Teaching the Past through
Oral History

Pattie Dillon

Any teacher of an American history survey course has wrestled with organizing a vast amount of material into a concise, integrated, and understandable series of lectures that can be presented within a few months. Covering the major national events that occurred between 1865 and the present often leaves little time to explore the underlying causes and effects that propelled historical development. To provide students with a deeper level of historical understanding, I have found it advantageous to base my lectures on two broad themes: the changing relationship between the federal government and its citizens and the expanding citizenship rights of women and minorities. Both themes focus on change and development and highlight the impact that national trends have on the everyday lives of Americans.	1
While traditional teaching sources—class lectures, textbooks, videos, and other secondary materials—offer students the basic facts and ramifications of historical change, they often fail to connect the broader national trends to individual lives and to show how individuals' perceptions and attitudes have changed or remained static over time. Oral history provides students with an important tool to make such connections. Personal interviews not only enliven historical study and personalize historical events; they also allow students to perceive how the nation and its individual citizens have changed through time. Interviewing people who experienced the poverty of the Great Depression, the violence of school integration, the turbulence of the Vietnam War era, or the fears of the Cuban missile crisis dramatically underscores the evolutionary nature of American history.	2
As part of my teaching curriculum, I require my students to conduct historical interviews for their term paper assignments and to present their findings during class discussion. I instruct each student to choose one event covered in class and to interview at least two people who lived through that event.1 That process alone can raise as many questions as it answers. Students often discover during an interview that individuals forget or gloss over painful subjects. For example, several students discovered that their interviewees resisted answering questions about their involvement in conflicts over the Vietnam War. Other people refused to talk about attitudes and activities of theirs that were once commonly accepted but are considered unacceptable today. This resistance especially emerged in dealing with school integration. Students often found that while many African American interviewees readily discussed their traumatic integration experiences, white respondents frequently failed to recall any aspects of desegregation even when it occurred in the schools they attended. One interviewee told her daughter that her school's integration had little effect on her high school years, although she acknowledged that several of her fellow white students routinely abused their black counterparts. In other circumstances, however, individuals might exaggerate or glorify their own involvement with a major historical event. To offset these potential biases, students must support their interviews with such secondary and primary sources as historical texts, journal articles, and newspapers from the designated time period. Those divergent sources provide students with tools to explore the complexity of historical events beyond the scope of textbooks or class lectures.	3
While broadening the scope of historical inquiry, oral history also allows students to examine stories of local and family interest. I allow students to interview anyone they choose, but most interview parents, relatives, or friends of the family. Using those sources, many students focus on stories and events that occurred in either their own or their relatives' hometowns. Since I have been a teacher at two southern state colleges, many of my students have lived in the South, and their research has focused on regional events. Many of their papers provided insightful, historically informed analysis of the everyday actions of individuals during such turbulent times as the depression and the era of school integration.	. . .