This weeks readings covered much territory. Therefore, I apologize in advance for the
schizophrenic character of my remarks.
One of the most powerful tools in the possession of
historians of the recent past is oral history.
At the heart of oral history process is the interview. Presenting the interaction of a narrator and
an informed interviewer, oral history interviews have power to document
memories and interpretations that would otherwise be lost. Fundamental to the project of writing history
“from the bottom up,” oral histories are the products of what Michael Frisch
calls “a shared authority.” For Frisch
this is precisely why oral history so valuable; it subverts the categories of
author and subject and restores agency in the history-making process to
individuals and groups who have often been cut off from it. In the introduction to A Shared Authority Frisch seems confident that the radical
political implications of oral history will be realized. However, the next reading should give us
pause before we join him.
Leon Fink’s article “When Community Comes Home to Roost”
discusses how public history endeavors (of which oral history is a frequent
component) can go “bad.” Fink explores this
subject through the story of North Carolina’s Cooleemee Historical Association
(CHA), an organization dedicated to preserving the history and heritage of its
namesake town. While New Left refugees
Jim and Lynn Rumley founded the CHA, the organization quickly took on a
historical and political mission that drew on some of the worst tendencies of
southern populism. The CHA stoked fear
of the outside world among Cooleemee’s poor white population, while upholding a
sanitized vision of the community’s past that evoked the “Lost Cause” of the
Confederacy. Even as it celebrated the
idealized cotton mill past of Cooleemee, the CHA ignored analyzing and
presenting the political and economic forces that had caused the closure of the
town’s mill in 1969. I was unable to
stave off thoughts of the Obama-era Tea Party as I read about the CHA.
This does not mean that the CHA failed. It was successful in creating a sense of
community in Cooleemee, but of a very circumscribed type. The CHA, while undeniably a public history
venture, was hardly the kind of standard-bearer for progress and equality
envisioned by Michael Frisch. For his
own part, Professor Fink believes the lesson that we should learn from the CHA
is to be more critical of “community,” a concept that is too often treated as
an unqualified good by idealistic historians.
Fink’s warning about community is reminiscent of Robert Putnam’s notion
of “dark social capital,” or a force that connects individuals but that is
otherwise unacceptable. The KKK is
undoubtedly a community, but the affective bonds between committed racists are
hardly something to be celebrated. As
Fink writes at the end of article, we must ask “’community for whom?’” and
“’community to what end?’”
The final reading for this week does not dovetail neatly
with the others, but nevertheless provides essential practical
information. The Oral History Manual by Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan is
exactly that which its title implies, but the authors do a good job of getting
one to think of an oral history project as more than just the sum of its
interviews. Prior to reading the Manual I viewed oral history in a
restricted way. I thought that it was a
method that a historian engaged in largely for her own purposes; if the
historian happened to accumulate a body of related interviews that was
substantial enough, then she might donate it to a library. However, I did not consider oral history to
be an activity to be done for its own sake.
Sommer and Quinlan quashed my preconceptions and given me a new respect
for the both the challenge and importance of oral history. Of particular value were the chapters related
to planning, ethical and legal questions, and preservation of oral history documents. I imagine that, like me, relatively few
conventional historians are familiar with this material. For those that are Sommer and Quinlan have
served up a nourishing, if slightly dry, helping of food for thought.
See you next week,
J
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