Oral History Analysis

In Doing Oral History, Donald Ritchie, historian of the United States Senate, explains that “Oral History collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews.” He says that memory is the core of oral history, and that this is where meaning can be extracted and preserved (Ritchie, 2003). When we collect and oral history from a subject, we are collecting their memories which Ritchie argues are of historical significance, especially when coming from under-represented groups of people. He says these interviews “may be used for research or excerpted in a publication, radio or video documentary, museum exhibition, dramatization or other form of public presentation. Recordings, transcripts, catalogs,

This was when the modern concept of oral history was developed. The FWP was designed to document the diversity of the American experience and the ways in which people were dealing with the Great Depression. The original plans for the publication of these oral histories fell victim to budget cuts and the change in national priorities, due to start of WWII, caused most of these oral histories to remain in manuscript form at the Library of Congress and other libraries around the nation. Some of the best known FWP oral histories are the “slave narratives” collected from former slaves living in the

For that, I interviewed my boss, Karen. I see her almost every work day but there were still many things I wanted to ask her about. I knew that she had been married to a man before she met her wife, and that she still had his last name even after separating and remarrying. I also knew that her father was a Methodist minister and performed her marriage ceremony back when he could’ve gotten in a lot of hot water for doing so. I knew that she was adopted, too. But the rest of her life, the in-between moments, were still a mystery to me. So, I really enjoyed that interview. As you can tell from the transcription, we laughed a lot and got along well. I think she felt comfortable and she told me later that she had enjoyed talking with me. I also came more prepared and with more questions. It was hard to do my initial research on my student interviewee because there wasn’t a lot of prior information that I could find about her. With Karen, I not only had my own prior information, but she is also easily found on the internet. A lot of that has to do with her age and the businesses she has been involved