Oral history started out by creating archives that authors could use in writing their books and articles, without much appreciation for the value of the sound recordings. With time, creative presentation and distribution of oral history has flourished and new uses for sound and video recordings, and transcripts have emerged. A half century after the establishment of the first oral history archives, an oral historian surveyed the types of “products” coming out of their work. She was looking for broad categories of traditional and innovative historical and interpretive works, and collected the following list:
1. Books (histories, biographies, poetry, and published transcripts).
2. Storytelling, audio books, and CDs.
3. Movies in various formats.
4. Training videos and books.
5. Museum and multimedia exhibits, and art installations.
6. Cultural preservation and heritage projects.
7. Driving audio tours.
8. Radio programs.
9. Educational material for children and teachers.
10. Theatrical works (plays, operas, drama, and comedy).
11. Dance choreography.
12. Internet websites.
13. Legal briefs and other law-related documentation.1
As the list indicates, the options for using oral history interviews have grown remarkably varied, limited chiefly by imagination and financial resources. Previous chapters have discussed the creation of oral history archives, the use of oral history for scholarly research, and the production of video documentaries. What follows are additional uses that recognize the accessibility of oral history—literally the words of the people—and the ease with which oral history interviews can be used in a number of arenas: in public presentations, in community and family history projects, in performances, on the Internet, and even for therapeutic purposes. They address the long-held concern of oral historians of needing to share the interviews with the communities that gave them.2
The Internet opened worldwide possibilities for sharing and advertising oral history interviews, not only as transcripts but also as audio and video recordings. Rather than trek to distant archives, researchers can access interviews from their own locations, search by word or key terms, and link to related collections. Families and communities can view their own oral histories. Students can learn interviewing techniques by examining other interviews. Archives can save costs by eliminating the publication of catalogs and other printed finding aids that grow dated.
Despite all these advantages, oral historians initially approached the Internet with some trepidation. Despite their dependence on technology, oral historians tend to consider technological innovations cautiously. In adopting new equipment, they seek assurances of its reliability, durability, and affordability. Archivists are especially concerned with the long-term preservation of the records and recordings. Established oral history projects that have invested a great deal in older technology shudder at the expense of transferal to the new, including the cost of staff retraining. Oral historians question whether new technology will influence the interview process, hinder the development of rapport and candor, and turn interviews into a form of public performance. The first interviewers worried whether tape recorders inhibited interviewees from speaking freely. Later, they became concerned that video would induce interviewees to play to the camera. More recently, they have to ponder the consequences of posting interviews on the Internet. There is always the danger that the medium will become the message, affecting the selection of people interviewed and the type of responses collected. Paul Thompson speculated that the digital revolution might make oral history “a different animal” but then argued that “we need all these different animals” to get more people to read and use our interviews. In fact, digital technology has attracted a new generation of oral historians ready to experiment with its endless possibilities.3
Among the pioneers in using oral history in the new medium were Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Josh Brown, who incorporated reminiscences into an e-book, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (1993). It combined audio and film clips, 600 pictures, and 5,000 pages of text with computer-based search features to help students see and hear the history they were studying. Although the project began with the late nineteenth century, they discovered that some of the earliest oral histories had been conducted with people who grew up in the 1880s and 1890s. They also found that some projects had not saved their recordings, and the sound quality of other tapes was not reproducible, but the authors of Who Built America? nevertheless were able to collect sufficient first-person recollections to accompany the photographs and written documentation. Users of their e-book could actually hear the sounds of history, through oral history, music, and newsreels. “Our larger motivation in experimenting with this new technology has been toward democratizing historical understanding,” the authors explained. The e-book turned users into “active participants in the process of constructing historical interpretations rather than merely passive consumers of historical ‘facts.’”4
At the same time, the National Park Service partnered with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to create Project Jukebox, for installation in a workstation at the remote Yukon-Charley National Preserve in Alaska. Called “jukeboxes” because users select recordings from an automated system of stacked compact disks, it allowed computer searching and retrieval of information. Project Jukebox offered oral histories of those who had lived, fished, hunted, and worked in the Yukon-Charley Preserve. Visitors to the park, local students, and new park rangers used the workstations to select topics and pull up recordings, transcripts, and illustrations at their own speed and to follow their own interests. The opening screen provided a general map of the area, from which viewers could click on specific areas and listen to portions of the interviews relating to those sites. When interviewees spoke in native languages, English translations were available on-screen.5
These innovations demonstrated to oral historians that digital technology could solve the problem of making interviews more readily accessible. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Internet had become universally available, and people recognized that it would create “a new way of thinking and viewing the world.” Students often mastered the new digital technology more readily than adults and led the way in developing creative applications. Schools found creating websites an inexpensive, effective, and attractive way of publishing the results of student oral history projects. Recordings were converted from analog to digital form and posted along with catalogs of the collections. New projects got underway with Internet-access as a built-in goal. Oral history organizations at the local, national, and international level found the Internet an ideal means of networking and communication. All of this stimulated new discussions of the legal and ethical ramifications of the new medium as well as of its creative uses.6
Around the world, oral history collections created websites, whether long-established archives to brand-new projects, large and well-funded or small, shoestring operations, among them high schools, religious, and community groups. Presidential libraries, faced with decisions about what to digitize among the mountains of records in their holdings, turned first to their oral history transcripts, as more manageable, self-contained, and appealing to the broadest audience of users. When the Washington Press Club Foundation sponsored interviews with pioneering women journalists, it planned from the start to post them on its website if the interviewees agreed. The pioneering oral history archives at Columbia, Berkeley, and UCLA went online along with university and community college archives from Honolulu to Chapel Hill.
The Library of Congress initiated the American Memory Project, one of the largest and most ambitious efforts to digitize research materials. Among the collections available online through the American Memory Project are the WPA Federal Writers’ Project Life Stories, most notably its many interviews with former slaves. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation have used the Internet for worldwide dissemination of their materials. Working with Brown University, sophomores at the South Kingsport high school in Providence, Rhode Island, turned a school project into a web page on “The Whole World Was Watching: An Oral History of 1968” and “What Did You Do During the War, Grandma?”
Many of these oral history websites have an educational objective. The United Indian Traders Association, whose members run trading posts on American Indian reservations, underwrote efforts by the Northern Arizona University to conduct interviews on the history of trade relations and cultural interactions in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. From the start, they intended it to be an Internet site. “Traders: Voices from the Trading Post” contains transcripts and short audio clips of the traders and the Native Americans who trade with them, tribal leaders, attorneys, accountants, sales personnel, artisans, and trading post employees. Placing the collection on the Internet made it available to public school teachers throughout the region and elsewhere, with an accompanying teachers guide and lesson plans.7
When the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at Berkeley documented the history of the campus Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, the project built a digital archive of interviews with the movement’s leaders, participants, and witnesses, paying particular attention to areas that had not been covered in depth before, such as the participation of women and minority students, faculty-student relationships, legal counsel, and the press. ROHO made the interviews available on its website together with an extensive archives of newsletters, newspaper and journal articles, leaflets, speeches, minutes of meetings, and other supporting evidence.8
The Internet blurred international borders. Researchers can virtually visit the British Library’s National Sound Archive, read interviews from the Imperial War Museum in London, keep up with the work of the Jamaica Memory Bank, check the Oral History and Folklore Collection at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, or the Sound Recordings in the National Archives of Singapore, all without visas, passports, and airline tickets. They can also keep contact with others who share similar interests on a daily basis via the oral history list serv, H-OralHist. Sponsored by the Oral History Association, H-OralHist provides an international interactive forum for anyone interested in using or doing oral history. Users pose questions, provide solutions, and share experiences, research interests, current projects, teaching methods, and the latest literature. They regularly post announcements of conferences, fellowships, and jobs. (Subscription to H-OralHist is free and can be obtained by sending an e-mail to listserv@h-net.msu.edu with the following text: SUBSCRIBE H-ORALHIST, first name, last name, and affiliation.)9
Websites are the equivalent of self-publication. They can include catalogs, interview transcripts and recordings, illustrations, podcasts, social media, blogs, and comments. These sites have multiplied steadily and moved oral history beyond simply preservation and access for research. Websites became a vehicle for mass presentation to public audiences. Beginners can build on their institution’s information technology resources or partner with a university or other large organization. Students in computer labs can be recruited to design web pages and input information.10
Start by thinking seriously about the audience you seek to attract and the material you want to provide them. Be careful not to overwhelm your users. Projects will want to create attractive web pages that are easily navigated. Rather than a long list of interviews, develop some subthemes around common events or chronology that will help users navigate the site. Creating a website has convinced some projects to move from audio recordings to video, since video provides a more powerful and appealing presentation that attracts more viewers. Do not overload the site with video clips, however. High definition video can consume an inordinate amount of storage space. Besides, most visitors will rarely watch more than a few minutes of a video.
The general public regularly asks for audio and video, but they generally prefer short segments. By contrast, researchers want full-text access to all available documentation. There are a number of reasons that an oral history project may choose not to post all its interviews. Issues of copyright and personal privacy may be at stake, and the staff time needed to scan and upload collections may be prohibitive. Sometimes, interviews are too sensitive, interviewees too much at risk, or language too blue to post for general access. Whether for reasons of copyright, cost, or concern over retaining control over their collections, some archives have adopted mixed programs of making interviews selectively available on the Internet and requiring that researchers purchase CDs or use PDF (portable document format) versions of the text.
Sampling interviews on websites can serve as an advertisement for the wealth of resources in an oral history collection. Before the Columbia Oral History Office, the oldest and largest oral history archives, made any of its interviews available on the Internet, it issued a CD called Stories from the Collection: Columbia University Oral History Research Office, which included highlights of a half century of interviews, ranging from Justice Thurgood Marshall discussing his appointment to the Supreme Court to Fred Astair discussing his Hollywood dancing career. Over time, Columbia was able to dip back into its vast archives to launch a “Notable New Yorkers” website, featuring interviews with key figures in publishing, politics, philanthropy, and the cultural life of New York City. The site includes 12,000 pages of transcripts and 180 hours of audio recordings dating back to 1955.11
Projects that post excerpts rather than entire interviews have made it a collaborative exercise by asking their interviewees: “What stories would you like to show the world?”
