Narratives of the Past: Historians and the Oral History Conversation

Oral history has never been so popular with historians. The scepticism of the 1970s and 1980s appears to be a thing of the past, overtaken by the ascendancy of autobiography in the humanities and social sciences following the cultural turn. Yet those who use oral history have not entirely left behind anxieties about the distortions or inaccuracies of recall and the representativeness of samples. Nor have they embraced narrative and subjectivity with equal enthusiasm. This paper explores some recent oral-history work focused on gender. It suggests that the use of social class as a recruitment criterion and as a tool of analysis is problematic, particularly at the intersection of class and gender. Preference for in-depth analysis of a single respondent’s testimony calls forth justifications based on alternative views of the meaning of typicality. ‘Reliability’ is treasured by some historians. Among them there are those whose practice involves stripping respondents of their illusions about their own pasts. In contrast, ‘unreliability’ is re-conceptualized by others as providing clues to ‘truths beyond the facts’. Historians have sought to explain respondents’ nostalgia for even the most painful of pasts. And they have tried to understand respondents’ sometimes defensive and negative self-positioning in relation to present-day discourses. Most of those who use oral history today worry less about being ‘hostage to the tricks of memory’ than historians used to. However, they still puzzle over memory and myth-making, narrative and meaning, and the kind of history that the oral testimony conversation makes it possible to write.