Oral Histories & Archives

from the beginning…

I embarked on this project knowing that a lot of things at the College weren’t quite set up yet. I want to honor the experience of being a student doing something new, because I wanted to and it was important, and also feeling like I was messing everything up and getting in the way of other bureaucratic processes. So here I will talk about some of the barriers my advisors and I encountered, willfully, knowing that not everything had been quite arranged/approved under a specific program at the College.

But first of all, there was so much that paved the way for me! As I mentioned in a previous post, the Greenfield Center supported institutional history projects, including oral history, during its lifespan 2014-2016. Also, folks had done oral history projects under Pensby fellowships: here, here, and here, all originating from the same motivation as mine–documenting past students’ experiences, building a history for the community that each of us found here. Jada Ceasar even spent a summer at other schools assessing projects like Black at Bryn Mawr, and recommending structures that Bryn Mawr could implement to support oral history work. She and Shannan Stafford began doing oral history as work-study, and I attended their workshop last year at the second mini-CDL. I asked their advisor, Kate Blinn, to oversee my work this semester, through Praxis, which gives students course credit for experiential learning. Praxis Independent Study had supported Black at Bryn Mawr four years ago. Furthermore, there’s a new grant between Pensby and the ECC to pay student workers to collect oral histories about Perry House! So that’s work-study again, plus Prof. Gallup-Diaz’s Praxis seminar next semester, “Telling Bryn Mawr Histories,” which will be for History credit.

You see the problem? There are all these different routes to doing historical research, but they’re all in different areas/avenues/structures of the College. There’s no coordinated oral history program to comprehensively train students and then share experiential knowledge. While there have been some meaningful steps forward–Eric Pumroy and Special Collections worked with the College Counsel last summer to create standardized consent forms!!– in other ways it felt like we were reinventing the wheel. I think ultimately there should be as many people doing these projects as possible! But for me this semester, it often felt like I was just adding to the chaos rather than piloting something really meaningfully.

This is something we kept realizing in the Telling Histories Working Group: this fundamental lack of organization for history projects. That’s why we included in our recommendations that there be a Standing Committee to direct history-projects. The Group was convened to work out how the College could continue to address the exclusionary histories brought up by the renaming of Old Library, and that was the single most important recommendation was to organize that labor so that it wasn’t being done in a million different places without building to anything. And importantly, Eric Pumroy, Director of Special Collections, is leading a charter to, among other things, consolidate & ratify oral history standards for the College, and building a relationship Alumni Relations & Development, who are crucial to this work. But it’s still a far cry from the Standing Committee we recommended.

I’m choosing to lay all of this out here, in my ethics post, because a lot of my thoughts and feelings about ethics are tied up in all my unresolved feelings about this project and the resistance points we’ve met along the way. At various times, I have felt (imagined or real) skepticism about the rigor of my oral-history training as an independent researcher with Kate and Ignacio, as well as resistance around the IRB question, feeling like my project was somehow illegal or something. Or that the research was potentially ethically-risky because it was indpenednt/under Praxis and not a class. And all of that is part of the disjointed nature of oral history research at Bryn Mawr, with everyone kind of on a different page about training, ethics, and IRB. We knew it was going to be more challenging to forge forward without waiting for administrative things to progress, but I never stopped feeling like some people on campus resented me for doing this work, like I was out-of-line. But also, as I think you’ll see from my ethics discussion, students want to do this work, because it’s deeply personal to us, to understanding ourselves and our community. So it’s going to keep happening, and it would be so nice to have the College to support us in a unified way.

ok, so finally, ethics:

In addition to some great practical guides at Canaday, the Oral History Association (OHA) has great resources online about ethical considerations and training resources in general. The OHA stresses four key points of oral history ethics: informed consent, clear communication of potential risks, providing interviewees the opportunity to amend a transcript, and sufficient preliminary research prior to the interview.

Thankfully, Bryn Mawr’s standardized consent forms, mentioned above, come in two parts, providing for a two-part conversation with participants: first, getting informed consent before the interview; and second, allowing the participant to amend the final transcript before it enters Special Collections.

Within this project, ethical considerations were alive for me in a way that isn’t true for all oral historians. Interviewing recent alumni of color about their labor at Bryn Mawr often felt insane. Why would I of all people, ask people to relive potentially traumatic experiences, so soon after they had happened? I was comforted, again and again, by my participants’ overwhelming willingness to take part, and by the knowledge that each of them thought about posterity when they were here as students.

I’m a baby history major, because I declared at the beginning of my Senior year. It feels like simultaneous to completing the highest/most advanced course requirements for the major, I’m only just coming to terms with some basic theoretical and foundational considerations for writing and doing history. Here I want to explore the place of oral history in debates in the discipline, and argue for a radical potentiality of democratizing historical authorship.

Why I Chose Oral History

When I was working on setting up this Praxis-project, the content/higher purpose came before the methodology. When I arrived at Bryn Mawr, conversations about institutional history had already been fomenting for many years among students. Everything I knew about Bryn Mawr history, distant and recent, came from orality among students. But that oral knowledge wasn’t cumulative, because the people who it happened to and who remembered kept graduating. As a student on the working group (see last post), I felt called to honor the students whose work had come before mine. But I had very little to work with to trace, uncover, and analyze—in the archive, for example—what they said, how it was meaningful to the present moment. I realize now that these concerns were and are fundamentally historical.

