Compare methods

	Oral History Methodology	Prosopography
Field	Historiography	Social History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1978	1971
Originator	Paul Thompson; Allan Nevins	Lawrence Stone; Lewis Namier; Charles Beard
Type	qualitative interview method	qualitative-quantitative collective method
Seminal source	Thompson, P. (2000). The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780192893178	Stone, L. (1971). Prosopography. Daedalus, 100(1), 46-79.
Aliases	Oral History, Life-Story Interviewing, Testimony Collection, Recorded Memory Work	Collective Biography, Prosopography, Group Biography, Multiple Career Analysis
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.	Prosopography, or collective biography, is the investigation of the common characteristics of a defined group of historical individuals by means of a uniform set of questions, asked of every member, about their birth, family, education, wealth, careers, office-holding, and connections. Lawrence Stone, whose 1971 essay Prosopography is the field's classic methodological statement, defined it precisely as the study of a population through a collective study of their lives. Rather than writing the biography of one notable figure, the prosopographer treats many lesser-known lives as a dataset, seeking the patterns, the typical paths into an elite, the marriage strategies of a class, the recruitment of an administration, that no single biography could reveal. The method has two great traditions: the study of small, well-documented elites, exemplified by Lewis Namier's analysis of eighteenth-century members of Parliament, and the study of larger, more anonymous populations to map social structure and mobility. It transforms scattered biographical fragments into systematic knowledge of social composition and power.