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Lowcountry Oral History Initiative (LOHI) Toolkit: Plan Your Project: Where to Start

How-to guide for community and campus oral history projects brought to you by the Lowcountry Oral History Initiative at the College of Charleston Libraries.

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Defining and Distinguishing Oral History

Oral history is a method of systematically collecting, preserving, and sharing memories of the past (e.g. a time period, an event, a place, a specific phenomenon, etc.) from individuals or communities.

  • Oral history has its roots in the oral tradition. The oral tradition began as a method of communication in preliterate societies: those that did not have a formal writing system preserved their stories, histories, knowledge, and traditions in oral form and passed them down through generations. The oral tradition is also a longstanding cultural practice in many societies across the globe, including historically marginalized (e.g. Black and Indigenous) communities. 
  • After President Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, he immediately implemented the New Deal (1933-1938): a monumental effort to stimulate economic recovery from the Great Depression (1929-1939). In practice, the New Deal was a comprehensive set of programs administered by numerous governmental agencies—at least forty—created for the purpose of carrying out the New Deal. One of those agencies was the Works Progress Administration, the programs of which focused on putting unemployed Americans back to work through construction projects and arts projects. One of the arts projects was the Federal Writers Project (FWP), the most significant initiative of which was the Slave Narratives. Between 1936 and 1938, writers collected firsthand accounts of slavery from over 2,300 formerly enslaved individuals across seventeen states.
  • In the 1960s and 1970s, oral history gained popularity in the academy because of the advent of social history. Unlike other historical fields (e.g. political history, intellectual history, economic history, and legal history)—which typically examine the experiences of dominant social groups (e.g. whites, men, the wealthy)—social history focuses on the lived experiences of those who do not hold social, political, or economic power. Social history became a predominant field in the 1960s and 1970s because the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement—and other movements born out of them—were helping to upend the various power structures (race, class, and gender) that characterize American society. Oral history, accordingly, became a primary method used by social historians to document "histories from below."
  • Oral histories provide a rare and unique privilege which other historical research methods do not afford—the ability to ask individuals about their firsthand knowledge of and experience(s) during a historical event or time period.
  • Granting individuals the opportunity to provide eyewitness testimonies of the past may challenge existing historical knowledge or provide entirely new information or interpretations of the past altogether. This is especially important in traditional scholarship where the voices and perspectives of historically marginalized groups are largely missing, misrepresented, or underrepresented. Relatedly, traditional archives are filled with silences of the historically marginalized. Oral histories grant an opportunity to counter these silences and erasure.

Although one conducts an interview to produce an oral history, it is important to draw a distinction between an oral history and a standard interview. To distinguish between the two, remember the "history" in oral history.

  • Oral histories are one of the research methods used to interpret the past. Historians typically consider the "past" to be—at the very minimum—ten to twenty years from the present day. Standard interviews, on the other hand, have no particular time period to which they must adhere.
  • Oral histories also join other items such as photographs, letters, diaries/journals, and newspapers as primary sources—objects and documents that are produced during a particular historical period and are used in the future to interpret the past. (Oral histories are considered primary sources because they are an individual's or a community's recollections of the past). Standard interviews, on the other hand, are not conducted with the intent of being used as a primary source.
  • There is an extensive planning process that precedes the conducting and collecting of oral histories, as well as an extensive process afterwards, which centers on the processing, preserving, and sharing of oral histories. Standard interviews are not subject to this planning process and are not obligated to be processed, preserved, or shared.