Oral History (Arguments)

Question 1

What is the historiographical significance of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 AD) being premodern?

Answer 1

• Proves orality as a tradition and source of material is not a modern concept
• Made using oral sources
• Word of mouth often employed to preserve knowledge of events in premodern times
• Considered one of the most important original references on Anglo-Saxon history and has played a key role in the development of an English national identity
• Uses written sources and letters too from early writers like Pliny
• Polemical nature of history at the time clear - advancing his personal views on politics and religion

Question 2

What is the historiographical significance of the institutionalisation of historical training and procedures inspired by Ranke in the 1800s?

Answer 2

• Led to a focus on written documents being considered to be the most reliable of sources
• Official written sources preferred wherever possible
• Relegated oral sources, considered second-best, to be used when studying illiterate societies only
• Oral evidence consider to be unreliable

Question 3

What is the historical context of Allan Nevins use of oral history in 1948?

Answer 3

• Increased technology for WWII led to increased availability of tape recorders
• Increase in recorded interviews during this time underpinned the revival in oral history

Question 4

What did Allan Nevins first use oral history for in 1948?

Answer 4

• To describe his recording of spoken memoirs of civil leaders in the US who had not yet written memoirs

Question 5

What is the significance of the historiographical context within which Allan Nevins was first using oral history in 1948?

Answer 5

• At this point, oral history still about preserving the elite and dictating their experience
• Not different from most history at this time
• Just another white, male, political history

Question 6

Why is Frisch criticism in 1979 of Allan Nevins 1948 work as “explicitly archival, informational, and elitist” anachronistic?

Answer 6

This is how much history writing was at this time
C-ref - Analysis of Nazi Germany and Holocaust implementation
Frisch is critiquing him from the perspective of the cultural, social, linguistic turns of the 1970s and 1980s where history has begun to deviate from the practice

Question 7

What is the significance of Nevins’ being American to the developments of the 1950s in oral history as a discipline?

Answer 7

• Nevin’s work revived interest in OH throughout America but this interest opposed his traditional approach
• Became a channel for voices neglected by white academia - repressed histories coming back
• A lack of interest and a misunderstanding of the discipline in Europe - didn’t take this same trajectory
• Still very much political

Question 8

What is the historical context which underpins the rise of oral history in the 1970s and 1980s?

Answer 8

• Proliferation of more accessible lower-priced portable tape recorders in 1970s/80s sparked popular and academic interest in oral history

Question 9

What is the historiographical significance of the shift in oral history in the 1970s and 1980s with historians reviewing their discipline?

Answer 9

• Rise of women’s history and gender history - linked to feminist movements
• Rise of non-white history/histories of race and ethnicity - linked to decolonisation and events of 1968 in US
• Linguistic turn
• Cultural turn
• Social turn of the 1960s - need for bottom down approaches but now more inclusive

Question 10

How did the rise of social history in Europe in the 1960s lead to the professionalisation of orality as a historical sub discipline?

Answer 10

• Deviation from “normal” historical practice
• Movement to record experiences of working-class e.g. EP Thompson (1963)
• Revives interest in oral materials as a result
• OH thus emerges as part of this process to democratise history with intention to give a voice to those underrepresented in sources and had little presence in official documentation

Question 11

What did the linguistic turn bring?

Answer 11

A new academic interest in fundamental constituive role of language and cultural discord in shaping interpretations of experience

Question 12

What did the cultural turn bring?

Answer 12

• A shift in attitudes/assumptions about nature/role of history to make culture the focus of contemporary debates
• A rejection of focusing on politics/economics and instead focused on how political/economic ideas understood, translated, disseminated, and represented throughout a culture

Question 13

Why were the majority of historians still sceptical of OH’s methods and reliability in the 1960s and 1970s?

Answer 13

• Memory called into question as a reliable resource
• Traditional empiricist criticism of oral narratives argue they are too malleable to be used by historical research bc of nature of memory construction

Question 14

What was Hobbsbawm’s critique of OH?

