20 Critical developments
thrust it out. The gesture said, 'Take it!' and I took the baby and I clasped it,
at which point she snatched it away and another lady, another baby, and I
guess I had clasped about a dozen babies in about two minutes. It would be
almost two years later at Harvard when Dr Jerome Bruner told me, you were
participating in one of the oldest ceremonies of humankind called 'the laying
on of hands'; that in their way they were saying to you, 'through this flesh
which is us, we are you, and you are us'. There were many, many other things
that happened in that village that day, but I was particularly struck with the
enormity of the fact that they were dealing with me and seeing me in the
perspective of, for them, the symbol of twenty-five millions of us black
pecple in this country whom they never had seen. They took me in to their
mosque. They prayed in Arabic which I couldn't understand. Later the crux
of the prayer was translated, 'Praise be to Allah for one long lost from us
whom Allah has returned.' And that was the way they saw that.
When it was possible to leave, since we'd come by water, I wanted to go out
over the land. My five senses had become muted, truncated. They didn't work
right. If I wanted to feel something I would have to squeeze to register the
sense of feeling. Things were misty. I didn't hear well. I would become aware
the driver sitting right by me was almost shouting something and I just hadn 't
heard him up to that point. I began now, as we drove out over the back
country road, with drums distantly heard around, to see in my mind's eye, as
if it were being projected somehow on a film, a screen almost, rough, ragged,
out of focus, almost a portrayal of what I had studied so, so much about: the
background of us as a people, the way that ancestrally we who are in this
country were brought out of Africa. [... ]
NOTE
J. Vansina, De la Tradition Orale: Essai de Methode Historique, Belgique, Tervuren,
1961. Translated as Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, Chicago,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.
2 The voice of the past
Oral history
Pau/ Thompson
Paul Thompson is Research Professor at the University of Essex. © Paul Thompson
1978, 1988.Extracted from P.Thompson, The Voiceof the Past: Oral History, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1988 (second edition) by permission of Oxford University
Press.
AII history depends ultimately upon its social purpose. This is why in the
past it has been handed down by oral tradition and written chronicle, and
why today professional historians are supported from public funds, children
are taught history in schools, amateur history societies blossom, and popular
history books rank among the strongest bestsellers. Sometimes the
social purpose of history is obscure. There are academics who pursue factfinding
research on remote problems, avoiding any entanglement with wider
interpretations ar contemporary issues, insisting only on the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake. They have one thing in common with the bland
contemporary tourism which exploits the past as if ít were another foreign
country to escape to: a heritage of buildings and landscape so lovingly
cared for that it is almost inhumanly comfortable, purged of social suffering,
cruelty, and conflict to the point that a slavery plantation becomes a
positive pleasure. Both look to their incomes free from interference, and in
return stir no challenge to the social system. At the other extreme the social
purpose of history can be quite blatant: used to provide justification for
war and conquest, territorial seizure, revolution and counter-revolution, tbe
rule of one cla ss or race over another. Where no history is readily at hand,
it will be created. South Africa's white rulers divide their urban blacks
between tribes and 'homelands'; Welsh nationalists gather at bardic eisteddfods;
the Chinese of the cultural revolution were urged to construct the
new 'four hístoríes' of grass-roots struggle; radical feminísts looked to the
history of wet-nursing in their search for mothers without maternal
instinct. Between these two extremes are many other purposes, more or less
obvious. For politicians the past is a quarry for supportive symbols:
imperial victories, martyrs, Victorian values, hunger marches. And almost
equally telling are the gaps in the public presentation of history: tbe
silences in Russia on Trotsky, in West Germany on the Nazí era, in France
on the Algerian war.
Through history ordinary people seek to understand the upheavals and
changes which they experience in their own Iives: wars, social transformations
7.
1
22 Critical developments
like the changing position of youth, technological changes like the end of
steam power, or personal migration to a new community. Family history
especially can give an individual a strong sense of a much longer personal
lifespan, which will even survive their own death. Through local history a
village or town seeks meaning for its own changing character and newcomers
can gain a sense of roots in personal historical knowledge. Through political
and social history taught in schools children are helped to understand, and
accept, how the political and social system under which they live came about,
and how force and conftict have played, and continue to play, their part in
that evolution.
The challenge of oral history lies partly in relation to this essential social
purpose of history. This is a major reason why it has so excited some historians,
and so frightened others. In fact, fear of oral history as such is groundless.
