Why Call It “Oral History”? Searching for Early Usage of a Generic Term

Abstract

I have discovered that the term oral was coined as early as 1863, and the concept implied in that early usage is remarkably similar to the meaning of oral in today's parlance. Like almost everyone else I thought Professor Allan Nevins of Columbia University devised oral in 1948, possibly adapting the term from a Greenwich Village bohemian named Joe Gould (1889-1957) who claimed to be recording overheard conversations for a magnus opus he was writing (but alas, never finished) entitled An Oral History of Our Time. My discovery was a classic case of serendipity. Let me recount the moment of realization by setting the scene for you: It was late and I was tired. My eyes were smarting and my empty stomach rumbled. I had worked doggedly from mid-afternoon right through the dinner-hour, ignoring hunger pangs and a slack throat which cried for the soothing balm of an evening libation. I didn't want to look at my wristwatch because it was probably after nine o'clock-much too late to keep the big library lighted, much too late to be tunneling through what seemed like an impenetrable mountain of bibliography. But guilt pangs were stronger than hunger pangs: I had to keep reading, even if the historical literature was turgid and uninformative, because I had promised myself I would master all the published Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society before I called it quits for the night. This was reading I should have done years before, but in one way or another I had managed to postpone it. Now I felt obligated to master all those blackbound volumes because I was doing the background reading for writing my book, Vermont: A Bicentennial History.' I didn't want to overlook anything I was expected to know before I started to write-any obscure minutiae I might find useful to illustrate a point or buttress an argument, any minor item of knowledge which would mislead reviewers into thinking I knew the history of the state whose heritage I was trying to inter-