Digital advocates have celebrated the ability of the Internet to return “orality” to oral history, by letting viewers connect faces and voices to the recorded stories. There are indexing strategies for audio and video that permit users to find the specific portions of an interview that deal with the issues they seek. In Canada, the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling has applied new digital tools to create searchable databases for its video interviews. The Australian Generations oral history project relies on timed summaries linked to audio files to avoid transcription costs and retain the “oral and performative elements” of the interviews.12
California State University, Long Beach, created a Virtual Oral/Aural History Archives website with the 350 interviews in its collection, covering topics ranging from labor and community history to music. Users can access the material by comprehensive keyword index, by specific segments, and by browsing the entire collection. The site provides only audio recordings without transcriptions.
Although digital advances have deemphasized transcripts, they have not replaced them. Grasping what is said is still a matter of interpretation, and preparing a transcript at least gives the interviewee a chance to participate in the process. Some individuals speak with accents, some speak in native languages, and some are just difficult to understand.
In reviewing websites, Linda Shopes has noted that people can “grasp the meaning of the written text more efficiently than they can listen to and absorb the spoken word.” An index can take users to a specific interview segment, but will they “skim” the audio recording and not listen to what precedes and follows that segment? She also questioned whether users would take the time to transcribe lengthy quotes to use in their own writing. These factors favor posting transcripts to accompany the recordings—a feature that also benefits the hearing impaired.13
For those seeking models for their own interviews, there is nothing better than reading online transcripts. Quite a few oral history websites also provide helpful advice—especially for students and teachers—on everything from interviewing tips to sample deeds of gift.
The place to start is Oral History in the Digital Age, an Internet source of abundant information about the standards for digital recording for archivists, librarians, museum curators, historians, folklorists, linguists, videographers, anthropologists, and teachers. Recognizing that no simple set of “best practices” can cover all digital projects, the site is filled with specific recommendation on how to best do oral history in a digital environment, from the varying sound qualities of different microphones to the catastrophic consequences of not mastering one’s equipment. The website also offers essays on legal and ethical issues, periodic blogs, and a series of “Thinking Big” interviews with experts in the field. Since it cannot anticipate future technological developments, the site advises oral historians to construct their projects in such a way that they can adapt to the inevitable changes that will come.14
Specifically designed to help middle school and high school students conduct oral histories in their communities, Discovering Our Delta provides online learning guides for both students and teachers. An accompanying video that follows five students from the Mississippi Delta as they conduct research on their communities must be ordered through the site, but the student and teacher guides are available online. They provide tips for locating community members to interview, preparing for the interviews, transcribing the recorded interviews, interpreting the gathered material, and a sample letter to parents of participating students explaining the project and its procedures.15 A related site, Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students (CARTS), carries information on upcoming oral history summer institutes for teachers and links to other educational guides for using interviewing and fieldwork to explore communities and traditions.16
History Matters, which describes itself as a “U.S. Survey Course on the Web,” provides a teacher syllabus using oral history, information about online resources, interactive exercises, talking history forums, and online assignments. Created by the American Social History Project/Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, History Matters offers itself as a starting point for history students to explore the web and as a storehouse of teaching resources grounded in the latest scholarship, including an annotated guide to websites. The site offers Linda Shopes’s helpful essay and guide, “What Is Oral History?” which includes information on other oral history websites and “tips for evaluating oral history online.”17
In 2001 the U.S. Congress voted to authorize the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to organize a veterans oral history project. Its sponsors intended the project to be a “living memorial” to all war veterans from World War I to the Persian Gulf, along with civilian volunteers and war industry. With more than nineteen million war veterans still living in the United States (then including 3,000 from World War I), there was an abundance of potential interviewees. The project encouraged the public to conduct the interviews and submit them to the Folklife Center. To coordinate these efforts and improve the standards of interviewing, the Center sponsored workshops and guides, including the booklet Helpful Guidelines for Conducting and Preserving Interviews and Other Project Materials. The project directors saw their task to be as much about “process” as “product,” making sure that people of all ages participated in the program and that the public learned about wartime, veterans, and oral history as a methodology for better understanding their culture and society. Those using the collection have ranged from graduate students writing theses to documentary makers and individuals doing family research. The popular success of the Veterans History Project prompted Congress in 2009 to authorize the Library of Congress to conduct a civil rights oral history project, surveying existing collections and conducting new interviews with people who had been active in the civil rights movement.18
In 1987, the British Library began collecting National Life Stories, “to record first-hand experiences of as a wide a cross-section of present-day society as possible.” The Library has conducted lengthy recorded interviews—usually between ten and fifteen hours—of the life and times of “the eminent and the ordinary.” These interviews range from pastry chefs to postal workers and poets. Its first project, “City Lives,” recorded the life stories of bankers and brokers in London’s financial district, known as “The City.” Other projects included “The Living Memory of the Jewish Community,” “Artists’ Lives,” “Lives in Steel,” “Book Trade Lives,” and “Food: From Source to Salespoint.” An ever-growing number of the interviews have been posted on the British Library Sounds website.19
Many oral history associations—international, national, and regional—maintain websites to announce meetings and workshops and to provide guidance for members. These sites further the networking efforts of oral historians, from academics to freelancers, to maintain contact, share information, and keep current with new developments in oral history.
New media gave oral historians the opportunity to rethink their audio and video recordings and have also created some spin-offs, such as digital storytelling. The Montreal Life Stories project asked the question: “How do we include a wider circle in the conversation?” They encouraged digital storytelling as the act of narrating oneself through multimedia. The project blends still photographs with narratives to create “short, evocative, and informational multimedia pieces.” The BBC’s Capture Wales digital storytelling project sent a bus to gather hundreds of stories that were then posted online. Digital storytelling workshops were held to preview the stories that people wanted to tell and to take them through the steps of recording their voices and selecting images to illustrate the stories. The workshops end with a screening of the story.20
Podcasts, YouTube videos, and other “mini-documentaries” have proliferated. The Fresno Historical Society’s Our Voices Oral History Project created five-minute clips from its WWII Oral History Project. They also produced educational materials, photo exhibits, and original plays, in an attempt to reach all of their many constituencies: “academics, general population, our veterans and their loved ones, and students.”21 The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta partnered with CNN videographers and producers to develop the Freedom Mosaic website, which features recent interviews with those involved in civil rights and human rights. The website was developed by a professional design firm, with the idea of departing from the standard archives-oriented civil rights website, in order to appeal to younger users.22
A community can be defined loosely as a group of individuals who share a common identity, whether based on location, racial or ethnic group, religion, organizational affiliation, or occupation. Obviously, communities differ considerably. One group may be fiercely proud of its collective identity, and another needs to be convinced that its heritage is worth preserving. Oral historians have helped broaden traditional notions of what constitutes a community’s history by looking not only at its political and institutional structures but also at its economic development and the ethnic and occupational composition of its population. Some oral history projects have tried to preserve lost communities, conducting interviews about buildings that were demolished or institutions that disappeared in all respects except in people’s memories.23
Residents of the rural, mountain community of Ivanhoe, Virginia, initiated an oral history project to help save their rapidly disappearing history and revitalize their community. Their “participatory research” project combined outside researchers, educators, grassroots community groups, and community members, who collectively designed the project and analyzed the results. Their “history group” of volunteers interviewed people at the post office, in the Civil League office, on the street, and in stores, collecting, transcribing, and editing fifty-three interviews and gathering over 800 photographs. Project director Helen Lewis noted that through the process of gathering its history, “Ivanhoe has looked to its elders and has carefully recorded times past, seeking lessons from traditions which may be creatively applied to present realities.”24
Oral history can also capture a specific time or event in a community’s history. War veterans and others who lived in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, during the Second World War were interviewed for Small Town America in World War II, a project that explored how worldwide events affected a town far removed from the battlefronts. The townsmen fought in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific, while some of the women joined the military as support troops. Others stayed home to run war industries or were rejected by the military for medical reasons. Oral historian Ronald Marcello had grown up in Wrightsville and went back to record the experiences of a cross-section of the community, whose first-hand accounts revealed how the war had changed their lives and impacted the town.25
Oil drilling brought about economic upheaval in several Wyoming towns, including Evanston, where the local county museum interviewed residents who had lived through the boom-and-bust experience. That included the mayor, city council members, county commissioners, oilfield workers, teachers, students, and the local newspaper editor. They fashioned the interviews into an exhibit that reminded viewers that history was more than the pioneer years they had been used to studying, gave some validation to those who had lived through the recent boom times, and brought a new audience to the museum. The University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center conducted interviews in three other boom towns, uncovering substantial tension between those who promoted mineral development and those who wanted to preserve the natural environment. “We’re holding our cowboy hats in one hand and our fist full of dollars in the other,” said one interviewee. “We’ll be asking ourselves, ‘Were we better off?’”26
Oral history works just as well in urban environments. In inner-city Philadelphia, Temple University developed the Discovering Community History Project to encourage residents of different neighborhoods to document their pasts through oral history, manuscripts, and photographs. The project staff wanted to aid and encourage neighborhood residents to do the work for themselves. They started with a slide show to introduce the project to the community but discovered that merely stating the importance of the community’s heritage was not very convincing. Neighbors initially hesitated to share memories and photographs they believed outsiders would consider commonplace. Slowly over time, and after repeated staff visits, residents eventually came to realize how their community looked to the outside, and how they could contribute to recording its history.
