ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a three-part primer for working with live sources. It explains the importance of live sources to history as a discipline. The chapter describes the most common way of engaging with live sources: the oral history interview. It discusses some of the unique challenges of this historical methodology. The direct correlation between power and the production of history makes sense in many ways. It takes an incredible amount of resources to learn how to write and otherwise record history, to obtain the necessary physical tools, and, later, to preserve these special materials into an ever-changing future. The chapter introduces the collaborative nature of oral history and walk through one of the most common oral history formats: an interview. Oral historians engage with live sources in a variety of ways.