We shal! see later that the use of interviews as a source by professional
historians is long-standing and perfectly compatible with scholarly standards.
American experience shows c1earlyenough that the oral history method can
be regularly used in a social!y and political!y conservative manner; or indeed
pushed as far as sympathy with Fascism in John Toland's portrait of Adolf
Hit/er (New York, 1976).
Oral history is not necessarily an instrument for change; it depends upon
the spirit in which it is used. Nevertheless, oral history certainly can be a
means for transforming both the content and the purpose ofhistory. It can be
used to change the focus ofhistory itself, and open up new areas ofinquiry; it
can break down barriers between teachers and students, between generations,
between educational institutions and the world outside; and in the writing of
history - whether in books, or museums, or radio and film - it can give back
to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a
central place.
Until the present century, the focus of history was essentially political: a
documentation of the struggle for power, in which the lives of ordinary
people, or the workings of the economy or religion, were given little attention
except in times of crisis such as the Reformation, the English Civil War, or the
French Revolution. Historical time was divided up by reigns and dynasties.
Even local history was concerned with the administration ofthe hundred and
parish rather than the day-to-day life of the community and the street. This
was partly because historians, who themselves then belonged to the administering
and governing c1asses,thought that this was what mattered most. They
had developed no interest in the point of view of the labourer, unless he was
specifically troublesome; nor - being men - would they have wished to inquire
into the changing life experiences of women. But even if they had wished to
write a different kind of history, it would have been far from easy, for the raw
material from which history was written, the documents, had been kept or
destroyed by people with the same priorities. The more personal, local, and unofficial
a document, the less likely it was to survive. The very power structure
worked as a great recording machine shaping the past in its own image.
The voice 01 the past 2j
This has remained true even after the establishment of local record offices.
Registers of births and marriages, minutes of councils and the administra,tion
of poor relief and welfare, national and local newspapers, schoolteachers log
books - legal records of all kinds are kept in quantity; very often there are
also church archives and accounts and other books from large private firms
and landed estates, and even private correspondence from the ruling landowner
c1ass.But of the innumerable postcards, letters, diaries, and ephemera
of working-c1ass men and women, or the papers of small businesses like
corner shops or hill farmers, for example, very little has been preserved
anywhere.
Consequently, even as the scope of history has widened, the original political
and administrative focus has remained. Where ordinary people have
been brought in, it has been generally as statistical aggregates derived from
some earlier administrative investigation. Thus economic history is constructed
around three types of source: aggregate rates of wages, prices, and
unemployment; national and international political interventions into the
economy and the information which arises from these; and studies of particular
trades and industries, depending on the bigger and more successful
firms for records of individual enterprises. Similarly, labour history for long
consisted of studies on the one hand of the relationship between the working
c1asses and the state in general, and on the other of particular but
essentially institutional accounts of trade unions and working-c1ass political
organizations; and, inevitably, it is the larger and more successful organizations
which normally leave records or commission their own histories. Social
history has remained especially concerned with legislative and administrative
developments like the rise of the welfare state; or with aggregatedata such
as population size, birth rates, age at marriage, household and family structure.
And among more recent historical specialisms, demography has been
almost exclusively concerned with aggregates; the history of the family, despite
some ambitious but ill-judged attempts to break through to a history of
emotion and feeling, has tended to follow the lines of conventional social
history; while at least until quite recently women's history has to a remarkable
extent focused on the political struggle for civil equality, and above al!
for the vote.
There are, of course, important exceptions in each of these fields, which
show that different approaches are possible even with the existing sources.
And there is a remarkable amount of unexploited personal arid ordinary
information even in official records - such as court documents - which can be
used in new ways. The continuing pattern of historical writing probably
reflects the priorities of the majority of the profession - even if no longer of
the ruling c1ass itself - in an age of bureaucracy, state power, science, and
statistics. Nevertheless, it remains true that to write any other kind of history
from documentary sources remains a very difficult task, requiring special
ingenuity. It is indicative of the situation that E.P. Thompson's The Making
01 the English Working Class (1963) and James Hinton's The First Shop
r 24 Critical developments
Stewarďs Movement (1973) cach depended to a large extent on reports by
paid government inforrners, in the early nineteenth century and First World
War respeetively. When soeialist historians are redueed to writing history
from the reeords of government spies, the eonstraints imposed are clearly
extreme. We cannot, alas, interview tombstones, but at least for the First
World War period and baek into the late nineteenth eentury, the use of oral
history immediately provides a rieh and varied souree for the ereative
historian.
ln the most general sen se, onee the life experienee of people of all kinds
ean be used as its raw material, a new dimension is given to history. Oral
history provides a souree quite similar in character to published autobiography,
but much wider in scope. The overwhelming majority of published
autobiographies are from a restricted group of political, social, and intellectual
leaders, and even when the historian is lueky enough to find an
autobiography from the particular plaee, time, and social group whieh he
happens to need, it may well give little or no attention to the point at issue.
