Diverse Personnel in Libraries
Diversity
Identity
Interviewees
Interviewing
Life History
Memory
Mentoring
Oral Historians: Tasks and Roles
Oral History
Oral History: Definitions
Shared Authority
Spectrum Initiative
Storytelling
Trauma
Validity
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- One of the two things that distinguish oral history from other disciplines
is “the search for a connection between biography and history, between
individual experience and the transformations of society.” i
- “… the focus of oral history is to record as complete
an interview as possible—an interview which contains, within itself,
its own system of structures, not a system derived from the narrow conventions
of written history.” ii
- “I think that oral history is a tool to democratize the study
of history.” iii
- “Just as we work with the interaction between the social and
the personal, we also work with the interaction between narrative, imagination,
and subjectivity on the one hand, and plausibly ascertained facts on the
other.” iv
- “So what we create is a dialogic text of multiple voices and
multiple interpretations: the many interpretations of the interviewees,
our interpretations, and the interpretations of the readers.” v
- “It is this dialectic between the telling of the story and
the inquisitive and critical mind, whether of the “professional”
historian or of the interested neighbor, which gives oral history its
real dimension.” vi
- “Oral history should be a way to get a better history, a more
critical history, a more conscious history which involves members of the
public in the creation of their own history.” vii
- “Because oral history is a way of involving people heretofore
uninvolved in the creation of the documents of their past, it is an opportunity
to democratize the nature of history not simply by interviewing them but
by seeing.that involvement as a prelude to a method which allows people
to formulate their own meanings of their past experiences in a structured
manner in response to informed criticism.” viii
- “Oral history is unique in that it creates its own documents,
documents that are by definition explicit dialogues about the past, with
the “subject” necessarily triangulated between past experience
and the present context of remembering.” ix
- “Narrators articulate memory, evaluation, and anecdote in the
dialogues with interviewers who are trying to reconstruct a broader framework
and therefore invite them to highlight the encounter between history and
their lives, private worlds and events of general interest.” x
- “Oral history, then, offers less a grid of standard experiences
than a horizon of shared possibilities, real or imagined.” xi
- “By showing people trying to make sense of their lives at a
variety of points in time and in a variety of ways, by opening this individual
process to view, the oral history reveals patterns and choices that, taken
together, begin to define the reinforcing and screening apparatus of the
general culture, and the ways in which it encourages us to digest experience.” xii
- “Oral history is also good at restoring pivotal moments to
life, at helping us imagine the drama of impending decisions and their
unimaginable consequences, as distinct from the all-too-familiar monuments
these decisions become in the landscape of the historical past tense.” xiii
i Portelli, Alessandro, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and
the Art of Dialogue (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997),
6.
ii Grele, Ronald J., “Movement Without Aim: Methodological and
Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” In Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes
of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd ed. (Chicago: Precedent Publishing,
1985), 135.
iii (Ronald J. Grele, , interviewed by Studs Terkel), “It’s
Not the Song, It’s the Singing: Panel Discussion on Oral History,”
In Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd ed
(Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), 87.
iv Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and
the Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997),
64.
v Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and the
Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997),
65.
vi Grele, Ronald J., “Preface,” Envelopes of Sound: The Art
of Oral History 2nd ed (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), vii.
vii Grele, Ronald J., “Preface,” Envelopes of Sound: The Art
of Oral History 2nd ed (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), viii
viii Grele, Ronald J., “Preface,” Envelopes of Sound: The
Art of Oral History 2nd ed (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), viii
ix Frisch, Michael, ”Quality in History Programs,” In A Shared
Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History
(Albany, NY: Statue University of New York Press, 1990), 188.
x Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and
the Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997),
161.
xi Portelli, Alessandro (The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and
the Art of Dialogue. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997),
88.
xii Frisch, Michael, “Oral History and Hard Times,” In A
Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History
(Albany, NY: Statue University of New York Press, 1990), 11.
xiii Frisch, Michael, “Oral History, Documentary, and the Mystification
of Power,” In A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning
of Oral and Public History (Albany, NY: Statue University of New York
Press, 1990), 163
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