Envelopes of Sound

What distinguishes the swapping of stories from historical conversations? The answer seems clear. The change occurs when historical imagination and criticism are brought to bear upon the tale. Conversations become historical in the truest sense when a context is formed for the dialogue. That context is provided by the historian, not as someone who holds a degree and therefore a monopoly over interpretation, but as someone who cares about the "pastness" of the past, who by an act of imagination tries to form a view of change over time which can explain what is being said. It is this dialectic between the telling of the story and the inquisitive and critical mind, whether of the "professional" historian or of the interested neighbour, which gives oral history its real dimension. This book is about historical conversations, what we have chosen to call conversational narratives. It is about how they are formed, understood and interpreted. It is about the role historians play in their creation. Oral history holds great promise for the increase of our knowledge of the past and of how that past lives on in the present.
Oral history should be a way to get a better history, a more critical history, a more conscious history which involves members of the public in the creation of their own history. The major concern of this volume is method, but the aim of the discussion of method is to understand how it is that we can create the critical dialogue about the past that is so necessary to preserve our freedom in the present. What oral history gives the historian it gives with abundance. It teaches us a new, every day, how important history is to the common cultural enterprise. It shows us again and again how people live with their past and try to make sense of their present. It allows us to enter people's lives in the most extraordinarily intimate ways. Because the people we talk to give us so much, it is our obligation to think carefully about what they are saying and why, and to evaluate carefully what we are given.