Oral history

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Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.

The term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any information about past events that people who experienced them tell anybody else, but professional historians usually consider this to be oral tradition. However, as the Columbia Encyclopedia explains:

Primitive societies have long relied on oral tradition to preserve a record of the past in the absence of written histories. In Western society, the use of oral material goes back to the early Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom made extensive use of oral reports from witnesses. The modern concept of oral history was developed in the 1940s by Allan Nevins and his associates at Columbia University.

Video Oral history

In modern times

Oral history has become an international movement in historical research. Oral historians in different countries have approached the collection, analysis, and dissemination of oral history in different modes. However, it should also be noted that there are many ways of creating oral histories and carrying out the study of oral history even within individual national contexts.

In the words of the Columbia Encyclopedia:

The discipline came into its own in the 1960s and early 70s when inexpensive tape recorders were available to document such rising social movements as civil rights, feminism, and anti-Vietnam War protest. Authors such as Studs Terkel, Alex Haley, and Oscar Lewis have employed oral history in their books, many of which are largely based on interviews. In another important example of the genre, a massive archive covering the oral history of American music has been compiled at the Yale School of Music. By the end of the 20th cent. oral history had become a respected discipline in many colleges and universities. At that time the Italian historian Alessandro Portelli and his associates began to study the role that memory itself, whether accurate or faulty, plays in the themes and structures of oral history. Their published work has since become standard material in the field, and many oral historians now include in their research the study of the subjective memory of the persons they interview.

There are also several contemporary organizations dedicated to doing oral history which are not affiliated with universities or specific locations. StoryCorps is one of the most well-known of these: following the model of the Federal Writers' Project created as part of the Works Progress Administration, StoryCorps' mission is to record the stories of Americans from all walks of life. On contrast to the scholarly tradition of oral history, StoryCorps subjects are interviewed by people they know. There are a number of StoryCorps initiatives that have targeted specific populations or problems, following in the tradition of using oral history as a method to amplify voices that might otherwise be marginalized.

Oral histories are also used in many communities to document the experiences of survivors of tragedies. Following the Holocaust, there has emerged a rich tradition of oral history, particularly of Jewish survivors. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an extensive archive of over 70,000 oral history interviews. There are also several organizations dedicated specifically to collecting and preserving oral histories of survivors. Oral history as a discipline has fairly low barriers to entry, so it is an act in which laypeople can readily participate-in his book Doing Oral History, Donald Ritchie wrote that "oral history has room for both the academic and the layperson. With reasonable training... anyone can conduct a useable oral history." This is especially meaningful in cases like the Holocaust, where survivors may be less comfortable telling their story to a journalist than they would be to a historian or family member.

Maps Oral history

In Europe

Great Britain and Ireland

Since the early 1970s, oral history in Britain has grown from being a method in folklore studies (see for example the work of the School of Scottish Studies in the 1950s) to becoming a key component in community histories. Oral history continues to be an important means by which non-academics can actively participate in the compilation and study of history. However, practitioners across a wide range of academic disciplines have also developed the method into a way of recording, understanding, and archiving narrated memories. Influences have included women's history and labour history.

In Britain, the Oral History Society has played a key role in facilitating and developing the use of oral history.

A more complete account of the history of oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland can be found at "Making Oral History" on the Institute of Historical Research's website.

The Bureau of Military History conducted over 1700 interviews with veterans of the First World War and related episodes in Ireland. The documentation was released for research in 2003.

During 1998 and 1999, 40 BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for The Century Speaks series. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, the Millennium Memory Bank (MMB). The interview based recordings are held by the British Library Sound Archive in the oral history collection.

In one of the largest memory project anywhere, The BBC in 2003-6 invited its audiences to send in recollections of the homefront in the Second World War. It put 47,000 of the recollections online, along with 15,000 photographs.

In Italy

Alessandro Portelli is an Italian oral historian. He is known for his work which compared workers' experiences in Harlan County, Kentucky and Terni, Italy. Other oral historians have drawn on Portelli's analysis of memory, identity, and the construction of history.