Temple’s experience demonstrated that such projects cannot expect the same response from every community. The most significant differences in neighborhood response to the project were based on neither race nor class but on the neighborhood’s recent history and demographics—that is, on whether it was stable, declining, or undergoing gentrification. The project achieved its greatest successes in those neighborhoods with strong community organizations—civic associations, clubs, churches and synagogues, especially those that cared for the elderly—that were willing to take charge of contacting potential interviewers and interviewees, “assigning tasks, checking up, and following through.” Communities that lacked organizations with such clout, or where community associations were distracted by more pressing concerns, proved the hardest to convince of the merits of oral history.27
Noting that people who live in the same area can actually be quite distant from each other, the D.C. Community Humanities Council sponsored the City Lights Program to bring scholars, storytellers, and other performers to senior citizens living in public housing to talk about their common culture and history. At the predominantly African American Potomac Gardens, these discussions focused on religious traditions, migration from the South to the city, work as domestics, living through the Depression, and the Washington riots of 1968. The elderly residents of Potomac Gardens had attended school at a time when, except for references to slavery, black people did not exist in the history textbooks, which gave them little sense of having contributed anything worthwhile to society. The City Lights Program emphasized how important their experiences were, and how much they had in common with each other. “We were strangers before,” said Thelma Russell, a member of the community. “Now we understand that our common ground is the African American heritage that we share.”
Senior citizens at Potomac Gardens collected the stories of their struggles and accomplishments to leave a record for their descendants. Supported by a Humanities Council grant, they conducted a door-to-door survey in their building and collected data about the residents. Drawing from this information, they scheduled weekly meetings, focusing each week on a different birthplace and encouraging residents to share their personal memorabilia and stories of home and migration. With the assistance of the local historical society, the seniors learned how to interview each other. A local video production company recorded the interviews, from which they produced a documentary video, In Search of Common Ground. A curator from the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum helped residents develop an exhibit from their project. Both the video and the exhibit were displayed at schools, public housing sites, and other neighborhood organizations throughout the city and will be preserved as a legacy for the future. “We may not be rich,” Thelma Russell concluded, “but we are rich in history.”28
Preservationists have tapped the memories of still-living informants to reconstruct the material culture of the past—furnishings, tools, structures, vehicles, and many other physical objects—and to determine how these items were used, by whom, and how they fit into the broader social and economic patterns of the community. Oral history has helped gather the details of day-to-day life in historic buildings—to re-create period furnishings and decorations—through interviews with those who visited the house during the era in question, often when it was associated with a particular family or prominent individual. Their memories bring color to the black-and-white photographs of the past and provide context for otherwise sketchy and incomplete documentary evidence.
In seeking to save San Diego’s older architecture during a period of massive redevelopment, the Downtown San Diego Project found gaps in the official records that only oral history could fill. Project members interviewed construction crews and demolition company employees to determine the extent to which bulldozers and backhoes had penetrated certain areas. The California Office of Historic Preservation called for interviews with the state’s architects and engineers and advocated interviews with those in the building trades, those who established the utility networks, transportation planners, bridge builders, and officials of the development agencies in local government.29
On the national level, the National Historical Preservation Act of 1966 required federal agencies to consider how such federally funded projects as highway construction, dams, reservoirs, airports, and parks affect local cultural resources. To carry out this mandate, culture resource management (CRM) teams have applied the insights of archaeology, architectural history, folklore, and oral history to urban planning, resource conservation, public works projects, and commercial development. While archaeologists were working on a CRM crew in Irion County, Texas, they uncovered hundreds of what appeared to be prehistoric petroglyphs in a limestone outcropping. But they also found the carved name of Burt Smalley, dated 1921; by then, Smalley was deceased. The mystery was solved through oral history interviews with surviving family members and old-timers in the community. These interviews developed a portrait of a recluse who spent his life carving petroglyphs in the rocks near his ranch.
Oral history interviews have helped CRM projects locate unmarked gravesites and abandoned farmhouses, as well as the otherwise unrecorded names of sharecroppers. Interviews have helped reconstruct farmers’ living patterns, including the layout of yards and houses, gardens, fields, wells, barns, and privies. “Oral history can turn a prairie foundation into Hansford County’s one-room Palo Duro Schoolhouse,” noted Dan Utley, an oral historian who works with CRM teams. “Oral history can transform seemingly unrelated artifacts—a Model T transmission, a scatter of bricks, and welded metal barrels—into an irrigation system used to pump Concho River water up a steep bank and across a ravine to what was a parched cotton field in the 1950s.30
There are times when oral history may be all that’s left of a community. In Chicago, Audrey Petty and a team of interviewers tracked down those who had lived in the city’s now-demolished public housing projects. Defunded by government and allowed to deteriorate, the projects were viewed from the outside by the mayor as “Godawful buildings” whose problems of violence and crime could only be solved by razing. By contrast, the residents recounted how, despite all the problems, the housing projects had once been filled with support networks of neighbors who had been “like family.” Their interviews spoke from the inside of public housing, unit by unit, floor by floor. In Frankfort, Kentucky, Jim Wallace conducted interviews with the former residents of Crawfish Bottom, a low-lying swampy area along the banks of the Kentucky River, just below the capitol. The state government viewed the place as poor, violent, and unsanitary, and bulldozed it to make way for new state office buildings. The oral evidence Wallace collected revealed a much more vibrant neighborhood than suspected, one that had been poorly served by the state and that was demolished against the wishes of its residents. A generation later his interviews helped another historian reconstruct the history of Crawfish Bottom, recovering a lost community.31
When Alessandro Portelli, a professor from Italy, conducted interviews in Harlan County, Kentucky, deep within Appalachia, he worried that locals might resent him as an outsider. He was surprised to find little negative reaction. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he did not know much and was not in a position “to teach anybody anything.” One of his interviewees added, “I’ll tell you something else that makes a lot of difference. You’re not from the United States. You are not from New York or you are not from Chicago or you are not from Louisville and you are not from Lexington or Knoxville.” The locals appreciated that he was neither trying to influence them nor acting condescending toward them. “All you’re doing is trying to gather a little knowledge or get people to tell you stories, and they don’t resent that.”32
Just as the race and gender of the interviewer and interviewee may affect the interview, whether the interviewer comes from the subject community will influence what is said. The Temple Discovering Community History Project found that its best interviews often came from enthusiastic amateurs in the community. Because “spontaneity and candor naturally extended between friends, neighbors and people of the same background,” it was easier for those insiders to establish rapport. But with thorough research, persistent effort, and the right personality, interviewers from outside a community can also build the kind of rapport that facilitates interviewing. In fact, all oral historians constantly find themselves shifting between the roles of “insider-outsider, historian-listener, participant-observer, minority-majority, student-teacher, apprentice-mentor.” What is important is that interviewers become conscious of these varying relationships and how they influence the interviews. Those who have engaged in extensive fieldwork interviewing in communities in which they are outsiders strongly recommend that interviewers keep a journal of their impressions of the community and their changing relations within it.33
Communities naturally seek to preserve and present their best image. Interviewers often find themselves being steered toward those who tell “success” stories; they must attempt to record the dissatisfied as well. Interviewers also need to avoid being seduced by the democratic impulses of oral history to just “let people speak for themselves.” Unquestioned and unchallenged memory can veer toward nostalgia. The oral historian’s job is not to celebrate the past but to explore and document its diversity and complexity.34
At the same time, people’s privacy becomes an issue when recording a community’s oral history. Interviewers must consider what right they have to raise questions that embarrass the community, especially if they are outsiders who will not remain there to live with the consequences. When dealing with a community’s denial or a difficult or traumatic event or issue, interviewers ask challenging questions and then give people an opportunity to respond, but they must also honor interviewees’ refusal to address certain issues. Clearly, it is essential to interview as broadly as possible. Some people cannot or will not reflect on painful issues of the past, but others have just as strong an impulse to bring the same issues out into the open.
Stories and opinions within a community will probably vary widely. When oral historians try to determine which versions are more reliable, they seek patterns—another reason to interview more than one type of person in a community. Rather than simplifying the past, oral historians complicate the history by collecting counterevidence and challenging simple answers. The picture of the community that emerges from the interviews is thus most likely to be neither all good nor all bad. Oral historians need to lay out the controversies in an honest way, explaining to the community the structure of a project and the nature of residents’ roles in it.
Sometimes the stories that exhibit planners want to tell are not the ones the public wants to hear. An exhibit needs to balance responsiveness to one’s audience and to one’s craft. The community, having provided information, should be included in its presentation in order to retain some ownership of the story. Museum curators report that oral historians seem better at creating this kind of collaborative history than other scholars, “both out of practical necessity and personal conviction.”35
Interviewers usually assume that the community will be pleased, flattered, and empowered by being the focus of an oral history project. But some communities want no attention and consider any project suspicious and intrusive.
In New York City, the public historian Joe Doyle studied the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. Situated along the Hudson River docks, Chelsea had a history as a longshoremen’s and seamen’s community. During the 1940s the Longshoremen’s Union had expelled its Communist members, badly splitting the neighborhood. Then, during the 1950s, newspapers published lurid exposés of organized crime on the waterfront. A “code of silence” developed in the neighborhood, and Chelsea residents would not talk to the police or to outsiders. In later years the neighborhood residents had no desire to reminisce about those troubled years. “As for talking at the present time to young historians eager for ‘oral history,’ it still does not quite sit right with old-timers,” Doyle concluded. Uncomfortable with its history, the National Maritime Union destroyed all its noncurrent records; nor were its members interested in re-creating those records through oral testimony. Far more willing to talk about the past were the members of the Marine Workers Historical Association, many of them battle-scarred “Reds” who had been ejected from the union. Pragmatically aiming his project toward the most cooperative segment of the community, Doyle shifted the focus of his interviews to the Communist Party on the waterfront. But even that subject was still so sensitive that people had second thoughts about speaking on the record. When Doyle organized an “oral history day” for residents, none of the invited speakers appeared. Doyle then gave the oral history a “breathing space” of two years, after which he opened a second round of public meetings. By that time some of the tensions and opposition to studying waterfront history had begun to decrease. His persistence even encouraged local Longshoreman’s Union officials to speak more openly. Doyle’s experiences suggest that interviewers facing uncooperative communities need to give them time rather than to give up on their projects.36
Communities that have been exploited in the past may object to losing control of the planning and disposition of the interviews. This has been particularly true with Native American, First Nation, and Aboriginal communities, whose traditional stories, even when told in the present tense, represent multigenerational rather than firsthand individual memories. Stories told might involve myths and legends that have significance to the tribe, and, as such, they may not fit the standard interviewing format. Oral historians should take special care that the recording and preserving of these stories follow tribal protocols.37
Major flooding of the Ouse River in Sussex, England, in 2006, devastated towns along its banks and prompted Sussex University’s Centre for Continuing Education to organize the Ouse Project to help local residents get involved in the environmental decisions that would affect their community. They interviewed farmers about past land use and agricultural methods, integrating their observations with ecological research into present-day habitats to demonstrate how land use around the river might be managed to alleviate flooding in the future. By incorporating oral histories, the Ouse Project produced a substantial amount of information that would not have been assembled otherwise and added a human element to an ecological survey. One farmer, for example, identified the local river authority’s poor management techniques as responsible for considerable damage along stretches of the riverbank. The Ouse Project “not only engaged with the local communities; it harvested their energy” and made sure their voices would be heard in long-range planning.38
A project’s immediate goal may simply be to record the recollections of key members of a community, but it should consider long-term objectives as well. The ultimate goal may be a book, play, exhibit, documentary, or website that depicts the patterns and themes of importance to the community.