Answer 14

• OH is just memory not fact

Question 15

What was Patrick O’Farrell’s critique of OH?

Answer 15

• OH closer to myth than history

Question 16

What did oral historians reviewing their discipline do to the discipline from the end of the 1970s?

Answer 16

• Shift into interpretive mode

- Attention on the narrative forms and the creative dimensions of oral narratives

Question 17

How did oral historians from the end of the 1970s reimagine the perceived weaknesses of the discipline as strengths?

Answer 17

Argued the malleable aspects of memory give an insight into psychological, cultural, and social aspects

Question 18

Who were the key oral historians reviewing their discipline in the late 1970s in America?

Answer 18

• John Blassingame (1975)
• Ann Shockley (1978)
• Michael Frisch (1979)

Question 19

What did Blassingame’s 1975 handbooks do for the practice of oral history?

Answer 19

• Provided readers with tips for/questions to apply in an interview
• Provided advice for transcription process → arguably more reliable discipline than others as OH engage so critically with their methodology due to heightened sense of responsibility
• Advised those using an interview conducted by someone else to always use first edition of a transcription and compare info provided w other sources to check validity

Question 20

What is the historiographical significance of John Blassingame’s 1972 book analysing personal accounts given by former slaves?

Answer 20

• AA - particular interest in AA studies
• Was sceptical of using the Slave Narrative collection testimonies gather by WPA as part of his resources as felt they were distorted by pressures to view plantations as paternalistic institutions

Question 21

What did Ann Shockley suggest in 1978 was important for the practice of oral history?

Answer 21

Suggested a ‘set of evaluative criteria’ necessary to ascertain interviews’ worth

Question 22

What is the significance of Ann Shockley’s decision to found the Black Oral History program?

Answer 22

• Said she wanted to correct the “long neglect and racist attitudes of some” academia that didn’t collect materials relating to Black history
• Her writings esp. Focused on AA perspectives and consistently encouraged libraries to place special emphasis on AA collections
• Began working at Fisk (HCBU) for the Special Negro Collection in 1969

Question 23

What did Michael Frisch in 1979 argue memory was?

Answer 23

Memory a powerful tool for evaluating the nature of the process of historical memory

Question 24

What did Frisch’s focus on power of memory do to discipline of history?

Answer 24

Turned focus of oral histories from “history as it really was” to what memory, in its entire fallibility, could tell us

Question 25

Why did Frisch argue memory should become the main focus “as the object, not merely the method, of oral history”?

Answer 25

Memory = “personal, and historical, individual and generational”
Using the unreliability of the explicit to highlight the implicit - making use of the issues of using oral history as fact i.e. as a method for fact recollection

Question 26

By the end of the 1970s what was oral history well established in?

Answer 26

Archival projects

Question 27

What did the 1980s see oral history shift from and to?

Answer 27

• Shift from original intention to give voice to minorities underrepresented in sources and who had little presence in official documentation
• Shift to a more general desire to bridge the past and the present

Question 28

Why did the oral history field continue to be scrutinised from within the discipline in the 1980s?

Answer 28

Technological advances created new ethical and mythological issues to be tackled

Question 29

What is the historiographical context within which Alessandro Portelli is writing in 1981?

Answer 29

Writing following a shift to poststructuralism, slightly earlier than Lusia Passerini

Question 30

What were Alessandro Portelli’s main arguments (1981)?

Answer 30

• Excluding the researcher’s voice creates ‘a subtle distortion’ in interviews
• Criticised those who relied on transcription only, as distinguishing factor of OH, is in form
• Tonal range, volume range, rhythm of popular speech carry many class connotations not repdocuible in writing
• Ignoring these could lose implications inherent in intonation and forgeo the narrator’s participation in the story and ultimately misconstrued meaning
• Stressed that ‘untrue’ statements were still psychologically ‘true’ and that errors in testimony, ‘where imagination breaks in’ often reveal more than factually accurate accounts

Question 31

How was Portelli’s arguments influenced by the historical and historiographical context within which he was writing?