In post-Soviet/Eastern bloc states

Belarus oral history

As of 2015, since the government-run historiography in modern Belarus almost fully excludes repression during the epoch when Belarus was part of the Soviet Union, only private initiatives cover these aspects. Citizens' groups in Belarus use the methods of oral history and record narrative interviews on video: the Virtual Museum of Soviet Repression in Belarus presents a full Virtual museum with intense use of oral history. The Belarusian Oral History Archive project also provides material based on oral history recordings.

Czech oral history

Czech oral history (likewise the oral history applied in others so called post communist countries) did not experience that building period in 1960s and 1970s, partly at the beginning in 1980s, where in the world is spoken about social movement more than a method. With knowledge of the thing I can say that this development was in its beginning probably necessary and well- founded. Understandable (in its beginning) was also some political activism. In 1970s and 1980s in Czech Republic (similarly in other countries of so-called socialist block) was OH absolutely unknown. History and historians did not know about it. Isolate attempts to invite witnesses for scientific project ended without accomplishment (ideological task, guiltlessness of method, imperfect technique, etc.). Hypothetically, if the OH had been discovered earlier for Czech historians, it could have acted positive and surely combative activist role (as A. Freund. P. Thomson and many others speak about it) like in other authoritative regimes. It could have aimed at enquiry of proscribe groups: dissent or prisoners of conscience. To cognate research or any other allusion about just mentioned groups of fellow - citizen was until 1989 totally avoided by communist historiography. Oral History was for the first time used in the mid 1990s but we can speak about some kind of progress for past six years, as Sean Field speaks about it, when it has transformed from disregard and criticized to possibly respect. In the first years of 21st century one can even speak about boom of Oral History in the Czech republic. In 2000, The Oral History Center (COH) at the Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic (AV ?R) was established. Next year, in 2001, was created association Post Bellum.

Projects

"Students in the Period of the Fall of Communism - Life Stories", published as the book One Hundred Student Revolutions by M. Van?k and M. Otáhal (1999), was funded by the Grant Agency AV ?R. The project "Political Elites and Dissidents during the Period of So-called Normalization - Historical Interviews" was funded by the GA ?R and resulted in two publications: Victors? Vanquished (2005), a two-volume collection of 50 exemplary interviews; and a compilation of original interpretive essays entitled The Powerful?! or Helpless?! These publications demonstrate that oral history can contribute greatly to our understanding of many interesting fields in human lives and history itself, such as the motives behind the dissidents' activities, the formation of opposition groups, communication between dissidents and state representatives and the emergence of ex-communist elites and their decision-making processes. "An Investigation into Czech Society during the 'Normalization' Era: Biographic Narratives of Workers and the Intelligentsia" (funded by the Grant Agency AV ?R). The book of interpretations (called "Ordinary People...?!") (2009). All oral history centers in the Czech Republic emphasize educational activities (seminars, lectures, conferences), archiving and maintaining interview collections, and providing consultations to those interested in the method.

Post Bellum is a non-profit organization founded in 2001 by a group of historians and journalists interested in increasing the knowledge of people regarding events that occurred in the 20th Century within the Czech Republic and surrounding European countries. Post Bellum has collected thousands of witness accounts by conducting interviews with people who lived through significant periods in history. Their documentation project created in 2008, Memory of Nation, is the biggest oral history project in the Czech Republic. They are working together with Czech Radio and Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.