Websites have turned community oral history projects into “living documents,” a source of both information and civic pride. Interviews with community leaders and members can be interspersed with maps, photographs, documents, walking tours, travel destinations, and related links. Providing an online location that can be consulted at any time also restores a sense of “ownership” of the project to the community itself. Communities are not fixed in time but fluid entities that change with generations, economics, and cultural developments. The interviews can capture a community at a particular time in its history or return the voices of those who once lived there but left. The Fox Point Oral Histories in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, include interviews with those who were replaced by gentrification, as well as those who held on during periods of upheaval.39
Excerpts from oral histories can also be published in local newspapers or broadcast over local radio stations or community-access television channels. The oral historian Charles Hardy produced a series of radio programs, Goin’ North: Tales of the Great Migration, based on interviews with African Americans who left their homes in the South to relocate in the City of Brotherly Love. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a special education supplement to serve as a companion to the series and to encourage listeners—particularly students—to collect similar information about their own families. Journalism students at the University of Texas and the U.S. Latinos and Latina WWII Oral History Project, working in collaboration with the San Antonio Express-News, have published a tabloid newspaper, Narratives, that includes student articles and interview excerpts drawn from the project. Available both on paper and online, Narratives offers its interviewees “a wonderful way of sharing their stories with a broader audience.”40
Community oral historians have found outlets for their work in brochures distributed by the local chamber of commerce to promote the area and as source material for secondary social studies classes studying local history. Oral history has been incorporated into exhibits, walking tours, and dramatic productions. Popular oral history exhibits drawn from the community have encouraged many people to visit museums that they had never before entered, although they had lived in the area all their lives. But often the challenge is to display the material in places where people will actually see it. As eager as they are to participate, local history societies or museums may not attract many viewers. Instead, consider displaying the exhibit at a shopping mall, senior citizens’ center, public library, school, union hall, church, or civic organization to reach a broader cross-section of the community. Find out where people congregate in the community and put your exhibit there. Hold a reception to show the exhibit, invite the interviewees, and allow the rest of the community to view the product.41
In Idaho, a county museum director used oral history to catch the attention of the area’s schoolchildren and to attract them to the museum. She conducted interviews on women’s rural life and the roles in the country during the early decades of the twentieth century and turned the interviews into a forty-five-minute presentation that combined a slide show, period music, museum props, and a narration by a character in costume. The production traveled to every school in the county, as well as to many senior citizens’ organizations.42
The Montana Historical Society encouraged the collection of historical materials on Montana’s many women’s clubs by producing a booklet, Molders and Shakers: Montana Women as Community Builders: An Oral History Sampler and Guide that detailed how clubs could collect their histories through club records, minute books, financial records, yearbooks, luncheon programs, newspaper clippings, and craftwork. From these archives, interviewers from the clubs could gain a better sense of what topics to cover and what questions to ask in club oral histories. Molders and Shakers urged club members to be imaginative in getting the stories generated from the oral histories back to the community, recommending that the clubs consider publishing newspaper articles drawn from the interviews, creating a booklet on the club’s history featuring excerpts from the interviews and accompanying photographs, or producing slide-tape shows with interview excerpts as narration. The oral histories were incorporated into lesson plans on women’s experiences for local history classes. Transcripts also provided scripts for readers’ theaters—club members presenting dramatic readings of the interviews. Molders and Shakers reminded women’s club members that the results of oral history can be shared with the club’s membership or made more widely available as a public program in a community center.43
The Friends of Patapsco Valley and Heritage Greenway, near Baltimore, Maryland, organized a traveling exhibit of an oral history project to display in local galleries and libraries. The project conducted oral histories in four small towns in the valley, while a photographer took portraits from which framed museum-quality prints were made. The exhibit was mounted in various local galleries and libraries, with excerpts from the oral histories accompanying each portrait. An excerpt of audio recording was played between two rocking chairs, while a mural created from one of the prints served as a backdrop. At some “narrative stage events,” the interviewer publicly drew out stories from those previously interviewed. At others, a script based on the interviews was performed. The combination provided depth and texture. Scriptwriter Sally Voris reported, “They have been performed in the galleries while the exhibits have been on display so that people can see the images, read the text, hear the stories and see them enacted.”44
A staple of folklife festivals, oral histories have been conducted before audiences: interviewees tell their story, play their music, or demonstrate their craft. In 1981, with little in the way of funds, staff, or publicity, the Center for Southern Folklore turned a previously commercial crafts festival, the Sorghum Days Folk Festival, into a folklife festival by arranging for people to demonstrate their techniques and talk about their lives and work. The festival brought together white and black crafts workers and presented the differences and similarities in their heritage; it drew large and appreciative audiences of local residents and out-of-town visitors. Similarly, the Mid-South Folklife Festival invited blues musicians to perform and then to participate in oral history workshops, where they were interviewed by professional historians, and to discuss how the conditions of the rural, segregated South influenced their music.
Oral history has been prominently featured at the Smithsonian Institution’s annual folklife festivals on the Mall. One event in the mid 1980s blended generations as well as races and genders by bringing together sleeping-car porters and airline stewardesses to compare their jobs before an audience that had never before fully appreciated what went into their work. The festival celebrated the bicentennial of the White House by inviting White House workers, from stone cutters to table setters, to reflect on their careers and the many occupants of the White House whom they had served. Their behind-the-scenes testimony was supported by photographs, menus, and other memorabilia, which the Smithsonian recorded in a video documentary, Workers in the White House.45
At women’s music festivals, Bonnie Morris developed the role of “festival anthropologist,” taping not only the music but also the talks that took place between acts. She collected what she felt represented the essence of festival culture: “speeches, impromptu announcements, and tributes from the stage.” She sought the performers’ permission and found them delighted to learn that she had recorded the festivals.46
There always seems to be at least one relative who retains the family lore, who can identify every obscure photo in the family album, and who corresponds with far-flung kin. Or there is a family member with an interesting past that we have always wanted to ask about. They make logical candidates to interview, but somehow no one has gotten around to it. Suddenly they are gone, taking with them all that unrecorded family history. Christopher Columbus’s son Fernando admitted to a hazy knowledge of his father’s early life and voyages, “for he died before I made so bold as to ask him about such things; or to speak more truly, at the time such ideas were farthest from my boyish mind.”47
The traditional means of tracing one’s family tree through census reports, city directories, and ship manifests can be supplemented with the recorded memories of living relatives. Older family members are repositories of stories about their childhood and of stories their parents and grandparents told them about the family’s past, about immigration, about former residences, and about changes in the family name over time. Family culinary history can also be a popular theme, with older generations passing along food traditions and recipes. They often feel a responsibility for preserving the family traditions for following generations—who are not always appreciative or responsive. Grandparents are usually willing to talk, but their children and grandchildren, feeling they have heard these stories too often before, have never taken the trouble to record them. Then, too, it is hard to admit that older relatives will not always be around to be interviewed later.
Families can do their own interviews—a number of useful guidebooks include sample questions—or they can hire professional interviewers. Many family interviewing services have developed; they conduct interviews and produce tapes, CDs, transcripts, videotapes, and book-length family histories. The interviews become family keepsakes to be passed along, and copies can be given to alma maters, church libraries, or local public libraries.48
To get a good interview, family oral histories should follow the same standards and procedures that apply to any other oral history. Prepare a family history questionnaire that includes some standard questions to ask all the family members to be interviewed as well as specific questions for each interviewee. Even for a family interview a legal release is advisable, so that the tapes and transcripts might someday be deposited in a suitable library.
Family oral histories need not be just a series of anecdotes. They can tell not only the “who” and “what” in a family but the “why” as well—the motives and attitudes that research in traditional genealogical sources would not necessarily bring to light. Sometimes the interviews provide clues that lead the interested family researcher to other sources of family documentation, such as the name of a town where family members once lived, or the location of a cemetery where birth and death dates appear on tombstones, dates that in turn help in locating newspaper obituaries. Traditional sources of family history provide preliminary research for the interviews. Family Bibles often contain dates of births, deaths, and marriages. In addition, school diplomas, letters, and local newspaper clippings provide basic information about family members.
Families reflect their times and communities. Questions can be directed at family life during the Depression, the Second World War, the cold war, the turbulent 1960s, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movements, and other sociohistorical periods. Family interviewers pursuing such questions should familiarize themselves with some of the history of these larger events, perhaps through reading basic history textbooks; such preparation generates questions to ask and frames the interviewee’s story against a larger backdrop.
