ABSTRACT
Recent discussions about the uses of oral sources have added new dimensions to old debates over what constitutes historical truth. Early practitioners of oral history tended to use their sources as historians have traditionally used written documents, as factual evidence about specific historical events. Over the past two decades, however, oral historians have suggested that interviews can tell us about the construction of social subjectivity, myth and memory. 1 Oral history, in the words of Alessandro Portelli, ‘may…be viewed as an event in itself’. 2