Answer 31

• Early 1980s role of researcher as a social actor whose involvement in the interview could not be passive and thus had to be accounted for in analysis prominent
• Writing a decade after the launching of the video home system making noting things like tone easier
• Linguistic turn and poststructuralist turn clearly influencing too

Question 32

How did Portelli’s 1991 work highlight his claim that ‘untrue’ statements were still psychologically ‘true’ and that errors in testimony, ‘where imagination breaks in’ often reveal more than factually accurate accounts?

Answer 32

• “Symbolic” misremembering of Luigi Trastulli’s death
• Misremembered his death and merged with street fighting in 1953 when workers were laid off - MERGED TWO IMPORTANT/SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS IN THEIR LIFE
• reconstructing a more palatable truth: in 1953 workers fought vs police vs 1949 they ‘let’ him die - demonstrates cultural context of militancy and pride, and gives his death more meaning as becomes a martyr in the struggle for jobs

Question 33

What was Luisa Passerini interested in in the 1980s?

Answer 33

• Interested in recovering experience of Italian working-class under Fascism

Question 34

How does Passerini recover the experience of Italian working-class under Fascism?

Answer 34

Analysed silences and inconsistencies in oral narratives to demonstrate how fascist ideology had become deeply entangled in everyday life and personal identity

Question 35

What did Joanna Borant do?

Answer 35

Led the late 1980s development in recognising interview as a two-way process, advancing our understanding of the socio-political uses of oral history.

Question 36

What did Borant’s work conclude oral history interviews could do?

Answer 36

Could help one remember and process traumatic events, or it could empower minorities

Question 37

What does Alistair Thomson conclude in the 1990s through his study of the ANZAC Legend and WWI vets?

Answer 37

• Viewing OH as an interaction between past and present = most significant shift since early 1970s
• Moves away from view that a definitive guide increased reliability of interview
• Increased technological options forced oral historians to re-assess their ethical positions and produce guidelines to cover new situations
• Re-evaluated the socio-political development in oral history - tension between scholarship and advocacy

Question 38

What did Thomson find in his study of WWI vets and ANZAC Legend?

Answer 38

• Found when interviewing vets about their experiences of war they described scenes from film Gallipoli as if they were accounts of their own experience
• Film released shortly before interviews > gave a powerful expression to veterans’ notions of Australian masculinity and national identity
• Veterans borrowed from the film by constructing themselves as a specific type of soldier - even though this involved suppressing their own personal memories that didn’t conform to stereotypes

Question 39

What does Thomson’s study illustrate about OH as a discipline?

Answer 39

• Illustrates importance of comparing oral narratives - without comparison, wouldn’t have identified pattern
• Illustrates influence of present cultural interpretations of the past on memory, subjects and self-fashioning, usefulness of OH resting on historian’s aim to analyse and assess the ‘cultural circuit’

Question 40

What historical method does Penny Summerfield use in 1998 Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives?

Answer 40

Studies the effects of WW2 on women’s experience and sense of selves through 42 oral interviews

Question 41

How does Penny Summerfield explore women’s wartime lives and cultural representations of men and women?

Answer 41

By analysing the connection between popular/collective discourse and personal memory in women’s accounts

Question 42

How does Summerfield’s Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives see the subjectivity of oral narratives as a positive contribution to history?

Answer 42

• Uses this exploration to argue that accepted historiographical view that war reinforced gender distinctions was over-simplified
• Explored how women remembered themselves as participants in war, their relationships with other women and men, how they responded to demobilisation and employment post-war, and how they felt their lives had changed

Question 43

What is a key example of how Summerfield demonstrated the variety of frameworks women used to structure their narratives through the cultural scripts available to them and the intersubjectivity of the interview process?

