“Oral history is a history built around people” (Thompson: 2016. pg 39).
Oral history is the process of interviewing people for a range of perspectives on certain issues. There are many benefits to interviewing people, especially when considering many perspectives that you may not find, or are even written about in standard history books. Thompson explains that oral history has lesser restrictions than what might be found in a book, and as such “the critical effect of this new approach is to allow evidence from a new direction” allowing the historian a greater choice of topic and able to select specific interviewees (2016. pg 36). It means that historical research no longer has to be just from books, but many people can contribute- even those who may not have been able to before from a lack of resources. This opens up and shifts many areas of study, one of which Thompson argues was “the transforming impact of oral history upon the history of the family. Without its evidence, the historian can discover very little indeed about either the ordinary family’s contacts with neighbours and kin, or its internal relationships” (Thompson: 2016. pg 37).
“Oral history gives a voice to those who are otherwise not heard and has the potential to reveal undisclosed individual, cultural and subcultural memories” as is written by Goodchild, Ambrose and Maye-Banbury- whose paper argues for the use of oral history in energy research (2017. pg 138). They argue that oral history can be vital in revealing problems that otherwise may not have even been thought of- one example being that several interviewees dreaded going to a cold bed before the implementation of central heating in homes (2017. pg 141).
Equally, what distinguishes oral history from other historical sources is the interview itself; “the tone and volume range and the rhythm of popular speech carry implicit meaning and social connotations which are not reproducible in writing” (Portelli: 2016. pg 50). Much of what can be conveyed through an interview can just as easily be lost through writing, but they are what Portelli calls “essential narrative functions: they reveal the narrators’ emotions, their participation in the story, and the way the story affected them” (2016. pg 51). It is in this way Portelli argues that oral histories are “credible” sources alongside written documents; “the important in oral history may not lie in adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge” (2016. pg 50). An interviewees’ involvement within a certain point in history may say much more than a book can write on the same topic, and their interview would reflect their personal understanding of it past facts and statistics into emotion and connection.
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