In Spain

Because of repression during the Franco dictatorship (1939-75), the development of oral history in Spain was quite limited until the 1970s. It became well-developed in the early 1980s, and often had a focus on the Civil War years (1936-39), especially regarding the losers whose stories had been suppressed. The field was based at the University of Barcelona. Professor Mercedes Vilanova was a leading exponent, and combined it with her interest in quantification and social history. The Barcelona group sought to integrate oral sources with traditional written sources to create mainstream, not ghettoized, historical interpretations. They sought to give a public voice to neglected groups, such as women, illiterates, political leftists, and ethnic minorities.

src: library.columbia.edu

In the United States

Elite studies

In 1948, Allan Nevins, a Columbia University historian, established the Columbia Oral History Research Office, now known as the Columbia Center for Oral History, with a mission of recording, transcribing, and preserving oral history interviews. The Regional Oral History Office was founded in 1954 as a division of the University of California, Berkeley's Bancroft Library. In 1967, American oral historians founded the Oral History Association, and British oral historians founded the Oral History Society in 1969. In 1981, Mansel G. Blackford, a business historian at Ohio State University, argued that oral history was a useful tool to write the history of corporate mergers. More recently, Harvard Business School launched the Creating Emerging Markets project, which "explores the evolution of business leadership in Africa, Asia, and Latin America throughout recent decades" through oral history. "At its core are interviews, many on video, by the School's faculty with leaders or former leaders of firms and NGOs who have had a major impact on their societies and enterprises across three continents." There are now numerous national organizations and an International Oral History Association, which hold workshops and conferences and publish newsletters and journals devoted to oral history theory and practices. Specialized collections of oral history sometimes have archives of widespread global interest; an example is the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, a department of the University Library of Yale.

Oral history began with a focus on national leaders in the United States, but has expanded to include groups representing the entire population. In Britain, the influence of 'history from below' and interviewing people who had been 'hidden from history' was more influential. However, in both countries elite oral history has emerged as an important strand. Scientists, for example, have been covered in numerous oral history projects. Doel (2003) discusses the use of oral interviews by scholars as primary sources, He lists major oral history projects in the history of science begun after 1950. Oral histories, he concludes, can augment the biographies of scientists and help spotlight how their social origins influenced their research. Doel acknowledges the common concerns historians have regarding the validity of oral history accounts. He identifies studies that used oral histories successfully to provide critical and unique insight into otherwise obscure subjects, such as the role scientists played in shaping US policy after World War II. Interviews furthermore can provide road maps for researching archives, and can even serve as a fail-safe resource when written documents have been lost or destroyed. Roger D. Launius (2003) shows the huge size and complexity of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) oral history program since 1959. NASA systematically documented its operations through oral histories. They can help to explore broader issues regarding the evolution of a major federal agency. The collection consists primarily of oral histories conducted by scholars working on books about the agency. Since 1996, however, the collection has also included oral histories of senior NASA administrators and officials, astronauts, and project managers, part of a broader project to document the lives of key agency individuals. Launius emphasizes efforts to include such less-well-known groups within the agency as the Astrobiology Program, and to collect the oral histories of women in NASA.

Folklore roots and ordinary people

Contemporary oral history involves recording or transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical events. Some anthropologists started collecting recordings (at first especially of Native American folklore) on phonograph cylinders in the late 19th century. In the 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project--part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)--sent out interviewers to collect accounts from various groups, including surviving witnesses of the Civil War, slavery, and other major historical events. The Library of Congress also began recording traditional American music and folklore onto acetate discs. With the development of audio tape recordings after World War II, the task of oral historians became easier.

In 1946, David P. Boder, a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with "displaced persons"--most of them Holocaust survivors. Using the first device capable of capturing hours of audio--the wire recorder--Boder came back with the first recorded Holocaust testimonials and in all likelihood the first recorded oral histories of significant length.

Many state and local historical societies have oral history programs. Sinclair Kopp (2002) report on the Oregon Historical Society's program. It began in 1976 with the hiring of Charles Digregorio, who had studied at Columbia with Nevins. Thousands of sound recordings, reel-to-reel tapes, transcriptions, and radio broadcasts have made it one of the largest collections of oral history on the Pacific Coast. In addition to political figures and prominent businessmen, the Oregon Historical Society has done interviews with minorities, women, farmers, and other ordinary citizens, who have contributed extraordinary stories reflecting the state's cultural and social heritage. Hill (2004) encourages oral history projects in high school courses. She demonstrates a lesson plan that encourages the study of local community history through interviews. By studying grassroots activism and the lived experiences of its participants, her high school students came to appreciate how African Americans worked to end Jim Crow laws in the 1950s.

