Doing Oral History

by Donald A. Ritchie

Oral history is vital to our understanding of the cultures and experiences of the past. Unlike written history, oral history forever captures peoples feelings, expressions, and nuances of language. This book explains the principles and guidelines created by the Oral History Association to ensure the professional standards of oral historians. It explores all aspects of oral history, from starting an oral history project---including funding, staffing, and equipment---to conducting interviews, publishing, videotaping, preserving materials, teaching oral history, and using oral history in museums and on the radio. A definitive step-by-step guide that provides advice and explanations on how to create recordings that illuminate human experience for generations to come. Illustrated with examples from a wide range of fascinating projects, this authoritative guide offers clear, practical, and detailed advice for students, teachers, researchers, and amateur genealogists who wish to record the history of their own families and communities.

Genres: Oral History, Nonfiction, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 1994

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a how-to book for people interested in documenting the past with audio recording. Although it was written before the existence of current digital audio technology, most of it's advice is extremely useful for the current historian or archivist of oral histories. This is because the same amount of preparation and care is required (perhaps even more so) in order to ensure that material is findable by researchers and comprehensible when found.

Oral history has suffered from a sense of being "popular history" or "amateur history" in the academic historical profession, and its power to offer insights into the past were still largely unexplored when this book came out. That has mostly passed, but there are still people who think that if they make any recorded interview with an older person is "oral history," and that it is "easy" to do. This book dispels these misconceptions and gives the first time oral historian a great deal of excellent advice on how to avoid the worst mistakes.

I have been involved in some degree of amateur oral history myself, and I would require anyone who wished to assist me to read this book and discuss its contents with me before allowing them into the field.