LIFE OF THE MIND CONSORTIUM

BACKGROUND

Oral history is the systematic collection of living people's testimony about their own experiences. Oral history is not folklore, gossip, hearsay, or rumor. From: Judith Moyer

One of the two things that distinguish oral history from other disciplines is “the search for a connection between biography and history, between individual experience and the transformations of society.” From: Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

By showing people trying to make sense of their lives at a variety of points in time and in a variety of ways, by opening this individual process to view, the oral history reveals patterns and choices that, taken together, begin to define the reinforcing and screening apparatus of the general culture, and the ways in which it encourages us to digest experience. From: Michael Frisch. “Oral History and Hard Times,” in A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany, NY: Statue University of New York Press, 1990.



 

Once Upon A Lifetime

This Oral History Symposium held on October 15, 2007 was a spectacular opportunity to share expertise and stories.

 

Barry Rauhauser sharing the voice and image of an African American woman who served in the military.

We came to this exciting event to hear about oral history projects on national and local levels and, more importantly, to hear from oral historians, faculty and students why it is important for us to share our stories with them. We learned some of the whys and wherefores of the collection and use of oral history and how Willow Valley residents can contribute to this important work. The stories of our lifetimes are worth telling, and together they are history.

 

 

All of us have stories to tell about what it was like to grow up in “the old days,” what our hometowns and schools were like, what we ate, the chores we did, the games we played, where we hung out as teenagers, “courting” rituals, and all those big and small events that shaped our youth. What do we remember of what was happening in the world as we were growing up and how did that effect our lives?

 

Professor Bill Dorman interviewing May Hirata on her experiences in the Poston internment camp

Then, what was it like to leave home for the first time, whether it was to go to school, to get married, to get a job, to join the military, or just to get that first apartment on your own? Whether you were a stay-at-home wife and mother, a small cog in a big wheel, or the big wheel yourself; your story is important as one of many that together tell our story as a nation and a people. The everyday happenings of our lives reveal the social history of our society within the larger context of national and international events.

 

Oral history provides the opportunity to develop “conversations across generations.” Sharing your life stories with students and scholars of today and tomorrow is important for their understanding of what life was like in our day, and they have no way of knowing if we don’t tell them.

Among the presenters for Once Upon A Lifetime were:

Bill Dorman, Professor & Chair, Communication and Theater Depaartment, Millersville University

Jane Hannigan, Willow Valley resident

May Hirata, Willow Valley Resident

Paul Irion, Willow Valley Resident

Bob McDaniel, Willow Valley Resident

Marilyn Parrish, Assistant Professor & University Archivist, Millersville University

Barry Rauhauser, Stauffer Curator, Lancaster County Historical Society

Jack Reardon, Willow Valley Resident

Tom Ryan, Executive Director, Lancaster County Historical Society

Barbara Keener Shenk, Narrator for Millersville Project

Linda Shopes, Oral Historian, Public History Consultant

Latiaynna Tabb, Millersville University Student

Tracey Weis, Professor of History & Director, Women’s Study Program, Millersville University

Tom Whary, Willow Valley resident

 

A delightful interpretive reading by Tom Whary of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! by A. Wolf

History of Oral History

Linda Shopes writes: "Historians generally consider oral history as beginning with the work of Allan Nevins at Columbia University in the 1940s. Nevins was the first to initiate a systematic and disciplined effort to record on tape, preserve, and make available for future research recollections deemed of historical significance. While working on a biography of President Grover Cleveland, he found that Cleveland's associates left few of the kinds of personal records--letters, diaries, memoirs--that biographers generally rely upon. Moreover, the bureaucratization of public affairs was tending to standardize the paper trail, and the telephone was replacing personal correspondence. Nevins came up then with the idea of conducting interviews with participants in recent history to supplement the written record. He conducted his first interview in 1948 with New York civic leader George McAneny, and both the Columbia Oral History Research Office--the largest archival collection of oral history interviews in the world--and the contemporary oral history movement were born." Please visit her website Making Sense of Oral History.

Mutual Benefits

1.) Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. Taken from Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California.

2.) The human life span puts boundaries on the subject matter that we collect with oral history. We can only go back one lifetime, so our limits move forward in time with each generation. This leads to the Oral Historian's Anxiety Syndrome, that panicky realization that irretrievable information is slipping away from us with every moment..

3.) Oral History collecting is a means of developing new constituencies, building community support and recognition among local institutions as well as sharing information that might tragically be lost to future generations.

4.) Oral History serves as a model of a cross-generational and cross-institutional cooperation as well as a means to share from many diverse views.

The above etching was created by the artist, Tom Hirata. The righthand side of the piece includes a copy of Executive Order 9066 signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942 as well as the following text:

 

 

“It is this dialectic between the telling of the story and the inquisitive and critical mind, whether of the “professional” historian or of the interested neighbor, which gives oral history its real dimension." --Ronald J. Grele

2008 Last Update