Oral History: An Appreciation

Abstract

In the generation since Allan Nevins demonstrated the great potential of personal narratives as sources for writing history, much time and effort have been spent, and much money, in the activity that has come to be called history . But the product of all this effort and expense remains largely untested in terms of its promise. Broad and undiscriminating charges of wasteful triviality or of biased and selfserving narrations do little to improve or clarify the situation. Nor do naive and enthusiastic praises of its potential serve to prove its worth. Even the occasional use of oral history information by biographers does not establish its validity as an important source. The promise remains impressive in the abstract, but the product is still untested. Yet, if oral history is to be a reliable research tool, if it is to be respected historical evidence, and if it is to justify a national association in its name, then those who produce oral history, the scholars that use its product, and the institutions that finance its projects must have some means of understanding its proper role and of evaluating what is being done in the field. We need to know more about the place of oral history in the system of historical analysis, and we need to understand better the contribution that oral history can make to the writing of history. Clues are scattered in the literature on oral history. This essay attempts to bring them together and to place oral history in its proper context, to give it a proper value as historical evidence, and to offer some ideas for critical testing in order that the product may justify the promise.