Oral Histories

This basic manual offers detailed advice on setting up an oral history project, conducting interviews, making videorecordings, preserving oral history collections in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting oral history. Using the existing Q and A format, the third edition asks new questions and augments previous answers with new material, particularly in these areas:1. Technology 2. Teaching 3. Presentation 4. Legal considerations 5. Theory and Memory 6. Internationalism. These changes make the third edition of Doing Oral History an even more useful tool for beginners, teachers, archivists, and all those oral history managers who have inherited older collections that must be converted to the latest technology.

Oral history is a particularly useful way to capture ordinary people's lived experiences. This innovative book introduces the full array of oral history research methods and invites students and qualitative researchers to try them out in their own work. Using choreography as an organizing metaphor, the author presents creative strategies for collecting, representing, analyzing, and interpreting oral history data.

The Oral History Manual is designed to help anyone interested in doing oral history research to think like an oral historian. Recognizing that oral history is a research methodology, the authors define oral history and then discuss the methodology in the context of the oral history life cycle - the guiding steps that take a practitioner from idea through access/use. They examine how to articulate the purpose of an interview, determine legal and ethical parameters, identify narrators and interviewers, choose equipment, develop budgets and record-keeping systems, prepare for and record interviews, care for interview materials, and use the interview information.

Oral history is increasingly acknowledged as a key tool for anyone studying the history of the recent past. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of oral history theory in an accessible format. The book is structured around key themes, including the peculiarities of oral history, the study of the self, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, memory, narrative, performance and power.

Written in a clear, accessible style, this new volume offers historians, social scientists and other practitioners engaged in this difficult, rewarding work a scholarly and practical guide to the methods of oral history. It will interest researchers and students in a wide variety of disciplines including history, sociology, anthropology, education, psychology, social work and ethnographic methods.

In this fourth edition of his pioneering work, fully revised with Joanna Bornat, Paul Thompson challenges the accepted myths of historical scholarship. He discusses the reliability of oral evidence in comparison with other sources and considers the social context of its development. He looks at the relationship between memory, the self and identity. He traces oral history through its own past and weighs up the recent achievements of a movement which has become international, with notably strong developments in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, South Africa and the Far East, despite resistance from more conservative academics.