Oral History

Oral History is a method of collecting and preserving historical information trough recorded interviews with people who witnessed the past. A long time ago people didn’t have libraries and tape recorders and a lot of them didn’t know how to write and couldn’t even read, so they were forced to preserve their history in oral form. Particular events have been passed from one generation to another through songs and legends. Eventually, this songs and legends had been written down, for example Iliad and Odyssey of antiquity or Koran (Papazian, 2003). Herodotus, a famous Greek historian and storyteller, back in the fifth century B.C. was one of the first to use methods of oral history. He was very interested in people’s stories, especially those one’s who traveled and who could tell him about past events. Herodotus wrote down all these stories and they are available to people nowadays (Oral hisotry). Historians and librarians from Wisconsin and California had done the earliest oral history interviews in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. They conducted interviews with first settlers of the West and Midwest. However, historian Allan Nevin, was the first who invented the modern method of tape-recorded interviews. Back in 1947 in New York, he established the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. Since then a lot of similar programs and projects had been opened by Universities, Government agencies and private institutions (Introduction to Oral History).

Without invention of the tape recorder, oral history wouldn’t be so extensively used today, because without a sound recording system, in order to save spoken words, you had to rely on your memory. Reporters didn’t write down Abraham Lincoln’s well-known “Lost Speech” because they were so into it that they forgot to take notes (Hoops 7). This situation is impossible today because almost every journalist these days has a tape recorder.

With the progress of new recording techniques, Oral History is becoming more and more important. Oral history often provides information that would be not possible to get otherwise. If a hundred years ago in order to tell news to your friends who were far away or to make a business deal you had to write a letter, in our days you can just simply use a phone. Thus, there are no written records of such events or transactions for the history. Illegal activities in any society are seldom written down, so the only way to know about it is the oral history. Totalitarian regimes often have a tight grip on information dissemination and have a tendency to depict historic events the way they want to see them, so oral history in such societies is the only way sometimes to reestablish events of the past. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, about Soviet Union’s forced labor camps, is based on stories of fellow prisoners with whom he shared the Gulag cells. Back then the Soviet government wouldn’t let these people to write down about their