Oral history: some methodological and theoretical considerations

Abstract

Historians are always concerned about the ways in which the materials they use have been created. Thus, those who use quantative data feel the compulsion to study the ways government agencies, especially the Census Bureau, went about the task of collecting the data. In like manner, political historians are deeply concerned about the ways in which political tracts, congressional records and personal correspondence came into being, and how they are collected and preserved. Oral Historians are equally concerned about the genesis of the interviews they use, and the nature of the dialectical relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee which created that interview. But, alone among historians the documents we use are created by historians themselves, and in most cases are used by the very people who created them. Thus, just as we would want to know about the field of statistics and the training of the particular statisticians who created the Census, we must, to understand the oral history, investigate the field of history and the particular historians who created the oral histories.