Naison (2005) describes the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), an oral community history project developed by the Bronx County Historical Society. Its goal was to document the histories of black working- and middle-class residents of the South Bronx neighborhood of Morrisania in New York City since the 1940s.

src: www.newark.rutgers.edu

In the Middle East

The Middle East often requires oral history methods of research, mainly because of the relative lack in written and archival history and its emphasis on oral records and traditions. Furthermore, because of its population transfers, refugees and émigrés become suitable objects for oral history research.

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In Asia

Oral history in China

The rise of oral history is a new trend in historical studies in China that began in the late twentieth century. Some oral historians, stress the collection of eyewitness accounts of the words and deeds of important historical figures and what really happened during those important historical events, which is similar to common practice in the west, while the others focus more on important people and event, asking important figures to describe the decision making and details of important historical events. In December 2004, the Chinese Association of Oral History Studies was established. The establishment of this institution is thought to signal that the field of oral history studies in China has finally moved into a new phase of organized development.

Notable oral historian

Te-Kong Tong (1920-2009) was a prominent Chinese American historian and recognized as the "pioneer of oral history in contemporary China (????????????)". His view on oral history of historical characters is that historians should identify the changes of the people, and posit their evolution in parallel with that of history.His work include:

• The Memoirs of V. K. Wellington Koo (1977)
• The Memoirs of Hu Shih (1977)
• The Memoirs of Li Tsung-jen (1979)

Oral history in Southeast Asia

While oral tradition is an integral part of ancient Southeast Asian history, oral history is a relatively recent development. Since the 1960s, oral history has been accorded increasing attention both on institutional as well as individual levels, representing "history from above" and "history from below".

In Oral History and Public Memories, Blackburn writes about oral history as a tool that was used "by political elites and state-run institutions to contribute to the goal of national building" in postcolonial Southeast Asian countries. Blackburn draws most of his examples of oral history as a vehicle for "history from above" from Malaysia and Singapore.

In terms of "history from below", various oral history initiatives are being undertaken in Cambodia in an effort to record lived experiences from the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime while survivors are still living. These initiative take advantage of crowdsourced history to uncover the silences imposed on the oppressed.

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Methods

Historians, folklorists, anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists, journalists, linguists, and many others employ some form of interviewing in their research. Although multi-disciplinary, oral historians have promoted common ethics and standards of practice, most importantly the attaining of the "informed consent" of those being interviewed. Usually this is achieved through a deed of gift, which also establishes copyright ownership that is critical for publication and archival preservation.

Oral historians generally prefer to ask open-ended questions and avoid leading questions that encourage people to say what they think the interviewer wants them to say. Some interviews are "life reviews," conducted with people at the end of their careers. Other interviews focus on a specific period or a specific event in people's lives, such as in the case of war veterans or survivors of a hurricane.

Feldstein (2004) considers oral history to be akin to journalism, Both are committed to uncovering truths and compiling narratives about people, places, and events. Felstein says each could benefit from adopting techniques from the other. Journalism could benefit by emulating the exhaustive and nuanced research methodologies used by oral historians. The practice of oral historians could be enhanced by utilizing the more sophisticated interviewing techniques employed by journalists, in particular, the use of adversarial encounters as a tactic for obtaining information from a respondent.