Do not limit your family history to a simple collection of pleasant memories. Family pasts may include stories of feuds or deaths that may be painful to revisit but are important for understanding family relationships. Some family members may be reluctant to dredge up unhappy memories, and others will want to use the interviews to settle a few scores.49
When Corinne Krause interviewed three generations of ethnic American women in Pittsburgh, she found that grandmothers, mothers, and daughters offered dissimilar versions of the same family’s shared history. Their stories suggest how family members experience the same events and react to the same individuals in different ways, depending on their age, attitudes, and expectations. Krause recorded the conflicts between generations, but she also tracked their deep bonds and persistent values. She conducted her initial round of interviews during the 1970s, a time when the granddaughters were in open rebellion against old traditional family ways. When she returned a decade later, most of the grandmothers had died and their granddaughters had married and had their own children, in whom they were trying to instill the traditional values of their families.50
Bill Fletcher, whose book Recording Your Family Roots offers a multitude of sample questions to ask family members, has noted that the geographic spread and mobility of modern society has led to less frequent interaction between the generations of many families. Grandchildren often see grandparents only on holidays or during vacations and other limited encounters. Fletcher views taping an oral history as an excuse “to talk across the generational lines.” Similarly, Linda Shopes has argued that doing family oral history “can be the impetus for developing and deepening relationships with other family members. Even more important, it can enhance one’s own sense of identity.”51
Yes, because family history is part of popular culture and has become a subject of scholarly study. Researchers are increasingly interested in the lives of everyday people and open to looking at family oral histories for valuable information. The details a family wants from oral history interviews—treasured stories, data on births, deaths, weddings, divorces, graduations, jobs, and trips—are the same subjects that social historians now study.
Oral history can record a family’s daily pattern of living, how the household was organized, how the family spent money, who sat where at the dining table, and what types of meals were served. Since these topics are common to all families, researchers use data from one family to compare with others as they compile aggregates from which to make generalizations about social patterns. “From classroom projects for family efforts to large research projects, the possibilities for such family history are endless,” the historian Carl Ryant noted. “What is required is a greater scholarly sensitivity to the possibilities of oral history and family history. This should result not only in more extensive scholarly analysis of existing data but also better quality data being generated for future analysis.52
Near the end of his life, the journalist Henry Fairlie commented that “in growing old, one has a stocked attic in which to rummage and the still passing show and pageant of life to observe, not only at a more leisurely pace, but with the convincing satisfaction and interest of having lived through many of the changes, even from their beginnings, that have brought us from there to here.” The object of oral history interviews with elderly people is to collect their recollections for the record, but the elderly themselves also gain something from the process. Aristotle observed that the elderly “are continually talking of the past, because they enjoy remembering.” Some in a family may scoff that older relatives are “living in the past,” but as the gerontologist Robert Butler noted, elderly people naturally pass through a period of life review. As people take stock of their lives, they may reveal information that they have long suppressed, even from their families.53
Oral historians often comment on the eagerness with which many older people agree to be interviewed. The elderly seem to return to their youth while talking about it. They act more animated and treat their knowledgeable interviewer as a contemporary. Their children and grandchildren have heard snatches of these stories for so long that they no longer ask them about them; the interviewee’s closest friends may be deceased. The folklorist Patrick Mullen thought that it was “as if elderly persons are waiting for someone to come along and ask for the stories, and the folklorist had better be a good listener.” Henry Glassie also noted that “old tellers of tales are not astray in a wilderness of nostalgia...They fill a crucial role in their community. They preserve its wisdom, settle its disputes, create its entertainment, speak its culture. Without them, local people would have no way to discover themselves.”54
Those involved in reminiscence therapy have observed an increase in self-esteem among the nursing home residents who participated and some overt changes in body language. One therapist noted that during the early sessions her interviewee sat hunched in his wheelchair, his head hanging low and displaying almost no eye contact as he spoke. As they continued to meet, the interviewee felt increasing confidence in his ability to recall memories and some assurance that she would listen to him. “His back became more upright, he focused his eyes on those of his listener and his face became much more animated.” She found such changes in body language typical in both men and women who participated in the therapy sessions and that the process brought older people out of their shells.55
Nursing homes have encouraged and sometimes hired oral historians to record the life stories of their residents. Some conduct “Reminiscence Groups” in which residents talk about various issues from their pasts, publishing highlights in their newsletters. The Larksfield Place retirement community in Wichita, Kansas, established an oral history program in cooperation with Wichita State University and Emporia State University to collect life stories and encourage residents to use those interviews as starting points for other autobiographical projects. The Parker Jewish Geriatric Institute in New Hyde Park, New York, videotaped interviews with its residents. These interviews provided families with “a lasting record of treasured stories” but also had therapeutic value for the storytellers, who came away from the experience feeling more positive about themselves and their lives. “It reaffirms for them that their lives were valuable and productive,” concluded Edith Shapiro, the institute’s director of therapeutic recreation.56
For others, the experience of being interviewed for an oral history stimulates a cathartic release of long-pent-up emotions. Ronald Marcello has interviewed hundreds of Americans who were prisoners of war during the Second World War. “One byproduct has been some therapeutic value for the men,” said Marcello. Many had been encouraged by their wives and children to participate in the taping. “Some say to me, ‘I wouldn’t have talked to you about this in 1946. The scars were too recent.’” Yet oral historians should keep in mind that the recall of painful memories can have traumatic as well as therapeutic effects. Those who have interviewed Holocaust victims, for instance, report that some interviewees express a duty to leave a record for future generations but that doing the interviews triggered recurring nightmares.57
Nursing homes have been described as places “where biography ends,” since the residents so often have no knowledge of their neighbors’ past lives before they became old and infirm. Yet when Tracy Kidder researched his book Old Friends, he was always welcomed because older people enjoyed having someone to talk with. “Old people have nothing to do but try to make meaning out of their lives,” he concluded.58
A video interviewer who works in nursing homes has suggested that the interviewer try to put the person in a comfortable setting, “preferably a favorite place—with soft, flattering light.” As a starting place for her interviews, she usually asks about such enjoyable family occasions as weddings and bar mitzvahs to give the interviewee a chance to introduce all the characters of the story “in a celebratory manner.”
Those working with the elderly recommend asking about a particular events or occasion more than once. The chances are that the second time the question is asked it will receive a more thorough answer, since the interviewee will have had time to remember it more vividly. Memory cues become increasingly useful with older interviewees. Sometimes an old photograph or song will bring back the past to them. Photo albums are even more helpful, since they are usually arranged in chronological order. A company in Madison, Wisconsin, called Bi-Folkal Productions sells “reminiscence resources” to nursing homes and libraries. The company produces a dozen different kits that use slides, tapes of sing-alongs, poetry, and photographs and are based on topics like pets, summertime, train rides, and the Depression. The company reasoned, for instance, that playing radio clips from a particular time would elicit memories that no question could ever tap.
The American Association of Retired People (AARP) has acknowledged the therapeutic value of oral history and storytelling among the elderly and established its own reminiscences program to train interviewees. AARP also publishes a guide to help volunteers elicit life stories. In Minneapolis, the Retired Senior Volunteers Program did oral histories of local senior citizens on such subjects as desegregating hotels and restaurants in the city, wartime experiences, and caring for the hungry and homeless. The project was cosponsored by a local radio station, which edited the tapes for weekly broadcast and then deposited them at the Minnesota Historical Society.59
Any group that has gone through a troublesome common experience can benefit from documenting impressions and memories through oral history interviews. The Women Miners Project has recorded the lives of women coal miners, many of whom are still young or middle-aged women. They began collecting interviews during the 1980s, a period of crisis for women miners because jobs were disappearing rapidly and the miners’ union was battling for survival. Many of the women had been thrown into indefinite unemployment and faced a bleak economic future.
