ABSTRACT
This section does not attempt to survey the national or regional histories of oral history, which are readily available in other publications.1 Paul Thompson, among others, charts the prehistory of the modern oral history movement, explaining that historians from ancient times relied upon eyewitness accounts of significant events, until the nineteenth-century development of an academic history discipline led to the primacy of archival research and documentary sources, and a marginalization of oral evidence. Gradual acceptance of the usefulness and validity of oral evidence, and the increasing availability of portable tape recorders, underpinned a revival of oral history after the Second World War. The timing and pattern of this revival differed markedly around the world. For example, the first organized oral history project was initiated by Allan Nevins at Columbia University in New York in 1948, and his interest in archival recordings with white male elites was representative of early oral history activity in the United States. In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s oral history pioneers were more interested in recording the experiences of so-called ‘ordinary’ working people-George Ewart Evans, for example, determined to ‘ask the fellows who cut the hay’2-and this interest fused with political commitment to a ‘history from below’ amongst many social historians in Britain and around the world from the 1960s. Yet although the points of genesis and patterns of development for oral history have varied from one country to another, there are sets of ideas and debates which have proved to be critical in shaping contemporary approaches to oral history, and which have influenced oral historians around the world. The readings in this section outline and explore some of these critical developments.
