Oral History: What It Is, and What This Project Is Not
The very valuable website www.dohistory.org gives this overview of oral history:
We all have stories to tell, stories we have lived from the inside out. We give our experiences an order. We organize the memories of our lives into stories.
Oral history listens to these stories. Oral history is the systematic collection of living people’s testimony about their own experiences. Historians have finally recognized that the everyday memories of everyday people, not just the rich and famous, have historical importance. If we do not collect and preserve those memories, those stories, then one day they will disappear forever.
Yes. This what the Why Here/Why Now project is doing. Collecting the stories of local people so as to have some insight into the moment we find ourselves in. Some day, looking back at this moment (with the benefit of hindsight), we might even see new significance in the things we say.
Again from DoHistory:
Oral history is the systematic collection of living people’s testimony about their own experiences. Oral history is not folklore, gossip, hearsay, or rumor. Oral historians attempt to verify their findings, analyze them, and place them in an accurate historical context. Oral historians are also concerned with storage of their findings for use by later scholars.
In oral history projects, an interviewee recalls an event for an interviewer who records the recollections and creates a historical record.
This is where this project may stray from traditional conceptions of oral history- of what it is and ought to be. I am not seeking to validate or analyze my findings. I am not seeking to document an event and locate it in a historical context. I am not seeking to build records for analysis for future historians, per se.
I am seeking to build an interactive website that tells the stories of particular people in a particular place at a particular time. I intend, full well, for these “records” to remain entirely subjective- as I believe one’s life narrative deserves to be left. No one can answer for another why they live in a certain place. No one can decide for another what the benefits and struggles are that one finds in daily life. These things are beyond our ability to validate, analyze, or locate. All one who encounters this site must do is sit back and listen.
It is a beautiful thing to really hear another person’s story. If you find you can’t quite hear it (i.e., you disagree with it), just come back later and listen again. Because the best thing this project could be ever hope to be is a catalyst for a community to pause for a moment, to listen a little longer, to allow another person’s opinion to nuance your own. To build bridges of understanding between people who play on different sides of the fence. To inform our decisions; our policy. I am doing this project not for future historians, but for us, now.