During a particularly difficult period, the women miners were able to use the oral history program “as a means of emotional support.” The project developed an exhibit out of the personal collections, writings, artwork, and other historical materials related to women miners and conducted videotaped interviews. According to Marat Moore, the project’s director, the interviews helped establish “an affirming context” for the women miners: “Our questions involve how we have fared, do we go on from here, and whatever happened to affirmative action in mining and other high-skilled, high-paying industries.”60
Northwestern University Medical School instituted an oral history of AIDS patients to learn how hospital personnel could care for them more effectively. Interviews with nurses and other AIDS caregivers at the medical school and associated clinics identified the characteristics, values, training, and behavior needed to treat AIDS patients. Interviewers reported that interviewees frequently commented that the project made them stop and reflect for the first time on what they do in response to having AIDS. Social workers at the Durham, North Carolina, Early Intervention Clinic, conducted a similar oral history project with HIV-positive men to help them “give form and meaning” to their past and to leave a record to help others grappling with issues of sex and drugs.61
Realizing that the AIDS crisis in Africa was leaving a staggering number of orphans, deprived of the emotional support of parents whose memories were fading, the School of Theology at the University of Natal established the Memory Box Project, which encouraged ailing parents to record their life stories “as a way of keeping alive the family’s memories.” Project directors posited that children who knew their roots would grow more resilient. For each family interviewed, the project created a box that could be decorated with photos and drawings and that would contain the recorded family stories to help the child cope with the loss of parents and retain their family identities. The surviving caregivers were asked to preserve the Memory Boxes and update them from time to time as new events occurred. In the event of loss or misappropriation, the project retained copies of the interviews but limited their access only to family members. Researchers would require family permission to consult the interviews.62
People diagnosed with mental illness or developmental issues were once believed to be incapable of articulating their personal histories in a recognizable form. Michael Angrosino conducted a project on the history of “deinstitutionalization,” a policy that brought patients out of the old state hospitals and back into the community. That story had been told by mental health professionals and other caregivers but not by the clients. Those with mental disabilities were not only willing to talk but the project also had a therapeutic effect: “the clients, who were used to being talked at rather than engaged in conversation and who were familiar with the interrogatory style of the clinical interview, experienced a kind of liberation in being encouraged to tell their own stories in their own way at their own pace.”63
Some who are no longer institutionalized became homeless and have since participated in oral history projects. The process of recording interviews with the homeless, conducted by the Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project, required the interviewers to spend time hanging out in parks and on street corners to develop relationships and build trust, so that interviewers would be seen as independent from social services organizations. Not wanting to invade the little privacy that the homeless had, the interviewers decided that rather than ask only about personal life stories, they would give them a chance to talk about changes in the city during their lifetimes. They asked about the causes of homelessness and the transformation of the city during deindustrialization. As a result, Dan Kerr reported, the interviewees “shared their life histories as they came up within the course of their discussion of more public issues.” The project videotaped the interviews and then showed them in homeless shelters and soup kitchens and the like, where they became popular attractions.64
Those who have conducted oral histories with the terminally ill report that beyond the historical benefits, the interviews help patients find meaning in their life stories and give them a sense of leaving a legacy for their families. The interviews get them talking about living rather than dying. In medical facilities, interviewing helps build social relations between patients and caregivers. The interviews allow people to talk at length about their lives to an empathetic listener, but since patients may be emotionally vulnerable, interviewers need to proceed carefully when discussing painful memories. Even when oral historians are not conducting the interviews, they have sometimes partnered with local regional hospice groups to provide training for their social workers who will hear the patients’ stories.65
While preparing an exhibit on immigrants and migrants in Michigan, an oral historian who conducted interviews for the Michigan Historical Museum recommended that the exhibit designer also visit the interviewees to collect photographs and other documents from them. At first, the designer resisted, arguing that he just took whatever artifacts came in and incorporated them into an exhibit. But the oral historian insisted: “You have to meet these people. You have to hear their stories.” The designer relented. Inspired by the meetings he held, he realized that the best way to mount the exhibit would be to “feature a handful of people and create vignettes of their home or their work life.”66
Historical museums are sensitive to “the vanishing act of the past.” In the words of the historian Joyce Appleby, “people, buildings and institutions disappear swiftly, first from sight and then from memory, taking along with them the sights, smells, sensibilities and styles that distinguish a time and a place.” Historical exhibitions therefore serve as retrieval operations that arrange and explain the items and images in a manner that will “evoke a lost context” for the museum visitor. All too commonly in the past, historical museums were dimly lit halls, seemingly designed for nothing more than the veneration of objects, which were grouped together without much sense of how people had used them. Lights could be low since there were few captions to read. Museums are better illuminated now, allowing visitors to read longer, more informative captions for items that are woven together to tell a story of a time, place, event, or people. “History is not the old walking plow but the person who walked behind it,” as one museum curator asserted. Many historical museums have incorporated oral history tapes and excerpts from transcripts into their exhibits, which allow visitors to hear the voices of the people who used the objects on display or lived through the events depicted. Interviews not only enhance a museum’s displays and exhibits but also provide material for public talks and media presentations.67
The deindustrialization of the American Rust Belt has generated a number of industrial heritage museums that use oral historians to capture the memories of workers, whether from the preunion era or the heyday of unionization. The labor historian James B. Lane recommended that interviews focus on a wide range of attitudinal studies “about such matters as safety conditions and ecological standards, labor organizing and union-management relations, workplace folktales and corporate customs, and the bureaucratization process in both unions and businesses.” Oral historians need to interview not only employees and employers but competitors and customers, and the topics covered should include the machinery, the foremen, and the relationships between workers, especially in industries that have grown obsolete.68
Nearly every museum in the vast Smithsonian complex has collected oral history interviews and integrated them into their exhibits. From the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum to the National Air and Space Museum, interviews are displayed to visitors in audio and visual form and as part of the text of exhibits. The National Museum of American History has long collected and displayed artifacts of American advertising. In the 1980s it realized that its collection consisted of newspaper advertisements, trade cards, tearsheets, and other static objects but that it had no representations from modern multimedia advertising campaigns. The Smithsonian did interviews with executives of BBD&O (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) to collect memories and obtain films of television advertisements, jingles, and other memorabilia relating to its “Pepsi Generation” ad campaign—interviews that revealed how much of the campaign was spontaneous, not planned. Created as an archival collection, with descriptive brochures and finding aids, the taped interviews and television commercials became part of an audiovisual exhibit at the museum. Historians, archivists, and curators working on the project discovered that they had not only created new material for scholarly research and museum use but also had “established a healthy working relationship between a private corporation and a public research institution. This relationship went beyond financial support, in that employees of the company identified and contacted potential interviewees and encouraged their cooperation.”69
As befitting a museum devoted to journalism, Washington DC’s “Newseum” makes much use of interviews, including a studio where live interviews with news makers and news reporters take place regularly. One floor features traditional museum items, from Tom Paine’s writing desk to Edward R. Murrow’s microphone. On the floor below, visitors can film their own news broadcasts and can “question” prominent journalists, appropriate portions of whose prerecorded interviews are replayed on computer screens. The variety of options has different generational appeals. Older visitors tend to linger longer in the museum-like News History Gallery, while younger students crowd the interactive videos below.70
Popular features at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans are the oral history stations integrated throughout its exhibits. Visitors press a button to hear a soldier’s narrative about landing on the beaches of Normandy, along with photographs of the landing and other artifacts.71
Computers assist in tailoring the museum-going experience to individual needs and interests. At Ellis Island in New York harbor, oral historians conducted over 1,600 interviews with immigrants who had been processed there, along with military and civilian personnel who worked there. Many of the exhibits incorporated extracts from the interviews, as did a documentary film and theatrical performance. The museum also makes the audio recordings and transcripts accessible online in its Oral History Listening Room, where visitors can accession interviews by the name of the interviewee, country of origin, ship of passage, or the year of arrival in America. Visitors seeking information about a relative, or about the common experiences of others who migrated about the same time from the same region, can call up the appropriate audio recordings and transcripts to hear and read separately or simultaneously.72
Museum curators use oral history to “bridge the gap between representation and reality.” Oral history can be inserted as sound or video played at stations throughout an exhibit, or transcripts can be excerpted in captions and other text to inform visitors. Some exhibits incorporate interviews in documentaries shown in small theaters, usually before or after the exhibit; others intersperse the oral history material throughout the collection on various monitors and interactive videos. Since usually only a fraction of the interviews can be used, selection, editing, and brevity of remarks are all-important. As David Lance has noted, such displays are “most effective when they combine a variety of speakers and a range of subject content in short and pithy juxtaposition.”73
Curators believe that it is important for visitors to understand that individual opinions expressed in the interviews may not be held by the majority—a concept that confuses people who expect museums as sources of factual information. To distinguish between the subjectivity of the speakers and the objectivity of the curatorial text, some museums have printed quotations in different typeface and have made sure that the speaker’s names follow their words.74
The extensive use of audio and visual playback machines can escalate the costs of mounting an exhibit, and there is always the risk that machines will break down. It can be a depressing experience to walk through an exhibit with darkened gaps in its presentation owing to malfunctioning machines. Too often the equipment has been “adapted for exhibition purposes rather than designed for it” and breaks down because of the strain of continuous playback. Showing documentary films and video with sound or having audio broadcasts requires a careful positioning of speakers “and a fairly elaborate arrangement of equipment and wiring that takes careful planning and craftsmanship to conceal.” Using loudspeakers so that all may hear can be distracting; listening to repeated playback of the same recording becomes unnerving, and many museums have opted to use headsets for individual listening. Recorded tours that are played individually can also include oral history excerpts.75
Without some specifically designated space for audio and video oral history within an exhibit, curators have learned from experience that visitors will not spend much time on any single exhibit element. So they often edit interviews into thirty-, sixty-, or ninety-second segments. Curators have also observed that visitors react differently to interviews shown in a secluded alcove—which they view only briefly—to those shown on a theater screen, where they will spend more time, especially if they can sit down.76
The cultural wars of recent years spilled over to the once quiet world of historical museums. An explosion of bad publicity followed the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum mounting of an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the military plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Veterans’ organizations protested against it in the media and on Capitol Hill. The veterans and the curators of the exhibit had starkly different ways of analyzing and explaining the same event. One side argued that dropping the bomb ended the war with Japan without American troops having to invade, while the other side saw Hiroshima as the dawn of the age of nuclear anxiety. The result of their battle was an unhappy compromise in which the museum exhibited parts of the plane with a minimum of explanatory text and a prominently placed apology from the Secretary of the Smithsonian. Some visitors felt profoundly moved by seeing the plane and considering the destruction that it caused, but many others found it possible to view the fuselage as an artifact of aviation without pondering its role in the atomic age.77
After Enola Gay, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History attempted to take no side at all in an aptly titled exhibit Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Dialogue on American Sweatshops, 1820–Present. Curators sought to diffuse criticism by offering evidence and letting visitors draw their own conclusions. But when the exhibit opened, the Washington Post commented that it “treads the line between hot-button advocacy and cold, precise historical facts. Outrage, which should be the heartbeat of the show about human exploitation and illegality, is present only in the weighty collection of details.”78
Oral history offers a middle way between these two poles. Institutions like the Newseum, which bills itself as the “only interactive museum of news,” and the U.S. Holocaust Museum have relied successfully on audio and videotaped narratives and interactive computers to engage their visitors. This approach allows a museum to offer multiple viewpoints in different voices. Interactive technology makes it possible for museum-goers to “ask questions” of those who participated in historic events: interviews are videotaped and edited so that the interviewee can answer a series of preselected questions offered on the screen. By incorporating multiple voices, the exhibits teach the public that history may be interpreted in different ways. Rather than the authoritative, and sometimes condescending, single voice of the historian/curator lecturing the visitor on what it all means, the mélange of voices of participants and commentators can argue with each other to re-create the complexity of the past. The Enola Gay’s curators could have spared themselves much grief by including the voices of both the military veterans and the antinuclear activists, as well as diverse scholars in the field, to frame the exhibit as a debate rather than to try to settle the issue themselves.79
When Parks Canada planned to celebrate the gold rush, a seminal event in Canadian history, it wanted to make sure that the story of the gold rush pioneers did not omit the “Indian side.” But the Chilkoot Trail Oral History Project ran into resistance from the Carcross-Tagish tribe. After an extended set of interviews, the project anthropologist and a tribal elder stopped to relax at a lakeshore. The anthropologist found a stone hammer nearby and showed it to the elder as proof of the historic Aboriginal presence in the area. The elder casually threw it back into the bushes and said, “What have I been telling you all week?” The Carcross-Tagish similarly discarded Parks Canada’s objectives, maintaining that there was no “Indian side” to the gold rush stampede, but simply “an annoying but brief interruption of their ongoing lives.” Instead, they used the project to reiterate their claims to ownership of the land, to challenge the national understanding of the Chilkoot Trail, and “to begin negotiating a relationship with Parks Canada that might benefit both.” Parks Canada eventually incorporated the Carcross-Tagish view into its public interpretation for visitors to the trail, and the project—although it failed in its original objectives—became “an important stepping stone in the development of a positive working relationship between the First Nation and Parks Canada.”80
“History is on the move,” Simon Bradley has observed. “It has left the halls of academia and the libraries and the museums and has taken to the streets.” Using smartphone technology to package and present oral histories and use them for tours and landmark identifications, various “soundwalks” have been created. They generally include short clips from interviews so that the voices of those who lived and worked in an area can help walkers see the connections between the present and the past. Some audiowalks use MP3 downloads, and some use GPS positioning to break down fixed linear routes and avoid the need for maps.
