that had previously been unquestioned. In other cases it may encourage members of a community to engage in collecting their own history. “That is another sense of empowerment, where the power of interpretation moves from the academy to the community, but it’s a power of interpretation. It does not necessarily mean there’s going to be a shift in the economic, social or political forces at play in that community.”65
Transcripts of recordings are edited, and most published oral histories have been further edited, condensing and highlighting remarks and in some cases rearranging testimony for chronological and narrative purposes. But how much is too much? Oral historians have expressed suspicion over the popular books of Studs Terkel, who usually removed his own questions and sometimes reordered his interviewee’s answers. When Charles Morrissey questioned some of the Vermonters quoted in Terkel’s American Dreams, Lost and Found (1980), they objected to the way their remarks had appeared in print. One complained that Terkel “applied his thoughts to my words and came up with the version in his book.” Another felt that his words had been rearranged “in such a way that I can’t make sense of it.”66
Some of the best known “oral history” books have been produced by professional writers who lacked training in historical research and handled oral documentation rather loosely. Serious questions were raised about the authenticity of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976); many felt it was a work of historical fiction more than history. Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1974), in a similar fashion, seems to mix Truman’s recollections with Miller’s creative writing. Miller did not publish his interviews until after Truman’s death, and some of the statements he attributed to Truman strain credulity. Miller’s rambling remarks to an Oral History Association meeting in 1975 augmented the audience’s worst suspicions. “I don’t consider myself an oral historian,” Miller later admitted. He then added, “Oral historians don’t either. I spoke at their national convention several years ago and they loathed me, detested me, because since I don’t know the rules of oral history—and operate as a reporter, which I consider myself—I violate them.” After Miller’s death, seven hours of his recorded interviews with Truman, conducted in 1961–62, were opened for research at the Truman Library. Historians who reviewed the tapes found nothing in them to support his book’s more sensational claims.67
The work of some professional historians has also been called into question, notably the historian Stephen Ambrose’s interviews with President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s appointment books showed that Ambrose spent much less time with Eisenhower than he had claimed. They met only three times for a total of less than five hours and were never alone together. Ambrose’s books on Eisenhower, published after the president’s death, listed more interviews, raising suspicion that he had embellished his evidence.68
Editing and rearranging interviews for clarification and cutting away tangential material are appropriate so long as the original meaning is retained. The goal is to sharpen the focus without putting words in the interviewee’s mouth or altering the essence of what was said. For instance, if an interviewee spoke at length about someone’s positive characteristics and fleetingly of one negative quality, it would be misleading and unfair to quote only the latter.
In reproducing large sections of oral history interviews for publication, researchers should consider including the questions as well as the answers. Some subjects may not have been discussed simply because the interviewer asked nothing about them. Other subjects came up precisely because that was what the interviewer wanted to know about. By leaving as many of their questions in the text as feasible, oral historians not only show what questions elicited the responses but also demonstrate that the interviewee did not necessarily volunteer the information and may even have had to be coaxed to reveal private and potentially embarrassing information. Without the questions, the basic dialogue of an oral history is lost, creating the impression that people raised the issues when, in fact, they were responding to queries. Similarly, when several interviewees focus on a particular trait or make a similar observation, it could be simply because they are all responding to the same question.
Oral history has become fashionable among popular writers and other purveyors of popular culture who are not always careful about its presentation. Cullom Davis, who directed the oral history program at the University of Illinois at Springfield, warned of its “debasement” by those who fail to “observe the canons of our profession.” He charged that publication or oral history without interpretation produces little more than a scissors-and-paste scrapbook and a disorganized mass of recollections. “As serious practitioners, whether lay or professional,” Davis argued, “we must identify the hucksters and charlatans who exploit oral history’s intrinsic appeal for their own shallow, ahistorical and even unethical ends.”69
In one of his novels, David Lodge imagined a dialogue between a newspaper interviewer and the writer she was trying to interview. The reporter saw her interviews as real life because she used a recorder and invented nothing, but the writer noted that she left out the dull bits that would be too boring to read. “I concede the point,” she replied. “An interview is not an exact record of reality. It’s a selection. An interpretation.” The writer defined it as a game for two players. “The question is, what are the rules, and how does one win? Or lose, as the case may be.” The reporter rebutted, “I don’t see it as a game. I see it as a transaction. A barter. The interviewer gets copy. The interviewee gets publicity.”70
The compelling nature of the spoken word, the enjoyment of reading the vernacular, the honesty and humor of so many interviewees, has kindled a strong interest in allowing oral sources to “speak for themselves.” This approach, which often involves little interpretation on the part of the compiler, sometimes results in books that resemble collages. The literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick dismissed “tape recording without an interpretive intelligence” as “a primitive technology for history” designed to relieve the author of the burden of writing. Hardwick insisted that a book requires an author’s “signature of responsibility.”71
Reviewing the biography of Robert F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Henry Fairlie dismissed oral history as testimonials of dubious value. It is up to the historian “to do the hard work of sifting,” wrote Fairlie. “When we are given the personal words of various actors, that is all we are given, and we have either to take or reject their word that something happened as they say....That is what we have historians for: to take their word that this was so.” Historians act as judges, interpreters, and critics, compiling and analyzing sources of the past. Historians are rarely eyewitnesses to the events they write about. They reconstruct events and the temper of the time from a mixture of sources, balancing the reliability of one piece of data against another, arranging them in a coherent pattern to make sense of what happened.72
The very act of editing and arranging interviews shows that the author has not simply allowed interviewees to speak for themselves. Editorial intervention begins with determining whom to interview, what questions to ask, which interviews to include in the volume, in which order, and how much of the original interviews to publish. Even if the editor refrains from adding an overt interpretation, he or she is still deciding which interviewees are most worthy of being recorded and published. Having gone that far then, the editor owes something more to readers. At the minimum, authors of oral history collections should provide some background for their interviews to place the interviewees in context, offering suggestions about why they said what they did and took certain positions, and sometimes spelling out where interviewer and interviewee did not agree.
