Oral history
Though oral history has been claimed to be the first kind of history, the professional discipline in Britain was long suspicious of non-written sources. Local historians and folklorists were at the forefront of its revival, with university-backed initiatives starting to emerge in the 1950s. The new (social, labour, women's) histories of the 1960s provided not only a subject matter more amenable to oral history but also a methodological approach less concerned with traditional sources, with oral testimonies proving one way of providing a voice for those otherwise hidden from history. There are still doubts from historians as to the reliabiility and validity of oral testimonies, but the discipline, often in the pages of Oral History, the journal of the Oral History Society (founded 1973), continues to develop its own discussion of the methodological issues involved. In addition, the cultural turn and the growth of interest in the construction of identities has led to BME and LGBT oral histories becoming more prevalent.
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- Historians:
- Briggs, Asa
Samuel, Raphael Elkan - Institutions:
- Oral History Society
- Themes:
- Community history
History from below
Social history
Related publications
- Patricia M. Thane, 'Oral history, memory and written tradition : an introduction', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 9 (1999), 161–68
J. Bornat and H. Diamond, 'Women's history and oral history: developments and debates', Women's History Review, 16, 1 (2007), 19–39
The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (2nd ed., London, 2006)