Oral historians, by eontrast, may choose precisely whom to interview and
what to ask about. The interview will provide, too, a means of diseovering
written documents and photographs whieh would not have otherwise been
traced. The confines of the scholar's world are no longer the well-thumbed
volumes of the old eatalogue. Oral historians can think now as if they themselves
were publishers: imagine what evidence is needed, seek it out and
capture it.
For most existing kinds of history, probably the critical effect of this new
approach is to allow evidence from a new direetion. The historian of
working-class politics can juxtapose the statements of the government or the
trade union headquarters with the voice of the rank and file - both apathetic
and militant. There can be no doubt that this should make for a more realistic
reconstruction of the past. Reality is complex and many-sided; and it is a
primary merit of oral history that to a much greater extent than most sources
it allows the original multiplicity of standpoints to be reereated. But this
advantage is important not just for the writing of history. Most historians
make implicit or explicit judgements - quite properly, since the soeial purpose
of history demands an understanding of the past whieh relates direetly or
indirectly to the present. Modern professional historians are less open with
their social message than Macaulay or Marx, since seholarly standards are
seen to confliet with declared bias. But the social message is usually present,
however obscured. It is quite easy for a historian to give most ofhis attention
and quotations to those soeial leaders whom he admires, without giving any
direet opinion of his own. Since the nature of most existing records is to
refleet the standpoint of authority, it is not surprising that the judgement of
history has more often than not vindieated the wisdom of the powers that be.
Oral history by eontrast makes a much fairer trial possible: witnesses ean now
also be ealled from the under-classes, the unprivileged, and the defeated. It
provides a more realistie and fair reeonstruetion of the past, a challenge to
The voice ofthe past 25
the established aeeount. In so doing, oral history has radieal implieations for
the soeial message of history as a whole.
At the same time oral history implies for most kinds of history some shift
of focus. Thus the edueational historian bccomes eoncerned with the experiences
of children and students as well as the problems of teachers and administrators.
The military and naval historian ean look beyond command level
stratcgy and equipment to the conditions, recreations, and morale of other
ranks and the lower deck. The social historian can turn from bureauerats and
politieians to poverty itself, and learn how the poor saw the relieving officer
and how they survived his refusals. The politieal historian ean approach the
voter at home and at work; and can hope to understand even the workingclass
conservative, who produced no newspapers or organizations for investigation.
The eeonomist can wateh both employer and worker as soeial beings
and at their ordinary work, and so come closer to understanding the typical
economie process, and its suceesses and eontradictions.
ln some fields, oral history ean result not merely in a shift in foeus, but also
in the opening up of important new areas of inquiry. Labour historians, for
example, are enabled for the first time to undertake effective studies of the illunionized
majority of male workers, of women workers, and of the normal
experience of work and its impact on the family and the comrnunity. They are
no longer eonfined to those trades which were unionized, or those which
gained eontemporary publicity and investigation because of strikes or
extreme poverty. Urban historians similarly ean turn from well-explored
problem areas Iike the slums to look at other typical forms of urban social
life; the small industrial or market town, for example, or the middle-class
surburb, construeting the loeal patterns of social distinctions, mutual help
between neighbours and kin, leisure and work. They can even approach from
the inside the history of immigrant groups - a kind of history which is certain
to become more important in Britain, and is ma inly documented only from
outside as a soeial problem. These opportunities -- and many others - are
shared by social historians: the study of working-class leisure and culture, for
exarnple; or of crime from the point of view of the ordinary, often undetected
and socially semi-tolerated poacher, shoplifter, ar work-pilferer.
