Oral History

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that oral history is a record of individual human lives and experiences transmuted through the filtering prism of individual narrative and the human voice that is cataloged or arranged by oral historians to reveal more about the emotional and factual texture of a particular period of human life. The author points out that, rather than the analytical lens of history, the medium of oral history provides a discursive, meandering, but emotionally connective way of accessing how history was experienced during the time it was experienced, rather than simply how history affects our lives today in the eyes of philosophers, pundits, and professional historians. The paper adds that now history must be academically validated and objective, which has caused some historians to state that the idea of oral history is a contradiction in terms.

From the Paper:

"The multifaceted nature of presenting oral narratives as a history, with all of their contradictions, enables historical understanding as a whole to be much richer. By interviewing many individuals, a historian may work against possible biases within individual perspectives. By presenting different perspectives, the reader may now judge the events and the credibility of the different sources, while still gaining a sense of the emotional intensity of what it was like to "be there". Presenting a variety of narratives, as done in Dublin and Licht's article on the miners, as well as in Central City Blues, also undercuts yet another criticism of oral history as a technique, that it is more an encapsulation of the rapport between the interviewer and the interviewee than a genuine rendering of how the individual was, at the point in time he or she was describing."

More papers on Oral History:

• Narrative Essay # 50334 : "Oral History"
• Research Paper # 107779 : "Oral History and Historiography"
• Essay # 50292 : "An Examination of Oral History"

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