Making History Come Alive

An oral history collection project and radio series

WHY USE ORAL HISTORY?

Making History Come Alive

"Oral History is not only a tool or method for recovering history; it is also a theory of history which maintains that the common folk and the dispossessed have a history and that this history must be written."

Gary Okihiro - "Oral History and the Writing of Ethnic History"

Oral history offers a unique view of the past. What makes oral history distinct is that a story is being told. The way in which the story is told - what is left in and what is considered unimportant - can tell much about a person. It is history that begins and ends with personal experience.

Collecting oral histories can teach many skills: researching, interviewing, active listening, organizing material - just to name a few.

RE- VALUING APPALACHIAN LIFESTYLES

The act of collecting the material also serves two important functions. One, it provides the interviewer with a valuable experience, but it is important also to the person who is being interviewed, the interviewee. These are often older people and the fact that someone would want to interview them may give them a sense that their lives have some value; some interest to someone else. It frequently means more to the interviewee than you might realize.

For a number of years I was in a group called Oral History In Ohio (OHIO). This group was composed of people - many of them educators or historians, who used oral histories in their work. One of the most interesting projects presented was one done by a middle school in Cleveland. The teachers had their students go to a nearby nursing home and interview the residents there. Each student conducted an interview with a person. In return for the interview the student had to come up with a "gift' of some sort to give something back to the older person. One teenager, during the interview, discovered that the man who he was talking with had worked in downtown Cleveland throughout his whole life and spoke vividly of the streets and buildings there. He was now wheelchair-bound and never left the nursing home. As his gift the young man went downtown and took photos of the streets the interviewee had talked about. Then the student gave them to the elderly gentleman.

Once collected, the oral histories can be used in a variety of ways. You could simply start an archive of historical material on a topic or community. Some classes have compiled magazines or books of stories based on oral histories. They could also serve as the raw material for a children's book, a play, an exhibit, or a radio or TV feature.

There's another reason to conduct oral histories for those of us who live in Appalachian Ohio. Many of the towns in Appalachia that existed in the earlier part of the century are dying out. Little is left to show that these were once bustling, vibrant communities. For many of these towns there are no written records – they didn’t have a newspaper. . .or a mayor. . . or a town hall - the history is in people's memories.

Once the older people who live in these communities are gone, there will be no memory of what the towns were like. That bit of history will be lost forever. Now is the time to preserve local stories. Because of the coming millennia, people are thinking about what has happened in the last 100 to 1000 years. And this is the first century that we have been able to record oral history, so it’s very appropriate that we use the technology we have to do so.

This is a picture of a collection of houses called Row. It was part of the Sugar Creek Coal Company Town on Athens Rt. 550. All of these houses - and hundreds more that made up that community - are gone now.

So - how do you go about preparing do an oral history project? See Preparing for an Interview and Conducting an Interview .