ABSTRACT
This chapter explores oral historians' responses to critiques of the reliability of memory and the validity of the method, and investigates their engagement with the turn to narrative and subjectivity. It considers historians' responses to three types of alleged unreliability in oral history narratives: the collective misremembering of an event; contradictions within one person's life history; and inconsistencies between different groups describing a shared past. The chapter focuses on two features of oral historians' work that are characteristic of wider historical practice, and one that is peculiar to oral history. It addresses historians' responses to the idea that memories are constructed in dialogue with the public interpretations of the past that circulate through, for example, film and television, schooling and politics. The chapter discusses the work of historians who argue that individual memory responds to, and itself contributes to, such cultural constructions, and that it is possible to study these interactive processes historically.