The popularity of iPods and iPhones and MP3 downloads have expanded the opportunities for audiowalk tours using oral history. Audiowalks merge public history, local history, and oral history. Listeners get an oral history-based narrative at various points along a designated walk. Announcers may be used to provide context, but most oral history-based projects prefer to use edited clips and speak through other voices.81
As the web migrates to tablets and smartphones, it is transforming areas into “living museums.” By using mobile apps, museums and historian societies have generated audio tour playlists based on users’ preferences. The voices take the place of pins on a map to guide people through the area, creating a montage of sounds and memories. The best audio tours combine appropriate research, illustrations, and recordings to help those outside a community see it from an insider’s perspective.
Kentucky heritage-based tours, such as the Country Music Highway, provide oral history excerpts at each stop on the tour. There are also neighborhood tours that people can check out of local public libraries. Operating systems tend to become obsolete quickly in the digital era, and tours have evolved from cassettes to CDs to cell phones to QR (Quick Response) codes. Scanning QR codes posted on exhibit cases or in the windows of historic buildings with a smartphone app, visitors can access additional information about a location, hear and see interview excerpts, and get links to websites. Oklahoma State University developed a “Where Your Story Begins” walking tour exhibit for homecoming, using QR codes to connect to interview excerpts. They learned to keep the clips short since downloading video or extensive audio can carry an unexpectedly high cost for the phone service, depending on people’s data plans.
As urban and rural landscapes change, oral history interviews record people’s memories of the way things once were. In Great Britain, the Rescue Geography project captured memories of places that were undergoing redevelopment, such as a highway being built through the neighborhood. The Museum of London also funded audio trails that explored two strikingly different parts of the river Thames. Drifting described the pastoral nature of the riverbank near Hampton Court Palace, while Dockers told the story of an industrial stretch of the river near Greenwich. These “memoryscapes” included an hour of oral history testimony that reflected the changing nature of the areas. Those walking the trail could pick up a mobile device—a Walkman or iPod—from a library or tourist information center, or download the recordings on their own phones, and then follow a walking map. Listeners agreed that the original voices gave the recordings more authenticity than listening to an announcer reading a script. The recordings could sustain the walkers’ interest for several hours, more time than they might spend on recordings in museums.82
Drawing from oral histories, the Baltimore ’68 Driving Tour directed visitors to places connected to the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. The interviews recorded multiple sides of the story—the looter and the looted, the clergy and the National Guard, the politicians and the citizens—without taking sides. Those going on the tour can still see much of the original damage; the area was never redeveloped. “What makes this tour so valuable,” Jessica Elfenebin explains, “is putting hard information—exactly where and when fires were started, rocks were thrown, windows were broken—to familiar taken-for granted scenes of devastation.”83
Since both involve recorded human speech, oral history is “custom built for radio,” according to David Dunaway, an oral historian who has produced radio documentaries. Radio production is less costly than producing video documentaries, and radio studios operate in all kinds of communities throughout the nation, from inner cities to rural counties, and on the campuses of many universities. The growth of national and local radio stations has especially stimulated interest in producing and broadcasting historical documentaries over the radio, and funding agencies have underwritten some ambitious projects. “The craft of radio production rises to art in the hands of someone fashioning a program from disparate interviews, ambient noise, and historical recordings such as speeches and old radio broadcasts,” Dunaway notes. “By juxtaposing these elements the expert producer creates a textural tapestry of sound, complete with the built-in punctuation of pauses and music.”84
Oral history-based radio broadcasts have included Living Atlanta, an urban history of Atlanta, Georgia; First-Person America, reminiscences of the Great Depression; New Yorkers at Work: Oral Histories of Life, Labor, and Industry; and the life and times of New York City’s colorful mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The University of Alabama funded an oral history of Alabama blacks who worked as coal and iron ore miners, sharecroppers, union organizers, domestics, teachers, ministers, lawyers, and small-business operators. Focusing on Birmingham, Alabama, which in the 1920s had the largest black population of any major U.S. city, the project resulted in a dozen half-hour radio programs, Working Lives, that were broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR).85
The Blues Archives at the University of Mississippi worked with Media Production International of Memphis, Tennessee, to produce The Original Down Home Blues Show, a regular NPR series. The program combines blues music and interviews with the musicians. Each interviewee is asked to select the records played on the show, a practice that the producers feel reveals “a deeper insight into their sense of memory of place and time.” Recognizing that music is their livelihood, and that blues is a particularly marketable form of oral history, the producers feel a moral obligation not only to secure the rights of interviewees for their copyrighted material but also to pay them a fee for their contributions to the show. In return, such programs provide outstanding publicity for oral history archives and stimulate use of its own collection.86
Will the Circle Be Unbroken? a thirteen-hour, twenty-six part radio series about the civil rights movement, was broadcast over Public Radio International in 1997. Initiated by the Southern Regional Council, an Atlanta-based civil rights organization, the programs contained more than 250 reflective voices of blacks and whites from five southern cities: Atlanta, Little Rock, Jackson, Montgomery and Columbia. “What makes it work well is the medium itself,” wrote Alan Bunce, a reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor. The television series Eyes on the Prize had already covered much of the same territory. “Yet by revisiting the story on the radio, through the reminiscences of people who have lived through the history, without seeing the speakers, you are able to experience the individuals in a special way—to savor the tone of voice, to sense the emotional meaning.”87
The oral historian Gene Preuss was a high school student working at his hometown radio station when it launched a weekly oral history program. The station manager, an old newsman, interviewed older residents of the community about changes around them, firsts, and local traditions. “I found the interviews fascinating, and listened to every single one of these programs for almost three years, almost 120 different programs!” he commented. Preuss credited the program with convincing him to change his college major to history and his use of oral history in his work. Years later he noted that the radio station was still doing interviews, some 1,000 of them, and was working with the town’s archive to preserve them.88
Uncut interviews rarely go on the air. Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, who broadcast on NPR as the Kitchen Sisters, take what they call “an oral history approach to interviewing,” conducting long interviews that may go on for several hours, exploring many different avenues of thought and experience. But after they conduct the interviews they edit them furiously, whittling them into highly composed programs, a process they call “writing with other people’s words.” The Kitchen Sisters promise never to alter the spirit or the intent of what was said to them, “but we do cut the hell out of them.”89
A media producer’s first need is to cull the collection. A two-hour program might include an hour and a half of recorded interviews, out of a collection of dozens of hours. From her experience, Siobhán McHugh advises that media producers are looking for “facts and feeling” and will be drawn to the voices most “laden with emotional nuance.” The producer then tries to weave the voices together into a unified and compelling narrative, and a montage of sounds. It is important to maintain “editorial integrity” by not taking the quotes out of context, but some documentary makers take dramatic license and even use actors to re-create dialogue. In return, oral history acquires enhanced aesthetic appeal and greater public impact. There is an affinity between radio and oral history because they share a concern for the oral and aural characteristics of a narrative. Oral history may include strong feelings and emotions that will resonate with radio listeners. “If well crafted as storytelling through sound,” posits McHugh, “oral history on radio can be elevated to an art form that can move, inform, and delight its audience. It achieves one of the discipline’s defining aims to connect past and present lives.”90
Oral history archivists express disappointment that radio producers do not make greater use of their collections as raw material for documentaries. More often trained as journalists than historians, and working under tight deadlines and budget constraints, radio producers may be loath to spend the time needed to review long archival tapes. Too often they find the sound quality of archival recordings inadequate for broadcast use (although poor sound quality on analog tapes can be enhanced digitally). Radio documentary producers may find it easier simply to do their own interviewing, using broadcast studio equipment and asking questions specific to the project—an alternative that is possible, of course, only if there are survivors left to interview.91
To expand use of their collections, oral historians need to recognize the differences between their type of interviewing and radio interviewing and to try, when possible, to accommodate radio’s needs. “Radio producers work with action, sensation, emotion, and audio presence as their palette, the oral historian with objectivity and verisimilitude,” David Dunaway has argued. “Both pursue truth on different roads.” Oral historians must improve the sound quality of their recording and preserve them under optimal archival conditions for future use. Radio producers pick and choose from many different interviews, editing and rearranging them, adding music and sound effects, and rarely using more than a fraction of a single interview. Interviews therefore need to be abstracted or indexed for easy retrieval. Oral historians can work with radio producers to identify the most colorful dialogue, revealing anecdotes, emotional interludes, and those moments of verbal eloquence that can give spark to a documentary. Interviewers can also explain the themes and historical framework of the interviews. They need to take some care that the rights of the interviewees are protected and that in the editing and excerpting of the interviews for broadcast, the meaning is not distorted, and the interviewees are not held up to ridicule.92
The StoryCorps model has inspired more oral history projects to produce creative audio shorts from their interviews, which they offer to interested Internet or radio broadcasters. The Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Initiative has established a Radio Syndication Program for distribution. Since local broadcasters are usually unfamiliar with the interviews, such pieces rarely get to air on commercial or mainstream radio. “That is why we offer these stories at no cost to such markets, but with a creative commons copyright understanding,” Kevin Farkas explains. “We hope that in some way our content can fill their public issues or community-based programming needs.93
Although it seems conversational, oral history is often more stylized. Interviews reveal many performance aspects, from the way interviewees tell their stories to the use of words, pauses, silences, gestures, and facial expressions. People giving an interview put themselves on display for an immediate audience—the interviewer—and for posterity. As a result, Lynn Abrams has observed, “they are conscious of the need to perform and thus they may moderate their language, adjust dialect or accent, elaborate stories, and so on.” The staging of oral history seems a natural extension of this creative spirit, and it is a short step from a live interview to a live performance.94
Performance aspects further reflect the multidisciplinary nature of oral history, drawing interest from those in anthropology, sociology, art history, public history, and performance studies. All of these disciplines have found ways to use interviews to engage audiences.
