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When approaching recent historical events, where the scope of destruction and loss can be unfathomable in scale, oral history can bring both connection and immediacy through individual stories of loss, grief, rescue, or triumph that would otherwise disappear in the grand sweep of “Great Men and their Deeds.”
Scholar Indira Chowdhury describes the approach:
[T]he method enables the documentation of certain aspects of historical experience that are often missing from other kinds of historical sources. Oral historians not only interview and engage in conversation with living sources, they also find themselves challenged in a unique way—the historian is transformed into a protagonist in the dialogue. Oral history is perhaps the only field where the sources talk back to the historian, confronting, disputing, disrupting, and sometimes resisting the historian’s understanding of the past (Frisch 1990; Shopes 2012). Oral history works with the interviewee as a partner in dialogue and the verbal form historical truth can take is always co-constructed (Cook and Goodall 2013; Goodall and Cadzow 2009; Portelli 1991).
Some of the most effective (and affecting) projects using this approach concern communities that may be far outside of the audience’s experience, whether due to time, geography, or identity. Works like Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, Hard Times by Studs Terkel, and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy document their subjects through the voices of those who lived through specific moments and events that can be overwhelming or remain unknown without a more interpersonal method.