Answer 43

Contrast between women who remembered their war work as ‘heroic’ and the experience as emancipatory, who drew on narratives within popular memory and wartime propaganda/recruitment campaigns, and ‘stoic’ women who saw work as a necessity and remembered more traditional discourses of femininity

Question 44

What is the historiographical context and work that Summerfield builds upon?

Answer 44

1990s scrutiny of OH from within discipline from Thomson, lots of great work on ANZAC legend

Question 45

What is the purpose of James Mark’s (2005) oral histories of rapes by the Red Army during invasion of Hungary?

Answer 45

Not about establishing the truth of the rapes but exploring how politics and social memory informed the memory of rape

Question 46

How does Mark conclude the language of women’s accounts of rape was shaped by the language of Hungarian nationalism? (phases of this argument)

Answer 46

• Stories of brutal rape come from a place of anti-communist nationalism and is a symbol/metaphor for Hungairan suffering under Red Army/Communist occupation
• Using this suffering to divert attention from Hungarian involvement in fascism and the Holocaust
• Brutality of communist invasion contrasted domestically led violence during Nazi occupation

Question 47

How/why does Mark conclude rape was politicised as a narrative ‘element’? (phases of this argument)

Answer 47

• For most the reality was a confirmation of an expectation of Soviet violence created by German propaganda so narratives were explicit
• For Jews who saw Soviets as liberators rape was denied, painted as consensual, or contextualised with general wartime atrocities
• Suggests even ‘liberal accounts’ could not avoid politicised language because rape had been politicised - told accounts in a way defined by a need to prove a lack of communist or fascist sympathies

Question 48

What is the historical significance of the context within which Mark is conducting his interviews and writing and publishing this book in late 90s and early 200s?

Answer 48

• Interviews conducted by Mark 1998-2000
• Writing during collapse of USSR/end of Cold War where everything is politcisied
• Doesn’t consider the fact that women brutally raped being anti-Soviet isn’t necessarily surprising
• Also doesn’t consider that denial of rape/decision not to speak about it or contextualise it not necessarily linked to communism/fascism or nationalism but rather social stigmatisation and taboo of rape for women c-ref Andrea Peto (2003) Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna

Question 49

Why is Andrea Peto’s (2003) work on the memory and narrative of rape in Budapest and Vienna better than Mark’s?

Answer 49

• Utilised work of Austrian historians on Red Army rapes to ask similar questions in her interviews in Budapest to produce comparative data
• Noticed how Iron Curtain meant historical and political discourse on WWII focused on differences while ignoring similarities - Soviet troops stationed in Vienna until 1955
• Concludes conspiracy of silence in immediate post-war - women blamed for rape, women trying to pretend didn’t happen, women unsupported

Question 50

What does Peto’s study suggest about how we should view the testimonies of the women?

Answer 50

Perhaps we should read their rapes not in political context of then but of 2000s - rise of women’s history, women more able to speak up - tension between Mark’s analysis

Question 51

What is a possible weakness of Peto’s work?

Answer 51

• Utilised work of Austrian historians to ask similar questions in her interviews in Budapest to produce comparative data - targeted - not necessarily asking the right questions

Question 52

What did Kate Fisher’s 2006 study Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 do?

Answer 52

Studies attitudes towards birth control through oral narratives

Question 53

How does Fisher’s 2006 study prove valuable contribution to history of subjectivity of individual narratives?

Answer 53

• Uses oral studies to demonstrate the opposite to be true
• Historians have assumed that 20th century women care more about contraception than their male counterparts
• Suggests men’s knowledge of birth control was far more extensive than women’s, with women seeing it as important to claim ignorance with regards to matters of contraception

Question 54

What is the historical context within which Jeska Rees 2010 analysis of WLM in late-20th c England is undertaken?

