Oral History essays

Oral History essays At its most basic definition, oral history is an account of the past conveyed through word of mouth. Oral history tells of cultures and individuals by presenting oral commentary of events, situations and feelings of individuals. Oral history has made important contributions to the ways in which historians and the general public understands and interprets the past. (Stursberg 1997) The beginning of the modern form of oral history is said have originated with Allan Nevins of Columbia University. According to Peter Stursberg, in his Canadian Encyclopedia article on oral history, the modern oral-history movement began in 1948 when Nevin interviewed subjects accompanied by a graduate student who took long hand notes. Nevin evoked a sort of stream of consciousness, or as Stursberg calls it, "stream of reminiscences" from his subjects. Oral histories provide an effective tool that allows historians and anthropologists a chance to preserve oral traditions, skills and crafts. (Vansina 129) In her book, "Oral Tradition as History," Jan Vansina writes that, "The full cultural or individual significance of quilting or the making of a musical instrument can only be obtained through the nuance and subtlety of oral language. Thus we can learn much from a personal history that we could never obtain from a textbook." The practice and method of oral history has had a tradition probably as long as history itself. Herodotus used the method of interviewing survivors' experiences about the past for his account of the Persian wars in the 5th century BC for example. (Stursberg) Ancient cultures would pass down the history of their tribes using the oral tradition. Chosen tribal "historians" would memorize long tracks, usually in the forms of poems or ballads, of tribal history and be charged with maintaining the facts in memory and passing it down to following generations. (Vansina, ...