The first oral history archives focused on interviews with prominent politicians, diplomats, military officers, and business leaders. By the 1960s and '70s, influenced by the rise of new social history, interviewing began to be employed more often when historians investigated history from below. Whatever the field or focus of a project, oral historians attempt to record the memories of many different people when researching a given event. Interviewing a single person provides a single perspective. Individuals may misremember events or distort their account for personal reasons. By interviewing widely, oral historians seek points of agreement among many different sources, and also record the complexity of the issues. The nature of memory--both individual and community--is as much a part of the practice of oral history as are the stories collected.

src: www.oralhistory.org

Legal interpretation and relationship to historical truth

In 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Delgamuukw v. British Columbia trial, ruled that oral histories were just as important as written testimony. Of oral histories, it said "that they are tangential to the ultimate purpose of the fact-finding process at trial - the determination of the historical truth."

Writers who use oral history have often discussed its relationship to historical truth. Gilda O'Neill writes in Lost Voices, an oral history of East End hop-pickers: "I began to worry. Were the women's, and my, memories true or were they just stories? I realised that I had no 'innocent' sources of evidence - facts. I had, instead, the stories and their tellers' reasons for remembering in their own particular ways.' Duncan Barrett, one of the co-authors of The Sugar Girls describes some of the perils of relying on oral history accounts: "On two occasions, it became clear that a subject was trying to mislead us about what happened - telling a self-deprecating story in one interview, and then presenting a different, and more flattering, version of events when we tried to follow it up. ... often our interviewees were keen to persuade us of a certain interpretation of the past, supporting broad, sweeping comments about historical change with specific stories from their lives." Alessandro Portelli argues that oral history is valuable nevertheless: "it tells us less about events as such than about their meaning [...] the unique and precious element which oral sources force upon the historian ... is the speaker's subjectivity."

Regarding the accuracy of oral history, Jean-Loup Gassend concludes in the book Autopsy of a Battle "I found that each witness account can be broken down into two parts: 1) descriptions of events that the witness participated in directly, and 2) descriptions of events that the witness did not actually participate in, but that he heard about from other sources. The distinction between these two parts of a witness account is of the highest importance. I noted that concerning events that the witnesses participated in, the information provided was surprisingly reliable, as was confirmed by comparison with other sources. The imprecision or mistakes usually concerned numbers, ranks, and dates, the first two tending to become inflated with time. Concerning events that the witness had not participated in personally, the information was only as reliable as whatever the source of information had been (various rumors); that is to say, it was often very unreliable and I usually discarded such information."

Another noteworthy case is the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya against the British colonizers. Central to the case was Historian Caroline Elkins' study on UK's brutal suppression of the uprising. Elkin's work on this matter is largely based on oral testimonies of survivors and witnesses, which causes controversy in academia: "Some praised Elkins for breaking the 'code of silence' that had squelched discussion of British imperial violence. Others branded her a self-aggrandising crusader whose overstated findings had relied on sloppy methods and dubious oral testimonies." The British court eventually ruled in the Kenyan claimants' favor, which also serves as a response to Elkin's critics as Justice McCombe's 2011 decision stressed the "substantial documentation supporting accusations of systematic abuses". After the ruling, newly discovered files containing relevant records of former colonies from the Hanslope disclosure corroborated Elkin's finding.

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Other controversies in oral history

In Guatemalan literature, I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), brings oral history into the written form through the testimonio genre. I, Rigoberta Menchú is compiled by Venezuelan anthropologist Burgos-Debray, based on a series of interviews she conducted with Menchú. The Menchú-controversy arose when historian David Stoll took issue with Menchú's claim that "this is a story of all poor Guatemalans". In Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999), Stoll argues that the details in Menchú's testimonio are inconsistent with his own fieldwork and interviews he conducted with other Mayas. According to Guatemalan novelist and critic Arturo Arias, this controversy highlights a tension in oral history. On one hand, it presents an opportunity to convert the subaltern subject into a "speaking subject". On the other hand, it challenges the historical profession in certifying the "factuality of her mediated discourse" as "subaltern subjects are forced to [translate across epistemological and linguistic frameworks and] use the discourse of the colonizer to express their subjectivity".

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Organizations

National and international organizations promote scholarship in the field. Some notable examples include:

Journals

• Oral History Journal in Britain was established two years before the Review.
• Oral History Review, a scholarly journal begun in 1974.

