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An Overview of the Field of Oral History

Although the basic elements of oral history have been around since humans began using language, one man is credited as the "father of oral history." Allan Nevins was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote (and edited) for the New York Evening Post, the New York Sun, and the New York World. He may have borrowed the term oral history from a 1942 Joe Gould profile in the New Yorker magazine, but he'd been pondering the need for oral interviews with important individuals since 1931.

Works Progress Administration and Federal Writers Project endeavors to collect the memories of former slaves generated hand-recorded "oral histories" before Nevins launched his first such project, but at the time, they had not been so named. These took place in the mid and late 1930s.

In his introduction to The Gateway to History in 1938, Nevins recommended "some organization which made a systematic attempt to obtain, from the lips and papers of living Americans who have led significant lives, a fuller record of their participation in the political, economic, and cultural life" of his times and the several generations immediately preceding them.

It was ten years before Nevins launched the first true oral history project at Columbia University, with a mere $3,000. His first interviews here also were recorded via hand-written notes, but by 1949, he and his colleagues had obtained and began using a wire recorder, which "revolutionized" the process almost overnight. Also a biographer and historian, Nevins preferred long, biographical oral histories. However, by the late '40s and early '50s, the "special project" had been birthed, with projects on early radio broadcasters, the Ford Motor Company, and oil wildcatting in Texas alerting academicians to the possibilities. By 1954, the University of California at Berkeley had its own oral history office and launched the first multipurpose oral history project. By 1959, UCLA had started an oral history program, as well.

Like the skeptical faculty committee overseeing Nevins' first project, some academicians in the field have been reluctant to accept oral history as legitimate research. However, armed with an adequate understanding of human nature, and the nature of memory itself, oral historians can corroborate informants' statements from other sources and add an immeasurable richness of detail to the historical record.

The appreciation and popularity of oral history has grown by quantum leaps. Perhaps the best known oral histories were undertaken by a high school teacher and his students at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School of Georgia through the publication of the Foxfire books, documenting the lives and lore of Appalachian people and their material culture. These books came to life after Elliot Wigginton's failure to set his English students afire with the same old boring texts led him to desperate measures: starting a magazine in his class, financed through its sales, which determined its content—information about the local people.

His students "went home and talked—really talked—to their relatives, some of them for the first time. From those conversations came superstitions, old home remedies, weather signs, a story about a hog hunt, a taped interview with the retired sheriff about the time the local bank was robbed, and directions for planting by the signs." This was in 1966.

Now, state humanities councils from Alaska to Georgia fund oral history projects, as does the National Endowment for the Humanities, many of our universities have oral history programs, and the documentation of one-hour interviews with Americans from all walks of life is a daily occurrence through the National Public Radio-American Folklife Center/Library of Congress' StoryCorps Mobile Recording Unit, which recently made a visit to Las Cruces, NM, my own base of operations. It enjoyed such popularity that after it had been in town only a week, I got the last of some 130 interview appointments available to interview my Maid of Honor's father. Organizations for oral history and personal history are now international.

Journalism : My Door to Oral History

My own introduction to oral history, like Nevins', came through journalism. I began developing my skills in transcription first, when I broke my arm in a skiing accident and was forced to record and transcribe interviews for my job at the Santa Fe New Mexican, a Gannett newspaper, in the early 1980s. Next, I encountered the Santa Fe Network for the Common Good, whose Living Treasures Program honored individuals who had made a "significant contribution" to their communities, through oral history interviews, photo montages, and public "purposeful reminiscing."

The rest, as they say, is history. I pursued a Master's degree in English with a subspecialty in folklore and oral history, completed in 1992, at New Mexico State University. I've been doing oral history ever since, beginning with my work with Native Americans as a graduate student. I later served as project director for the White Sands Missile Range Ranching Oral History Project, a joint endeavor of the missile range (via the Legacy Resource Management Program), the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum foundation, New Mexico State University, and Human Systems Research, a local archaeological contracting company. Since then, I have taught at-risk youth and Navajo gifted and talented students oral history skills, as well as conducting interviews for the museum and for the University of Texas-El Paso's Bracero Oral History Project.

I founded Full Circle Oral History in 2000, the vehicle for some of the work mentioned above, as well as for archival research for WSMR. In 2006, I reorganized my company as an LLC, Full Circle Heritage Services, and added personal history, digitally assisted photo restoration, and book design to my repertoire of skills and services. Oral history, which to my mind revolves around public history documentation, and personal history, the recording of family and other special-topic projects for individuals, families, and businesses, both are deeply rewarding, with benefits to interviewer, informant, the public, families, and future generations.