HIST3706 - Oral History

From wax cylinders to reel-to-reel to digital video, recording technologies expanded the historical profession dramatically during the twentieth century. We will read some classics, such as Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days and Alessandro Portelli’s Death of Luigi Trastulli, as well as scholarly pieces aimed at working historians and very new work, such as Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. We will also explore the interface between documentary filmmaking, pod-casts, and more traditional Oral History forms. However, this course centers on methodology—students will learn about ‘best practices’ in the field and will work toward creating an interview record that can be housed in an archive and accessed by other researchers even as interviewees and their families retain intellectual property rights.