Oral history

This article is about the academic discipline of oral history. For the practice of recording history orally, see Oral tradition. For the academic study of oral tradition, see Oral tradition § Study.

An Evergreen Protective Association volunteer recording an oral history at Greater Rosemont History Day.

Oral history is the collection and study of historical information from people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries.[1][2][3][4] Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.[5]

The term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to the study of information about past events that witnesses told anybody else,[6][7] but professional historians usually consider this to be the study of oral tradition or traditional oral history due to the source receiving the information aurally.

  1. ^ oral history. (n.d.) The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia®. (2013). Retrieved 12 March 2018 from https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/oral+history
  2. ^ "Definition of oral history from the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science".
  3. ^ "oral history". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). HarperCollins.
  4. ^ "oral history". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 22 March 2020.
  5. ^ Nkala, Gugulethu Shamaine; David, Rodreck (2015). "Oral History Sources as Learning Materials: A Case Study of The National University of Science and Technology". Oral History Journal of South Africa. 3 (2): 82. doi:10.25159/2309-5792/340.
  6. ^ "Definition of oral history from the Macmillan Dictionary".
  7. ^ "Definition of oral history from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary".