Compare methods

	Oral History Methodology	Source Criticism
Field	Historiography	Historiography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1978	1889
Originator	Paul Thompson; Allan Nevins	Leopold von Ranke; Bernheim and Langlois-Seignobos codification
Type	qualitative interview method	qualitative critical method
Seminal source	Thompson, P. (2000). The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780192893178	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602
Aliases	Oral History, Life-Story Interviewing, Testimony Collection, Recorded Memory Work	Quellenkritik, Historical Criticism, External and Internal Criticism, Heuristic and Critical Method
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Source criticism (Quellenkritik) is the foundational procedure of the historical discipline, by which a scholar interrogates a source before treating any of its statements as evidence. Codified in the nineteenth century by Ernst Bernheim and by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, and rooted in Ranke's insistence on examining documents at first hand, the method divides into two complementary operations. External (or lower) criticism establishes whether a source is what it purports to be: its authenticity, the integrity of its text, its author, place, and date. Internal (or higher) criticism then asks what the source means and how far its assertions can be trusted, weighing the author's competence, sincerity, proximity to events, and interests. Only after both passes does the historian compare independent sources and synthesize a defensible account. The discipline of the method lies precisely in its refusal to take any testimony at face value.