Answer 54

• Rise in political correctness culture

- Rise of feminist histories and methodologies

Question 55

Jeska Rees fact card

Answer 55

• Initially recruited interviewees through contacts AT Feminist Archive North → snowball effect of women introducing her to other women
• Recorded and transcribed each interview and allowed interviewees to edit to “circumvent the pitfalls of seeking so-called ‘objective’ research when interviewing women” - drew upon feminist oral history methodologies
• Had an authoritative discourse in mind when conducting interviews but wanted it to be more spontaneous, organic approach rather than a response-based questionnaire or survey
• Found that power dynamic between her and interviewees who were all educated, older than her, and established political participation made her less authoritative than she had thought to begin with as it seemed appropriate to respect their ability to produce strong, coherent narratives
• Found some women on editing transcripts for errors and misinterpretations also made decisions regarding suitability of their words such as passages with sensitive material about others and some were distrustful of her motives

Question 56

Helen Mills fact card: (2016) Using the Personal to Critique the Popular

Answer 56

• Uses women’s memories of 1960s youth to critique popular idea of the “swinging sixties”
• Demonstrates that impression of period as promiscuous and permissive is based on the experiences of young men not subject to same restrictions as young women
• Highlights that the collective memory is based off of the culture of a very narrow metropolitan middle-class elite
• Female subjects critique the popular memory of the 1960s which did not fit with their experiences
• But popular memory was significant in their framing of their concept and experience of the 1960s
• Suggest popular memory baded on a myth propagated at the time by media representations, such as the films: A Taste of Honey, Up the Junction, and Ready, Steady, Go!

Question 57

Sheila Rowbotham on Oral History

Answer 57

• Oral history can uncover those previously ‘hidden from history’
• Oral history can overcome the limitations of written sources - eg can access histories of illiterate/un-documenting societies
• Can restore an agency to these societies which have largely been understood principally through dominant western narratives

Question 58

Halabwchs - collective memory theory

Answer 58

• All remembering relies on dynamics of groups > an individual’s social interactions determine how one remembers experiences from the past and what they remembers
• Groups reconstruct past experiences collectively > even though an individual does have a particular perspective on this group reconstruction, he or she does not have an indep memory of the past
• Collective memory is shaped by the nature of the group > therefore every group has its own collective memory that differs from others
• Indivs can belong to more than one group and traditions of CM BUT CMs cannot become independent of a group > group experience and memory (and identity) are interdependent
• Resembles episodic memory - Memory that is individual: cannot be passed from one person to another
• MH’s theory of collective memory is functionalist > memory functions as a mechanism that unites groups and cements identity
• Most durable memories are those held by most people > vs the value of individual memory bc group eradicates conflicting and marginal memories over time

Question 59

Susan Ostrov Weisser

Answer 59

• Used language to demonstrate that oral narrations that appear to draw on conventional ‘cultural scripts’ may actually be more subversive than is at first apparent
• Oral history interview with an ‘ordinary’ Italian American housewife
• First concluded the interviewee submerged herself within a conventional family story
• H/E through careful analysis of ways the words ‘but’ and ‘just’ were used, was able to see how her interviewee mediated the gender constraints and expectations of her life

Question 60

History of the Fosse Ardeatina illustrates how OH can draw a historian’s attention to something new

Answer 60

• Ada Pignotti alluded to fact men took advantage of her sexually and harrased her after her husband died in massacre while explaining difficulties she had sorting out a pension for herself as a widow
• Her story piqued Portelli’s interest - hadn’t expected to hear this
• Realised new line of enquiry could shed light on experience of widows of those who died in Fosee Ardeatina
• Couldn’t ask leading q’s - made open and general statements to give them space to go into similar narratives if wanted to
• E.g. ‘must have been a difficult time, esp. as a young woman’
• Pignotti hadn’t considered her story to be history and wouldn’t have written it down or offered it up if not for the OH interview process

