Oral History: The Importance And Significance Of Oral History

In chapter nine, both Troup and Green discuss the importance and significance of oral history. Oral history is used in many ways by historians and by everyday common people. We all have stories to tell, stories we have lived from the inside out. We give our experiences an order. We organize the memories of our lives into narratives (stories). Oral history listens to these stories. Oral history is the systematic collection of living people’s testimony about their own experiences. Historians have finally recognized that the everyday memories of everyday people, not just the rich and famous, have historical importance. If we do not collect and preserve those memories, those stories, then one day they will disappear forever. This is why we historians feel it is important to try to preserve surviving oral accounts to understand the past. We do not want to the voices of the past to disappear or to go unheard forever. We want to undercover the voices of the past and how they lived and how their society was like. However, we historians have to be cautious of biased and unreliable sources.

Thomason discusses the importance of oral history, especially memory for one Anzac Australian and New Zealand Army Corps soldier, Fred Farrall. Farrall was a veteran of the First World Word and Thomson wanted to retell his oral account of what he through in his life and his experience he went through joining the First World War. Overall, I enjoyed reading this chapter and understand the importance of oral history and how it can benefit us historians into understanding what some people went through and encountered in the past. Oral stories and accounts are a useful tool for historians to analyze and use to get a better understanding of a person’s way of life and memory of a historical encounter they went