ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the opportunities offered to the historian by oral history and the conceptual and methodological issues that it raises. Oral history has also been moved by an urgent sense of recovering a world of memory, largely through the reflections of older people which were about to be lost as they slipped over the lip of memory into forgotten obscurity. Perhaps the most straightforward way of conveying something of the potential value of oral history is to look briefly at the work currently done by three recent projects. This might give greater insight into how historians and community activists have used this method but also allow people to understand their motivations, their presuppositions and their ideological or political orientation. The projects discussed are: King’s Cross Voices: King’s Cross Oral History Project; East Midlands Oral History Archive: oral history of the village of Newton Burgoland; and South African History [Oral History] Online.
