Compare methods

	Oral History Methodology	Microhistory
Field	Historiography	Social History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1978	1976
Originator	Paul Thompson; Allan Nevins	Carlo Ginzburg; Giovanni Levi; Edoardo Grendi
Type	qualitative interview method	qualitative interpretive method
Seminal source	Thompson, P. (2000). The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780192893178	Ginzburg, C. (1980). The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 9780801843877
Aliases	Oral History, Life-Story Interviewing, Testimony Collection, Recorded Memory Work	Microstoria, Microhistory, Clue Paradigm, Evidential Paradigm
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.	Microhistory is the intensive study of a small, well-documented unit, a single person, family, village, or event, undertaken to illuminate the larger structures, beliefs, and contradictions of a society. Emerging in Italy in the 1970s around Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, and the journal Quaderni Storici, it was a reaction against the impersonal serial and quantitative history of the Annales school, which microhistorians felt had lost sight of real people and the texture of lived experience. By drastically reducing the scale of observation, the microhistorian can read sources with a density impossible at the macro level, attending to anomalies and apparently trivial details. Ginzburg theorized this as an evidential or clue paradigm, akin to the methods of the detective, the physician, and the connoisseur, in which small, overlooked signs disclose a hidden reality. The famous exemplar is Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976), which reconstructs the cosmology of a sixteenth-century miller from his inquisition records.