The oral history method made perfect sense because so much (if not all) of student knowledge is passed on through conversation, collaborative  remembering, and community-building; and this is also the reason that knowledge is so often (if not always) lost after a few years. This project hoped to intervene in that by recording some orality in a way that could be used for years and years to come. It made sense! Seeking to fill an archival silence with the voices the voices that made up the community I am a part of. But for other historians, arguing for the legitimacy of this method in comparison to documentary ones has been a fight against elitism ingrained in the history of history.

Oral History in the History of History (Historiography)

For much of History’s history, scholars have been interested in what is properly “political”: interested in narrating who had power and how it was administered. Importantly, the people whom history was about also had the power to administer the documents from which history was written. In the latter half of the twentieth century some historians became interested in writing about people without the power to document or record their own experiences in this “historical record.” This movement has many names and faces, but in the American context, it  coincides with the structural changes to admissions and curriculum wrought by the “Black revolution on campus; in the European context, it coincides with decolonization and the entrance of scholars repatriated from formerly colonized countries into the academy.

In my “Archival Theory and Practice” class at Haverford this semester, we learned about subaltern studies and the drive to go back to the source. We talked about how through digging through layers of citations and generations of scholarship, through linguistic analysis, scholars from previously colonized countries found historiography to be rooted in the same principles and discourses embedded in colonial documents. The continuity of violence in/through archives and intellectual colonization was kind of spooky to me, like a hidden inheritance/presence which takes a lot of mental energy to overcome/think through. New types of history demanded new methods: reading against the grain of legal records, administrative reports to restore the voices of the silenced. Historians began doing new things with old sources, but also advocating for the expansion of what is considered legitimate source material as well. Oral history and the oral tradition, autobiography,

So I guess I’m thinking about oral history methods as radically new. In his influential Voice of the Past, Paul Thompson (1978) theorizes oral history as offering “evidence from the underside” to diversify the perspectives represented in a historical text (8). He argues oral history can create a history that is more democratic and participatory, capable of giving back “to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place.”

As oral history rose as a popular method inside and outside of the academy, some historians criticized its value, legitimacy, and reliability. From this positivist perspective, history is a pursuit of facts about the past, and human memory is fallible and biased. But documents can be biased and unreliable, too. Opening up the discipline to new possibilities has demanded confronting the theoretical underpinnings whereby certain forms of knowledge are considered less reliable, legitimate, and valuable than others. But also, proponents of oral history methods argue extensively and persuasively for the inherent characteristics of oral history as strengths rather than drawbacks. There is so much information to be mined in the way words are spoken, in how the individual rememberer narrates their own life, and also in the particular magic of an intimate conversation between two people (Portelli 1979).

Oh and now that I’m writing down the historiography of oral history, I’m realizing it totally parallels my own project—seeking out and valuing new sources to be able to tell a story that wasn’t possible or written down before. And that’s at the root of what I’m working on in my Senior capstone project (thinking about how to build an community archive of student life at Bryn Mawr): what records, and whether that matches the types of histories students tell about themselves. I think that in the future, I hope to question what other types of gaps there are in the record of student history at Bryn Mawr, and what types of sources can fill those gaps.

Oral History as Academic & Community History

Flinn (2011) writes a bit about oral history, or community history, or autobiography, as important sources constituting community archives. His point is generally about the history-writing that exists outside of the academic context, arguing for a democratic non-elitist understanding of who is/can be a historian. Earlier in the semester I went over to my Nana’s house and I was reading Doing Oral History, a practical guide as I began to formulate this project. My Nana always asks me about my studies and what I’m reading, usually to pick some sort of fight because she thinks I’m being brainwashed. (Of course I think she’s brainwashed too.) But THIS time she told me that she herself had experience in doing oral history. She said she used to work with the Huntington Historical Society where she lives on Long Island, and put together an exhibit drawing on oral histories from elderly Huntington residents. She said she drank a lot of tea from dirty cups because her interviewees couldn’t see the dirt anymore. I feel silly now because my first question was like, did you read a book about it though? And she was like, “No, there weren’t any books about it then!” It was two years before Thompson’s Voice of the Past.

My Nana is in many ways the smartest lady I know; she knows how to make biscuits and gravy and how to set a table for every type of party. She went to school to be a nurse and somehow knows every fact available to a certain canon of American history. She knows every Civil War battle and she texts me on the anniversary of the day one of our ancestors was killed during the French & Indian War. History for her is embodied and living, and of material importance to the present, and indeed this is Thompson’s central claim—that history always has a social purpose. Anyway, I just think it’s valuable for me as a budding oral historian to recognize that the method has existed before it was theorized by Thompson or recognized as legitimate by an academic elite. As I said earlier, the method emerged intuitively as I sought to build a greater understanding of my own community, a way of documenting in parallel to the processes that are already existing among community members—social transmission of memory.