Listserves

• H-ORALHIST is an H-Net Discussion Network established in 1996, based on an earlier listserv, OHA-L, developed by Terry Birdwhistell of the University of Kentucky. It works by email and knits together an international network of researchers interested in creating and using oral history. Its daily email reach 3400 subscribers with discussions of current projects, teaching methods, and the state of historiography in the field. H-ORALHIST is especially interested in methods of teaching oral history to graduate and undergraduate students in diverse settings. H-ORALHIST publishes syllabi, outlines, handouts, bibliographies, tables of contents of journals, guides to term papers, listings of new sources, library catalogs and archives, and reports on new software, datasets, and other materials. H-ORALHIST posts announcements of conferences, fellowships, and jobs. It also carries information about new books and commissions book reviews.

src: www.glbthistory.org

See also

• National Day of Listening
• Oral history preservation
• Oral tradition

Oral history organizations

• American Folklife Center
  • Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center
• Baylor University Institute for Oral History
• Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University
• Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries
• New York Public Library Community Oral History Projects
• Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
• Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida
• Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina
• StoryCorps

Prominent oral historians

• David P. Boder
• Alex Haley
• Oscar Lewis
• Alessandro Portelli
• Studs Terkel
• Wallace Terry, journalist and author of oral history anthologies featuring African American war veterans and of black journalists

Fictional oral history

• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), a novel by Max Brooks

Ethical Guidelines

• Is Your Oral History Legal and Ethical? (2012). by the Oral History Society

References

Further reading

• Charlton, Thomas L.; Myers, Lois E.; Sharpless, Rebecca, eds. (2007). History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology. AltaMira Press. ISBN 978-0-7591-0230-9. 
• Cruikshank, Julie. "Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, & Social Imagination." UBC Press, 2005. ISBN 0-7748-1187-0.
• Doel, Ronald E. "Oral History of American Science: a Forty-year Review." History of Science 2003 41(4): 349-378. ISSN 0073-2753
• Feldstein, Mark. "Kissing Cousins: Journalism and Oral History." Oral History Review 2004 31(1): 1-22. ISSN 0094-0798
• Grele, Ronald J. "Oral history" in Kelly Boyd, ed. (1999). Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing vol 2. Taylor & Francis. pp. 881-83. ISBN 9781884964336. CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list (link)
• Grele, Ronald J. et al. Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History Praeger Publishers, 1991
• Hill, Iris Tillman. "Community Stories: a Curriculum for High School Students." Magazine of History 2004 18(2): 43-45. ISSN 0882-228X
• Hoopes, James. Oral History: An Introduction for Students U of North Carolina Press, 1979.
• Kelin, Daniel, II. To Feel as Our Ancestors Did: Collecting and Performing Oral Histories. Heinemann, 2005. 200 pp.
• Launius, Roger D. "'We Can Lick Gravity, but Sometimes the Paperwork Is Overwhelming': NASA, Oral History, and the Contemporary Past." Oral History Review 2003 30(2): 111-128. ISSN 0094-0798
• Leavy, Patricia (2011). Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539509-9. 
• Naison, Mark. "The Bronx African American History Project." OAH Newsletter 2005 33(3): 1, 14. ISSN 1059-1125
• Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Ritchie, Donald A. (2010). The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-533955-0. 
• Sommer, Barbara W.; Quinlan, Mary Kay (2009). The Oral History Manual (2 ed.). AltaMira Press. ISBN 978-0-7591-1157-8. 
• Sinclair, Donna and Kopp, Peter. "Voices of Oregon: Twenty-five Years of Professional Oral History at the Oregon Historical Society." Oregon Historical Quarterly 2002 103(2): 250-263. ISSN 0030-4727
• Stokes, Cynthia (2000). Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History. Teachers & Writers Collaborative. ISBN 978-0-915924-12-7. 
• Tomes, Nancy. "Oral History In The History Of Medicine." Journal of American History 1991 78(2): 607-617. ISSN 0021-8723
• Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), focus on Africa
• Vilanova, Mercedes. "International Oral History," History Workshop Journal (1995) No. 39 pp. 67-70 in JSTOR; by a leader of the Oral History movement in Spain

