Essay On Oral History

Oral history is the methodical compilation of contemporary depositions of peoples their and their personal experiences. Simply put by Gerry Albarelli in “The art of oral history”, “ Oral history is the firsthand testimony of people experiences of history (p.14).” Secondary sources are not considered oral history. Oral historians try to confirm their data, analyze them, and place them in an authentic historical text. The process of oral history is putting together and being able to interpret the memories and voices of people, participants, and communities in events from the past. Oral history should be a familiarized dialogue conversing about various conditions of the past thought to be of historical importance and willfully recorded on record.

By associating everyday, ordinary people in the historical conversation it gives the audience a chance to develop their own interpretation, and through this process creating history then becomes more honest. This “bottom up” way of history also inspires that this contemporary mold can be broken, in numerous ways. Oral history combines memories and personal experiences of historical understanding through interviews that are recorded. An oral history interview should consist of an adequately prepared questioning before hand from the interviewer, the interviewee and recording of the dialogue in audio or video format. The interviewer should transcribe and summarize the interview recording which then should be placed in an archives or library. Transcribing is very vital. Alessandro Portelli explains in his work “What makes oral history different” the importance of transcripts and its impact on history very eloquently, “ The transcript turns aural objects into visual ones, which inevitably implies changes and interpretations”(p.33). Oral history interviews can be utilized for various projects such as research; they can be cited in books, radio or video documentaries, dramatization, museum exhibition or other types of public presentations. Oral history does not include random

Class sections who are sometimes marginalized in conventional histories; people such as women, minorities, and people not in the public eye per se have been able to record their own histories and the histories of those they consider important using oral history. It can contribute new information, different explanations to information we no little about, and diverse understandings, which can bridge a vey important gap. Spoken word can send gestures and emotions with instant impact, an impact that the written word cannot match, as well as protecting a record of local dialects and accents, as Portelli put it, “We hardly need repeat here that writing represents language almost exclusively by means of segmentary traits( graphemes, syllables, words and sentences)(p.34)”. It allows the historian to ask questions of his or her interviewee, to actually visualize a historical source manifest it, instead of depending on sources manifested by other which can preserve many untruths. Even in the absence of written documentation, groups such as the working classes, women and ethnic minorities, for instance, their history is no longer limited to those in power positions, those who are rich and literate, their history now gives people a much more comprehensive, truthful and accurate picture of the past. Making the case for women shunned in history authors of the work “Learning to listen: interviewing techniques and