Oral History Activity: Listening to History

Questions to Ask

Who is talking?

One can catalogue any number of ways different “whos” inflect oral history narratives. Yet identities are neither singular nor fixed. “Who” exactly is speaking is defined by both the speaker’s relationship to the specific events under discussion and temporal distance from them.

Listen to these three interviews with members of the same family. Consider how gender and generation shaped the stories:

Strohl family oral history excerpts courtesy of Thomas Dublin, from Thomas Dublin, with photographs by George Harvan, When the Mines Closed: Stories of Struggles in Hard Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Click to hear audio Read Transcripts	Click to hear audio Read Transcripts	Click to hear audio Read Transcripts

Who is the interviewer?

The following two interviews with the same person, one conducted by an African-American interviewer, one by a white interviewer, present a stark example of the way the narrator’s response to the social identity of the interviewer shapes the interview. The narrator is Susan Hamlin or Hamilton, a former slave in South Carolina. These interviews were conducted with her under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) in the 1930s. Both interviewers worked from a common set of questions that included personal history, work experiences, education, diet, and the master/slave relationship. With instructions about how to render former slaves’ dialects in writing, FWP interviewers took notes and then summarized their interviews. Read the two interviews, paying close attention to the interaction between Hamlin/Hamilton and each interviewer and to the way she recounted her memories of slavery to each of them.

The interviews below were given by the same woman to two different interviewers, one is white, and one is Black. Can you tell which is which?

Interview #1	Interview #2
Interview #1 with Commentary	Interview #2 with Commentary

What are they talking about?

The topical range of oral history interviews is enormous, including everything from the most public of historical events to the most intimate details of private life. What is analytically important, however, is the way narrators structure their accounts and the way they select and arrange the elements of what they are saying. Interviews frequently are plotted narratives, in which the narrator/hero overcomes obstacles, resolves difficulties, and achieves either public success or private satisfaction.

As important as what is said is what is not said, what a narrator misconstrues, ignores, or avoids.

Narrators also encapsulate experiences in what can be defined as “iconic stories,” that is concrete, specific accounts that “stand for” or sum up something the narrator reckons of particular importance. Often these are presented as unique or totemic events and are communicated with considerable emotional force.

Here’s an example of an “iconic story” told by Lora Albright, an Idaho rancher, as she remembers the hardships of the great depression of the 1930s. What’s the meaning of this particular story for Ms. Albright? What does her encounter with this destitute family seem to stand for, in her mind? What can we learn about her views of life from this story? Read transcript

Why are they talking?

The purposes of an interview, expressed and implied, conscious and unconscious, also influence and shape the narrative itself.

The following passages are excerpts from two different interviews with Stella Nowicki for different purposes. Ms. Nowicki organized workers in the meat packing industry during the 1930s. Read each excerpt, then take the quiz below.

Excerpt One SN: Some woman was in the floor below, this was where they made the hotdogs. She would have to push the meat in and whatever and stuff, and she pushed something and the machine was going, the chopper, and it took her fingers tips off, you know. This friend of ours she said something, well how could they do this, they should have safety guards, you know, because we talked about safety also. Well the people after this accident and they were horrified but they figured they couldn’t do anything. Well that night a bunch of us got together and we wrote out a leaflet on this and came out with certain demands. And asked the women not to operate those machines until the company assured us that there would be safeguards. The whole plant heard about it. Here’s this bunch of women actually organized and stuck together, you know, and they went right up to the foreman and swore and said, you know, in Polish, whatever, English, you know “We don’t work, you fix the machines, put safety guards on, you know, something . . .S.N. I was getting together with these other people, young folk. By the way they were all young. And saying, well here the CIO was taking, they’re organizing, and the sit-down in Flint. The steel workers are organizing, automobile workers are organizing. We want to organize too.Q. At this time did you see yourself as a radical or a . . .S.N. Oh sure, sure, because I wasn’t about to do housework or anything else, because now I was convinced I became a dedicated radical. You know, working with these friends whom I liked and respected very much. It made a lot of sense, you know.Q. Do you think very many of the people who were involved then in organizing the early CIO were also socialists?S.N. Most of them were, I think. Most were dedicated or had sympathies in that direction.Q. What would a socialist society mean to working people?S.N. Well basically, a socialist society would mean that the means of production would be owned by them and that the fruits of their labor would be divided on a more equitable basis than it was.