A certain romantic belief has developed that putting a microphone in front of people will miraculously provide the road to truth. In his influential review of oral history literature, Michael Frisch has argued that what historians do—interpreting evidence, weighing, testing, and connecting people and events—is still critically important. “And yet, at the same time the exciting thing about oral history is that the process becomes a less exclusive one,” he added. The scholar and the subject collaborate: “They come together and provide a good advantage for understanding the meaning of the experience.” This is the notion that Frisch calls a “shared authority”: “the grounds of authority are very different, and have different meaning, but there is a kind of sharing in the process of the interpretive authority, which is one of the exciting things about doing oral history.”73
Some researchers allow their interviewees to check their quotes before they use them. “I think it’s only fair,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reasoned, “that when you talk to people, you should give them the same kind of control over an interview as they have over an oral history transcript.” Other researchers might chafe over this idea, given that an interviewee might change or delete something entirely. Yet anyone who has ever been interviewed by a reporter and then misquoted in the newspaper article can appreciate how differently the teller of the tale and the listener can hear the same story. Context is essential for accuracy, and even a perfectly quoted sentence can have its meaning altered when taken out of the larger text.74
At the same time, interpreting what the interviewees said remains the historian’s domain. A researcher and an interviewee may form entirely different opinions about the events being discussed. Even though interviewees were eyewitness, their perspectives could be distorted, and their memories incorrect. By collecting evidence from a multitude of sources, the historian may come to a different conclusion. The author’s duty is to quote the interviewee correctly and not distort the remarks to fit a thesis. Otherwise, the author is entirely responsible for the finished product.
Reviewers have been notoriously inconsistent in dealing with oral history. Too often a review begins with an admission that the reviewer knows little about oral history or does not trust oral sources, characteristics that never seem to disqualify them from reviewing the book. They distance themselves from the methodology and consequently add little to our understanding. At the root of their complaints, however, is a fairly common call for the author to assume a more interpretive role. Commenting on the increased appearance of books based on interviews, the novelist and frequent reviewer Diane Johnson asserted, “There does seem in this technique an almost cowardly reluctance to think.”75 In the same vein, Timothy Foote began a review of an oral history of the Second World War by noting: “Anything calling itself oral history probably ought to be approached with deep suspicion. Time is short. There is much to read. We’re already awash in ill-chosen words. And though tape recorders are splendid gimmicks, people who present interviews as history are farther from the mark than a cook who insists that a loose collection of eggs, sugar, milk, vanilla, flour, and a few squares of bitter chocolate are in fact a chocolate cake.”76
Reviewers more experienced with oral history have reacted to the literature through the lens of their own disciplines or tailored their reactions to fit the publications in which their reviews appear. After conducting a survey of oral history reviews, the book review editor Linda Shopes observed that reviewers in the Oral History Review generally wanted to know more about the interviewing process and procedures than about the subject matter and particular findings of a project, although the accuracy of the information gathered was often a major touchstone of OHR reviews. Reviewers commented on whatever unique insights and perspectives emerged from the interviews but took the authors to task for not testing the accuracy of oral evidence through corroborating sources. Reviews in the more theoretically oriented journals are more likely to be interpretive, focusing on subjectivity and how oral tradition and narratives “can reveal the complex consciousness of a culture.” Reviews in the more ideologically oriented journals tend to raise questions of a political nature.
Reviewers for general, non-oral history journals express more concern about oral history’s substantive contributions to historical knowledge. These reviews emphasize the importance of first-person narrative in conveying a sense of people as historical actors and actresses. General historical reviewers tend to respond best to authors who use a variety of interviewees together with other documentary sources, and who place the data in a broad analytical context. The chief conclusion that emerged from this sampling of reviewers was that the author of an oral history volume will inevitably be judged as a historian and cannot escape that role by suggesting that the sources “speak for themselves.”77
Publishers tend to view reviews as idiosyncratic. Unless a consensus emerges from every corner, they will take a bad review with a grain of salt. They pay more attention to where the review coverage comes from—whether in highly focused scholarly journals or more broadly mainstream publications. This indicates the audience that is most likely to respond to the book, which makes publishers think about whether to include more books in their lists of the type reviewed.