Perhaps the most striking feature of all, however, is the transforming
impact of oral history upon the history of the fami ly. Without its evidence,
the historian can discover very little indeed about either the ordinary family's
contacts with neighbours and kin, or its internal relationships. The roles of
husband and wife, the upbringing of girls and boys, emotional and material
eonfticts and dcpendence, the struggle of youth for independence, courtship,
sexual behaviour within and outside marriagc, contraception and abortion all
these were effectively sec ret areas. The only clues were to be gleaned from
aggregate statistics, and from a few - usually partial - observers. The historical
paueity whieh results is well summed up in Michael Anderson's brilliant,
speeulative, but abstract study of Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century
l-ancushire (1971): a lop-sided, empty frame. With the use of interviewing, it
,
26 Critica/ developments
is now possible to develop a much fuller history of the family over the last
ninety years, and to establish its ma in patterns and changes over time, and
from place to place, during the life cycle and between the sexes. The history of
childhood as a whole becomes practicable for the first time. And given the
dominance of the family through housework, domestic service, and motherhood
in the lives of most women, an almost equivalent broadening of scope
is brought to the history of women.
ln all these fields of history, by introducing new evidence from the underside,
by shifting the focus and opening new areas of inquiry, by chal1enging
some of the assumptions and accepted judgements of historians, by bringing
recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored, a cumulative
process of transformation is set in motion. The scope of historical writing
itself is enlarged and enriched; and at the same time its social message
changes. History becomes, to put it simply, more democratic. The chronicle
of kings has taken into its concern the life experience of ordinary people. But
there is another dimensi on to this change, of equal importance. The process
of writing history changes along with the content. The use of oral evidence
breaks through the barriers between the chroniclers and their audience;
between the educational institution and the outside world.
This change springs from the essentially creative and co-operative nature
of the oral history method. Of course oral evidence once recorded can be
used by Ione scholars in libraries just Iike any other type of documentary
source. But to be content with this is to lose a key advantage of the method:
its flexibility, the ability to pin down evidence just where it is needed. Once
historians start to interview they find themselves inevitably working with
others - at the Jeast, with their informants. And to be a successful interviewer
a new set of skil1s is needed, including an understanding of human relationships.
Some people can find these skil1s almost immediately, others need to
learn them; but in contrast to the cumulative proces s of learning and amassing
information which gives such advantage in documentary analysis and
interpretation to the professional historian well on in life, it is possible to
learn quite quickly to become an effective interviewer. Hence historians as
field-workers, while in important respects retaining the advantages of professional
knowledge, also find themselves olf their desk, sharing experience on a
human level, [... J
The co-operative nature of the oral history approach has led to a radical
questioning of the fundamental relationship between history and the community.
Historical information need not be taken away from the community
for interpretation and presentation by the professional historian. Through
oral history the community can, and should, be given the confidence to write
its own history.
[... ] oral historians have travelled a long way from their original aim - and
there is, undoubtedly, some danger of conftict between the two. On the level
of the interview itself, for example, there have been telling criticisms of a
relationship with informants in which a middle-c1ass professional determines
The voice of the past 27
who is to be interviewed and what is to be discussed and then disappears with
a tape of somebody's life which they never hear about again - and if they did,
might be indignant at the unintended meanings imposed on their words.
There are c1ear social advantages in the contrasting idea I of a self-selected
group, or an open public meeting, which focuses on equal discussion and
encourages local publication of its results; and of individual recording sessions
which are conversations rather than directed interviews. But there are
also drawbacks in the alternative.
The self-selected group wil1 rarely be fully representative of a community.
It is much more likely to be composed from its central groups - people from a
skilled working-c1ass or lower middle-c1ass background. The local upper
c\ass will rarely be there, nor will the very poor, the less confident especially
among women, or the immigrant from its racial minority. A truer and socially
more valuable form of local oral history will be created when these other
groups are drawn in. Its publications will be much more telling if they can
juxtapose, for example, the mistress with the domestic servant, or a millowner
with the millworkers. It will then reveal the variety of social experience in the
community, the groups which had the better or the worse of it - and perhaps
lead to a consideration of what might be done about it. Local history drawn
from a more restricted social stratum tends to be more complacent, a
re-enactment of community myth. This certainly needs to be recorded and
a self-sufficient local group which can do this is undoubtedly helping many
others besides itself. But for the radical historian it is hardly sufficient.
History should not merely comfort; it should provide a challenge, and
understanding which helps towards change. For this the myth needs to
become dynamic. II has to encompass the complexities of conflict. And for
the historian who wishes to work and write as a socialist, the task must be not
simply to celebrate the working c1ass as it is, but to raise its consciousness.