External links

• From the British Library:

• Food Stories - Food-related oral history recordings from the BL Sound Archive
• Oral history collections and activities, including National Life Stories

• From the US Government:

• Oral History of the US House of Representatives
• US Senate Oral History Project

• From Academia:

• Oral History in the Digital Age at Michigan State University (East Lansing, Michigan)
• African American Oral History Collection at University of Louisville (Louisville, Kentucky)
• Romano L. Mazzoli Oral History Collection at University of Louisville (Louisville, Kentucky)
• Canadian Military Oral History Collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections
• American Century Oral History Project at St. Andrew's Episcopal School is one of the largest pre-collegiate oral history projects and archives in the US
• University at Buffalo Archives Oral History Collection from the University at Buffalo Libraries
• Oral History of American Music at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut)

• Over 600 oral histories of combat veterans, from the Witness to War Foundation (non-profit)
• In the First Person - index of 2,500+ collections of international oral histories in English
• Oral history in the teaching of US History
• NYC records from Sept. 11 - includes more than 12,000 pages of oral histories as told by 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians
• The HistoryMakers: African American Video Oral History Archive (non-profit)
• FirstPersonUSA.org - a project of citizen historians concerned with preserving the memories of ordinary Americans
• Voices Through Corridors - Oral History accounts of hospital patients and staff in Walsall
• Gary Greaves Oral History Digitization Project. - "The recordings all relate to post-war Seattle history and cover a diverse array of topics -- such as transportation, race relations, housing, city planning and labor."
• Richard S. Hobbs Oral History Interviews with Revels Cayton. - "The collection consists of oral history interview recordings and partial transcripts of interviews, mostly conducted by Richard Hobbs with Revels Cayton. Interviews were used for the book The Cayton Legacy: an African American family.

World War II

• Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front Oral History Project Collection of oral histories with women and men living and working on the U.S. home front during WWII Regional Oral History Office and National Park Service
• Recollections of WWII - Directory of United Kingdom Oral History Collections Relating to WWII
• 376th Heavy Bombardment Group Oral Histories from the Ball State University Digital Media Repository

Vietnam War

• Vietnam War Era Veterans Oral Histories from the Ball State University Digital Media Repository

Organizations

• H-ORALHIST is an H-Net Discussion Network (or edited Blog) established in 2006
• Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling - Concordia University
• The Australian Centre for Oral History
• Oral History Association of Australia
• Institut d'histoire du temps présent (in French)
• Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore
• Pritzker Military Library's "Stories of Service" collects and records first-hand accounts from veterans and citizens involved in military efforts

"Creating Emerging Markets Project". Harvard Business School. 

Technical

• Oral History in the Digital Age at Michigan State University (East Lansing, Michigan)
• Digital Omnium: Oral History, Archives and Digital Technology by Doug Boyd
• Digital Audio and Portable Recorders: The Basics by Doug Boyd
• General principles and best practices for oral history
• Dédalo Project - Open software platform for management of intangible cultural heritage and oral history
• Advice on how to conduct oral history interviewing from the East Midlands Oral History Archive
• "Ask Doug" resource for choosing a digital audio recorder, Oral History in the Digital Age
• Testimony software from the Australian Centre for Oral History
• The manual of analogue restoration techniques by Peter Copeland is designed to aid audio engineers and audio archivists, and is available via the British Library Sound Archive
• [http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/95.full "OHMS: enhancing Access to Oral History for Free" by Doug Boyd. Oral History Review Volume 40

Issue 1 Summer:Fall 2013, Oxford University Press]

• Doing Oral History with Vietnam War Veterans EDSITEment lesson plan

Source of the article : Wikipedia