Excerpt Two S.N. We started talking union. The thing that precipitated it is that on the floor below they used to make hotdogs and one of the women, in putting the meat into the chopper, got her fingers caught. There were no safety guards. Her fingers got into the hotdogs and they were chopped off. It was horrible.Three of us “colonizers” had a meeting during our break and decided this was the time to have a stoppage and we did. (Colonizers were people sent by the YCL [Young communist League] or CP [Communist Party] into points of industrial concentration that the CP had designated. These included mass basic industries: steel, mining, packing, and railroad. The colonizers were like red missionaries. They were expected to do everything possible to keep jobs and organize for many years.) All six floors went on strike. We said, “Sit, stop.” And we had a sit-down. We just stopped working right inside the building, protesting the speed and the unsafe conditions. We thought that people’s fingers shouldn’t go into the machine, that it was an outrage. The women got interested in the union. . .I remember one of the first big CP meetings when we had William Foster come to talk. The hall wasn’t big enough. Somebody had gotten hold of a loudspeaker (they were very difficult to get in those days) and we hooked that up so that people could hear down the steps and into the street.We had a YCL/CP unit. (There weren’t enough people in either the YCL or the CP to meet separately and so we met together, younger and older people.) We would have meetings and marches and classes on Marxism and Leninism. We would write articles on the history of Marxism and Leninism which we would then discuss. These would go into The Yards’ Worker. We asked the old time friends of Bill Foster from the different plants for news of what was going on.

QUIZ

EXCERPT ONE: What do you think the purpose of this interview might have been?

family record  documentary film for broad distribution  labor studies book  union archive

EXCERPT TWO: What do you think the purpose of this interview might have been?

family record  documentary film for broad distribution  labor studies book  union archive

Once you have both answers right, click for an explanation.

What are the circumstances of the interview?

The circumstances of an interview can also affect what is recalled. In general, interviews for which both interviewer and interviewee have prepared are likely to be fuller and more detailed accounts than more spontaneous exchanges. ome oral historians have suggested that the location of the interview subtly influences what a narrator talks about and how they talk about it. Interviews in a person’s office, for example, tend to be more formal, less intimate, with the narrator emphasizing public rather than private life. Likewise, an interview with more than one person simultaneously or the presence of a third person in the room where an interview is taking place can constrain a narrator, turning a private exchange into something more akin to a public performance.

How do you think these following circumstances might affect the following interviews?

	The interviewer only hears words that rhyme with pastrami and rye. The subject, disturbed by the rumbling of the interviewer’s stomach, loses his train of thought. The famished interviewer rushes to finish the session to get some lunch.
	Two subjects might overwhelm one interviewer. Sharing a microphone creates an unconscious generational rivalry. There are just certain things a daughter won’t say in front of her mother… and vice versa.
	Microwaves emanating from nearby cell phones erase the tape. Passing pedestrians and motorists interrupt the interview to get in a word. Surrounding noise and activity divert the subject’s attention.

Oral History Project Evaluation

Now that you have had some background, let’s evaluate some oral history projects. I will assign each group a project to evaluate. Put your answers in a Google Doc and upload them to Slack under #oral-history.

About this Collection  |  American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940  |  Digital Collections  |  Library of Congress (loc.gov)
This site features approximately 2,900 life histories, both in transcribed and image form, collected from 1936-1940. The documents represent the work of more than 300 writers from the Federal Writers’ Project of the U.S. Work Projects Administration. The histories appear as drafts and revisions, in various formats, from narrative to dialogue, report to case history. Topics include the informant’s family, education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, and diet, as well as observations on society and culture. Interviewers often substituted pseudonyms for names of individuals and places.

Archives of American Art, Oral History Collections
Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art
Search | Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (si.edu)
This site offers transcriptions of more than 180 interviews with a variety of artists, including Louise Nevelson, Robert Indiana, Richard Diebenkorn, and Rube Goldberg. Projects include Texas and southwestern artists, Northwest artists, Latino artists, African-American artists, Asian-American artists, and women in the arts in Southern California. This site also include transcripts for more than 50 of the 400 interviews conducted in the 1960s as part of the “New Deal and the Arts Oral History Program.”