There is no point in replacing a conservative myth of upper-class wisdom
with a lower-class one. A history is required which leads to action: not to
confirrn, but to change the world.
In principle there is no reason why local projects should not have such an
object, while at the same time continuing to encourage self-confidence and
the writing of history from within the community. Most groups will normally
contain some members with more historical experience. They certainly need
to use tact; to undervalue rather than emphasize their advantage. But it is
everybody's loss in the long run ifthey disown it: their contribution should be
to help the group towards a wider perspective. Similar observations apply in
the recording session where the essential need is mutual respect. A superior,
d?minating attitude does not make for a good interview anyway. The oral
hlstorian has to be a good Iistener, the informant an active helper. As George
Ewart Evans puts it .- 'although the old survivors were walking books, I could
not just leaf them over. They were persons.' I And so are historians. They have
Come for a purpose, to get information, and if ultimately ashamed of this
they should not have come at all. A historian who just engages in haphazard
r 28 Critical developments
reminiscence will collect interesting pieces of inforrnation, but will throw
away the chancc of winning the critical evidence for the structure of historical
argument and interpretation.
The relationship between history and the community should not be onesided
in either direction: but rather a series of exchanges, a dialectic, between
inforrnation and interpretation, between educationists and their localities,
between classcs and generations. There will be room for many kinds of oral
history and it will have many different social consequences. But at bottom
they are all related.
Oral history is a history built around people. It thrusts life into history
itself and it widens its scope. It allows heroes not just from the leaders, but
from the unknown majority of the people. It encourages teachers and
students to become fellow-workers, It brings history into, and out of, the
community. ft helps the less privileged, and especially the old, towards dignity
and self-confidence. It makes for contact - and thence understanding between
social classes, and between generations. And to individual historians
and others, with shared meanings, it can give a sense of belonging to a place
or in time. In short it makes for fuller human bcings. Equally, oral history
offers a challenge to the accepted myths of history, to the authoritarian
judgement inherent in its tradition. It provides a means for radical
transformation of the social meaning of history.
NOTE
I Oral History, 1973, vol. I, no. 4, p. 57.
3 Oral history and Hard Times
A review essay
Michael Frisch
Michael Frisch lectures in History and American Studies at the State University of
New York, Bulfalo. Reprinted from Oral History Review, 1979, vol. 7, pp. 70-79, by
permission ar the Oral History Association. Originally published in Red Buffalo,
1972, vol. 1, nos. 2/3.
Studs Terkel's book, Hard Times, is subtitled An Oral History oj the Great
Depression, and it offers a good base for exploring a number of problems
inherent in doing, reading, and thinking about oral history, and for understanding
why these problems matter. It is, perhaps, appropriate to the topic to
begin with some comments about this paper's own genesis and history.
Hard Times is a massive compilation of more than 150 self-portraits of
American lives - culled from hundreds more - centred on the experience of
the 1930s. The interviews were conducted, edited, and arranged by Studs
Terkel, the remarkable Chicago radio personality whose special gift for
getting all sorts of people to talk about themselves was so profoundly
demonstrated in Division Street: America. The people of Hard Times range
widely, from New Deal officials and famous businessmen and artists to
anonymous farmers, workers, and plain people. Terkel also includes a number
of interview s with young people who can, of course, only talk about the
Depression in terms of what they have read or been told, and who therefore
e~able us to see the book's topic in terms of received memory as well as
gtven. To read through the enormous range of personality and experience
presented in the book is to encounter, in a sort of multimedia exposure, the
depth and drama of life in the Depression. As has virtually every other
reader, Ifound it moving, poignant, intense, human, and instructive.
d~~ortly after a first reading, I noticed that the cover of my paperback
e l110n said, in a blurb from Newsweek, 'It will resurrect your faith in all of
~~llto read this book.' The inside front cover, quoting Saturday Review,
int ~d the book 'A huge anthem in praise of the American Spirit.' These
an r~f~ed me ~o~siderably, because I found the book more depressing than
feli 111~ el~e 111 ItS overall implications. It had all the moving force of life, I
itn ' WhlChIS why it could so profoundly suggest the Depression's destructive
ablPI·at~ton the lives people líved, the personalities that emerged, and on the
I les di
Rath 111 rviduals retained to understand what was happening to them.
"'by ~ tha~ 'resurrecting my faith in all of us', the book seemed to show
mencans find it so hard to examine their culture and institutions