The artistic use of oral history is usually elaborately planned, although at times it can emerge spontaneously, without premeditation. The composer David Toop created The Body Evident from the digital recordings of his talks with the artist and theorist John Latham. Toop simply wanted to record an interview exploring Latham’s theories in his own voice, but, after listening to the recording, he realized that he had collected both an “oral and aural history of an artist, his ideas, their context, and my relationship to all those elements.” He developed a museum installation “derived entirely from his speech, vocal sounds, pauses, breathing, moments when he banged the table for emphasis, room sound, and ambient sound from the street.” He called this a “sound event” that could be sensed but not written down.95
Oral historians want to return their material to the community from which it came, but they recognize that the community may never read their books and articles. The six authors who collaborated on the highly acclaimed book Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987) recognized that, as a university press publication, it reached a predominantly academic audience. They had collected the life stories of the mill workers, then processed, edited, interpreted, and published them; but the authors wanted to do even more to “keep the stories alive and keep history ongoing.” Recognizing how much interviews involve storytelling, and that those stories were already in a sense a performance, the speech communications department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered an independent study course in which eleven undergraduates read through the interview transcripts and pulled characters and dialogue from the book to produce a script. In 1988 they took the play to many mill towns throughout North and South Carolina. The producers observed that audiences, seeing their own lives performed on stage, responded instinctively, “imitating what was going on and talking about it.” At the end of each performance, the cast would talk with the audience, who contributed additional stories and argued with the cast over interpretation, keeping alive the collaborative process between history and performance.96
In Baltimore and St. Paul, groups have used oral histories to produce stage plays about local history for local audiences. The Baltimore Voices oral history was initiated in 1978 to explore and present in popular forms the social history of Baltimore’s six oldest neighborhoods. A team of professional historians, graduate students, and community historians interviewed over 200 people, transcribed the interviews, and divided them into such common topics as family, neighborhoods, ethnicity, religion, work, income, wages and expenditures, education, immigration, race, prejudice, and the Great Depression. From these, they produced hundreds of one-page stories, with different ethnic groups, broken down by neighborhoods. The Baltimore Theatre Project organized these excerpts into a play, also named Baltimore Voices (1981), which was presented in the various Baltimore neighborhoods and videotaped as a documentary. The same year the Baltimore Voices project started, the St. Paul History Theatre produced the first in a series of oral history-based plays. In the 1970s and 1980s its repertoire included The Deadly Decades, dealing with the effects of Prohibition on the city; You Can’t Get to Heaven through the U.S.A., about Swedish and Italian immigrants; We Win or Bust, about a railroad strike; and Nina! Madam to a Saintly City, the story of police corruption and a famous operator of a local bordello. The playwright Arthur Miller turned Studs Terkel’s oral history Working into a stage play, An American Clock (1982).97
In the 1990s students at Cuyahoga Community College conducted oral histories in ethnic and minority neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, from which The People of Cleveland: Building Community was drawn. Accompanying dialogue from the life histories were slides and music and dance performances. The People of Cleveland played to more than one hundred audiences in churches, schools, and neighborhood organizations. Another play, Growing Up and Growing Old, drew from interviews about life cycles and sought to overcome negative stereotypes of the elderly. The Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii mixed interviews with 1940s swing music in its “living history performances” of An Era of Change: Oral Histories of Civilians in World War II Hawaii, for presentation at libraries and senior citizens centers.98
After conducting interviews with inmates at a correctional facility, Alicia Rouverol compiled them into a script that was performed by the prisoners. In both the interviews and performances, the inmates struggled with the issues in their lives that had led them to incarceration and gave performances to at-risk youths as object lessons. The oral histories encouraged self-reflection and served as “one of the few venues for creative expression available to the inmates.”99
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which lost more than a hundred of its students, faculty, and alumni in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, conducted interviews with a cross-section of New Yorkers caught in the chaos of the collapse of the World Trade towers. Drawing from forty of those interviews with police, firefighters, emergency personnel and citizen bystanders, they prepared What Happened? The September 11th Testimony Project, a ninety-minute, one-act documentary drama designed to be performed with a cast from six to fifteen actors. Offering the script for commemorative performances, project directors described it as “a collective narrative that follows events and personal experiences from early that beautiful morning through impact, escape, rescue and recovery, grieving, and reflection on how our lives have changed.”100
The director of drama at a local school collected documentation for a “musical documentary play” about the town, called All Change, performed as a series of plays—the largest had a cast of ninety-eight. Although they also used the interviews in a radio documentary and books, it was the play that attracted local audiences—“and there were requests wanting to know how to do it.”101
When his friends and colleagues in San Francisco’s dance community began dying of AIDS, dancer-choreographer Jeff Friedman created the LEGACY oral history program to preserve their memories and their dance routines. Since life involves a great deal of “physicality,” Friedman was sure that some form of performance reenactment was possible. He pointed to Michael Bennett’s Broadway musical A Chorus Line, which was based on workshop interviews with dancers and the resentment they expressed over how they had been treated in musical theater. The dancers thus became creative collaborators, although more through their personal stories rather than their movements. LEGACY combined both story and motion.
Many oral historians pay little attention to nonverbal forms of communication, but dancers told their stories with their bodies. Friedman videoed both the interview and the dance, starting with those most at risk because of illness or age. “As a dancer and choreographer deeply invested in oral history practice,” he explained, “I am concerned with how the body helps create meaning within the process of making history.”102
Kent State University commissioned Mark Taylor to choreograph Witness, a dance performance to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the shooting of four people on its campus by the National Guard during demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1970. Taylor interviewed four people in the town and at the university about their experiences: an eyewitness, a newspaper reporter, a student’s parent, and a professor. The recorded and transcribed interviews became the basis for both the script and the dance in the performance.103
Dance education has similarly incorporated oral history. Dance students at Brigham Young University, for instance, interviewed family members about a difficult passage in their lives and then converted those stories into performances.104
The lyricism of the spoken word and the personalities that delivered them have long inspired poets. There is often a similarity between poetry and oral history transcripts, especially when the words of the interview are reproduced in short bursts. Transcripts that are structured to show the poetic nature of the narrative bring the emotional feelings being expressed to the forefront. Those who have used this format argue that a poetic rendering of the transcript does not change its meaning but elevates elements of the language and facilitates analysis.105
The poet Kwame Dawes recorded interviews with African American elders from South Carolina and then used them as inspiration for his poetry in Wisteria: Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country (2005). Dawes did not want his poems to be read as transcriptions of oral history and instead called them an artistic adaptation of the original monologues. His poetry also described the experience, for instance, a woman’s “scent of wisteria, / thick with the nausea of nostalgia / fills the closed-in room” as she begins to “lean into the microphone, / smile at the turning tape.”106
Reminiscence Theatre in Great Britain involves a therapeutic use of reminiscence for dementia care. In group sessions or individual interviews, elders share their memories around some theme of social or historical significance with the director and actors. Their stories are transcribed and stored, and then turned into plays. Interviewees are invited to attend rehearsals and to direct the actors in scenes based on their experience, both to ensure their involvement and the production’s authenticity. The cast follows each performance with an informal discussion with the audience, providing an opportunity for further sharing of memories. Instead of making the audience travel to see the performance, the plays are put on at senior citizens’ clubs, day centers, community centers, nursing homes, and hospitals. Performances are accompanied by a book of stories and photographs, collected from the interviewees during the research period. Sold inexpensively (thanks to grants and subsidies), they help audience members keep reminiscing after the production.107
Not necessarily. History museums have turned their visitors into performers by asking them to read from oral histories. The Seattle Museum of History and Technology drew its inspiration from the Laramie Project, where actors had conducted oral histories about the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, and then presented their findings in a stage presentation. The Seattle Museum followed this pattern by staging a play, Verbatim, based on its own oral history collections. After each production, members of the audience were eager to tell their own related stories, which made the curators wonder if they should give the audience a chance to become performers. They created an experimental Speaking of Seattle program, drawn from the area’s workplace experiences and developed a set of “readers’ theater scripts” from the interviews. Museum visitors participated in role playing by reading from the scripts, a process that helped them better grasp local history. Since some of those who read the stories of others became anxious to tell their own stores, the curators also began conducting impromptu oral histories. “An oral history readers’ theater offers a magical chance to step into someone else’s shoes and begin to walk outward from oneself,” concluded curator Lorraine McConaghy. “That’s the value of the retellings.”108
From the most remote rural territories to inner-city neighborhoods, in audio and video recordings, over the Internet, on radio and on stage, in museums and community centers, oral history has proven to be a multifaceted tool, usable in a seemingly limitless number of ways, in many disciplines. Beyond their immediate purposes, oral historians seek to leave a better historical record, to preserve what would otherwise be lost or more obscure. In a sense, oral history has turned upside down George Santayana’s famous dictum that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Now oral historians are making sure that those who can remember the past must repeat it for the record.109