Oral History Methodology

Oral history methodology is the craft of generating historical evidence by recording interviews with living witnesses about their experiences and life stories. Unlike most historical sources, which the historian finds already made, oral history sources are created by the historian in collaboration with the narrator, which gives the method both its distinctive power and its distinctive problems. Pioneered institutionally by Allan Nevins at Columbia in the 1940s and given its fullest theorization by Paul Thompson, whose The Voice of the Past (1978) is the field's classic statement, oral history was animated by a democratic impulse to recover the experiences of ordinary people, workers, women, migrants, the colonized, who left few written records. The method requires careful interview design and conduct, faithful recording and archiving, and critical interpretation alert to the workings of memory. Far from treating recollection as a flawed substitute for documents, mature oral history studies memory and subjectivity as themselves valuable historical evidence about how people make meaning of the past.