Videohistory: Focusing on the American Past

Abstract

The technological revolution of the twentieth century has provided historians with new sources of documentation for their research. With the advent of video technology, the researcher has access to new types of visual information about people, places, objects, and interactions. Just as the development of audio recording technology in the 1940s stimulated the field of oral history, the ease and low cost of video technology in the 1970s offered new opportunities for the historian interested in using visual documentation. Self-conscious and structured historical documentation with video -often called videohistoryprovides an essential component of research for historians interested in material culture, the use of objects, and the relationships of people to one another and to their environments. Many historians have also found videohistory an excellent way to capture the history of people and communities who do not leave extensive written documentation. Visual information, then, supplements and complements documentary evidence, audiotaped oral histories, and artifacts. The historian who uses the video medium to study a person's environment (and ways of interacting with that environment) and material culture encounters a density of information rarely found in other forms of historical documentation. The words, background, objects, and movements each tell a separate story; when analyzed together, the subtle relationships between them provide an information total greater than the sum of the parts. Individual scholars and projects nationwide have created a wide range of videohistory materials that are now available for research use. Videohistory collections contain visual portraits of scientists, politicians, doctors, teachers, and artists. A video camera captured veterans discussing their Vietnam experience and a group of women scientists from Los Alamos recalling the first atomic bomb test. Videohistorians have recorded processes of traditional food preparation by southwestern native Americans, dairy farming by Minnesotans, and clockmaking by New Englanders to document rapidly changing life-styles. Videohistorians have preserved glimpses of life in the city and rural towns, in the laboratory and the slate quarry, on the farm and in the factory. Videohistory collections mirror the diversity of