About this Collection  |  Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938  |  Digital Collections  |  Library of Congress (loc.gov)
A collaborative effort of the Manuscripts and Prints and Photographs Divisions, this site has more than 2,300 first person accounts of slavery. The narratives were collected as part of the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration, and they were assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the 17-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Each digitized transcript of a slave narrative is accompanied by notes including the name of the narrator, place and date of the interview, interviewer’s name, length of transcript, and cataloging information.

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
McCain Library and Archive, University of Southern Mississippi
Oral History — Digital Collections (usm.edu)
This website offers 125 oral histories relating to the civil rights movement, drawn from the University of Southern Mississippi Center for Oral History Collection. The site features interviews with civil rights leaders such as Charles Cobb, Charles Evers, and Aaron Henry. It also offers oral history information about prominent figures on both sides of the civil rights movement, such as “race-baiting” Governor Ross Barnett, national White Citizens Council leader William J. Simmons, and State Sovereignty leader Erle Johnston. Approximately 25 of the interviews also provide audio clips from the original oral history recordings. Each interview file includes a longer (250-300 word) biography, a list of topics discussed, a transcript of the interview, and descriptive information about the interview, the interviewer, interviewee, and topics, time period, and regions covered.

IEEE History Center Oral Histories – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
This collection contains 180 interviews with “the technologists who transformed the world in the 20th century.” Categories include: the history of the merger of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers to form the IEEE; interviews with distinguished Japanese electrical engineers and managers; the 50th anniversary of the MIT Radiation Laboratory; oral histories of RCA Laboratories in the mid-1970s; and the Frederick E. Terman Associates Collection.

Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World
James Leloudis and Kathryn Walbert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
http://www.ibiblio.org/sohp/laf/
This site relies on hundreds of interviews with working-class southerners conducted by the Southern Oral History Program Piedmont Industrialization Project of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The site combines those sources with materials drawn from the trade press and with workers’ letters to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to craft a rich account of cotton mill life, work, and protest. There are approximately 70 audio clips of interviews with mill workers ranging in length from 15 seconds to more than eight minutes.

May 4 Collection
Kent State University
http://www.library.kent.edu/page/11247
The events of May 4, 1970, on the campus of Kent State University that left 13 students dead or wounded are the focus of this site. The materials attempt to answer why the events took place as they did, what lessons can be learned, and what can be done to “manage conflict among peoples, groups and nations.” The site contains online transcripts of 93 of the 132 interviews conducted at May 4th commemorations on the Kent State campus in 1990, 1995, and 2000.

Oral History Center – Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
This site offers full-text transcripts of more than 55 fully-searchable interviews, with plans to add oral histories on Black Alumni at the University of California. Current offerings include “The University History Series” focusing on the Free Speech Movement, “The Suffragists Oral History Project,” including the words of twelve women active in the suffrage movement, “Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement,” “The Earl Warren Oral History Project,” and “Health Care, Science, and Technology,” featuring interviews regarding the medical response to the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco from 1981 to 1984.

Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II
Sandra Stewart Holyoak, Rutgers History Department
Rutgers Oral History Archives
These oral history interviews record the memories of men and women who served overseas and on the homefront during World War II. The archive contains more than 160 full-text interviews, primarily of Rutgers College alumni and Douglass College (formerly New Jersey College for Women) alumnae. Rutgers undergraduates conducted many of the interviews. The easily navigable site provides an alphabetical interview list with the name of each interviewee, date and place of interview, college of affiliation and class year, theater in which the interviewee served, and branch of service, when applicable. The list also provides “Description” codes that indicate the nature of the interview contents, including military occupations (such as infantry and artillery members, nurses, navy seamen, and engineer corps) and civilian occupations (such as air raid warden, student, clerical worker, and journalist).

“Women in Journalism” Home (wpcf.org) – Washington Press Club Foundation
This site provides access to 41 of 57 full-life interviews of American women journalists for three professional generations: pre-1942, World War II through 1964, and post-1964. The collection includes interviews with women who began their careers in the 1920s and continues to the present day. Print, radio, and television journalism are all represented. Interviews address difficulties women have encountered entering the profession and how their growing presence has changed the field. Interviews range from one to 12 sessions and each session is about 20 pages long. The interviews are indexed but are not searchable by subject.