How to cite interviews is a question that touches on the one of how seriously researchers take oral sources. Of all the academic disciplines engaged in interviewing as a research tool, professional historians have devoted the least amount of methodological attention to its problems and potentials. This laxity contrasts sharply with the intense seriousness historians bring to written sources. Authors dutifully list every manuscript collection, book, and article consulted, and then limit the bibliography of oral sources to a few lines acknowledging those who “shared their knowledge” in “conversations” with the author. Footnotes identify the interviews with cryptic initials and often without dates or other information that would tell the interested reader how the interview was collected. Some interviews are not cited at all. Substantial numbers of histories drawn from oral sources give no indication of whether the recordings and transcripts are deposited somewhere, either for other researchers’ use or for verification. It remains puzzling why professional historians have accepted on faith the author’s reliability in note taking, transcribing, and even interpreting oral information.78
Guides to historical writing specify that the standard reference should begin with the name of the interviewee. The title of the interview (if there is one) should be in quotation marks. The citation should include “interviewed by [name of the interviewer]” and mention whether the interview is a recording or transcript, and whether it has been published as part of a book or journal article or in any other medium, with standard references to such publication. The citation should indicate whether the interview is in the author’s possession or has been deposited in a library or archive. Keep in mind that the purpose of a citation is to show where the information comes from and to help the reader find the original source. Page numbers for transcripts, or other publications, should be provided. For interviews found on the Internet, cite the archives where the collection is physically located as well as its electronic address.79
The following are examples of citations of interviews from oral history archives, from independent research, and from published sources:
Woodrow Crockett, interviewed by Bill Mansfield, March 15, 2001, recording and transcript, Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, National Park Service, Tuskegee, Alabama.
Sen. Hugh D. Scott, interviewed by the author, January 27, 1986, recording and transcript deposited at the Senate Historical Office, Washington, D.C.
Harry Bridges, interview by Harvey Schwartz, Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 9–31.
Among the prime questions publishers ask are: Who is the intended audience, and how will this book serve it? What contributions will it make to the field, and how will it be different from everything else that’s out there? Have you obtained the necessary copyright permissions from your interviewees to publish their interviews?
Publishers have different primary objectives. Some trade book publishers and university presses tend to be national and international in scope, while others might be more locally oriented. Consequently, some topics will appeal more to one than the other. As with any topic, look over the oral history titles on their backlists to see what they have published in the past as a guide to what new works they might accept.
The publisher’s guidelines will be available online. Follow them carefully in preparing a proposal (not a manifesto) that summarizes the content of the book and its major themes. Tell them something about your background and experience to establish your credibility. A table of contents, introduction, and a few sample chapters that show what you intend to do with the interviews will also help—the more material the better to give an idea of the shape of the book. Proposals will probably be reviewed not only by the editors but also by experts in the field, who may make suggestions for improvement. Again, the more material these reviewers have, the more they will understand the scope of the project. Otherwise, reviewers may focus on issues that are not included, even if you already had that in mind, which may require additional submissions. As an author, you do not need to embrace all their suggestions—especially if you feel they contradict your intentions—but you will need to take them seriously and explain to the publisher what revisions you are prepared to make. Remember that editors are there to make your book as presentable as possible.
It is unlikely that publishers will want to see anything the size of Gone with the Wind. Such doorstops are expensive and unfeasible for course adoption. Aim for a manuscript somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 words (the latter including notes). This means you may need to eliminate or substantially reduce some interviews, which can be a painful process if the interviewees are still living. Include the most colorful and representative in the text and thank the others in the acknowledgments, making sure to identify where the rest of the interviews are available for research.
If the interviews and analysis are available elsewhere as published articles or unrevised dissertations, publication might be regarded as redundant. You will need to rework the material in a meaningful way. A dissertation will serve a graduate student in getting a degree, but it usually requires substantial revision to address a wider audience than one’s doctoral committee. Take time to step back, dump or define any jargon, polish the prose, and incorporate and highlight new material.
In the digital age, not every oral history needs to appear in a book. Interviews can be made just as widely available online, often with audio and video components. But printed books will remain a significant medium for storytelling and scholarship, and will continue to play a role in the scholarly universe, particularly for faculty seeking promotion and tenure. Books are an appropriate medium for making arguments and explaining interpretations. They set a frame around the interviews, offering context that differentiates them from the original transcripts. In that sense, they produce something that is cooked rather than raw. Through editing and analysis, books organize the information so that readers can engage in it and connect it with other literature. Books are a collaboration between authors, editors, and publishers that shape ideas into attractive and approachable products. Publication has helped give substance to oral history, articulating trends and providing platforms for new ideas and analysis.