Question 61

Key Historiographical Debates

Answer 61

• Influence of contemporary contexts on historical remembering - positive or negative?
• Failure to recover fact - limited to OH? Point of OH?
• Role of interviewer - positive or negative? Methodological issues?
• Temporal limitations - limited to OH? Attempts been made
• Collective vs individual memory?
• Democratisation of history - positive
• Expansion of history - positive
• Challenge assumptions of dominant historiography - positive

Question 62

Michelle Mouton and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick

Answer 62

• Argue for the use of oral narratives to reconstruct individual experience:
• Boundary crossings (ruptures in the oral narrative) unmask understandings of history beyond conventional explanations of events
• Interview with Mekgwe and artist and former African National Congress exile in Soweto
  Mekgwe chose to participate in the interviews on the basis that the researchers used the more neutral term ‘uprising’ to describe events in Soweto, rather than the more stigmatising term ‘riot’
• Reassured him that the researchers were not simply echoing official state discourse and made him more willing to share his experiences
• Enabled them to get the perspective of those involved in the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa and insight into experience of apartheiD

Question 63

Subjects and self-fashioning: what is it

Answer 63

• Self-fashioning → a term introduced by Stephen Greenblatt in 1980 → used to describe the process of constructing one’s identity and public persona according to a set of socially acceptable standards (Wikipedia)
• This brings up debates about collective memory, the subject’s relationship with the interviewer, knowledge that something will be published etc.

Question 64

Subjects and self-fashioning arguments

Answer 64

• Subjects often remember things in line with the collective narrative
• Subjects want their memories and stories to please the interviewer
• Subjects don’t want to cause problems with their memories – try to control or edit the narrative
• Much of this depends on the subjects’ relationship with the interviewer → do they feel in control, comfortable, suspicious etc. → what is the power dynamic?

Question 65

Validity of arguments surrounding subjects and self-fashioning (some more problematic than others)

Answer 65

• We can’t get always around subject’s desire to portray their memories in a particular way → some of this will be subconscious impact of society, some might be conscious desire to impress, be helpful etc.
• i.e. in my thesis, subjects not recalling their experiences in gender or class terms explicitly because they know not what I am researching BUT also said they wouldn’t have interpreted things in that way at the time
• But in terms of the collective memory – oral histories often bring to light experiences that deviate from the collective memory → not everyone conforms, not everyone self-fashions
• And this is where it’s interesting – these points of difference help highlight the nature of the collective memory, it’s meaning, who it includes, what purpose it serves, why it’s been perpetuated etc.
• By interviewing lots of people you can see what the collective memory is, where the self-fashioning is → and this is because not everyone will do it in same way, take on the collective memory to the same degree etc.

Question 66

Collective and Individual Memory as linked theorists - individual memory subsumed under the rubric of collective

Answer 66

• Daniel Schudson has argued that since memory can only be expressed through the ‘cultural construction of language in socially constricted patterns of recall,’ all memory is essentially collective
• Alon Confino has broadly defined collective memory as the representation of the past and the making of it into shared cultural knowledge by successive generations in ‘vehicles of memory,’ such as books, films, museums, commemorations etc. - potentially every representation of the past is a form of collective memory
• Dawson argues that in the process of life story telling, an individual seeks to achieve a state of calmness in which they are in control of their own narrative and can draw upon public discourses and popular culture to generate a version of their own history
• Michael Roper has argued that remembering always invokes public discourses particularly those of the popular media

Question 67

Collective and Individual Memory in conflict

Answer 67

In practice, individual and collective memories are often in tension, and the recollections of individuals frequently challenge collective accounts designed to achieve unity

Question 68

Oral History as myth/story-telling

Answer 68

• This is about the purpose of oral history – those who criticise it as ‘myth’ are often those who are using it to find empirical facts → and yes, it’s not that helpful in that regard
• They also bring individual accounts to light – it is informative to understand where these conflict and agree with the collective narrative
• It is valuable to the historian to understand how we interpret history in the present → we are in the pursuit not just of understanding what happened in the past, but understanding how it is remembered today
• Therefore – what’s wrong by it being about ‘the myths we live by’