I am going into my 3rd year of my undergraduate history degree (UK University) and therefore I will be promptly starting my dissertation. My proposed thesis (although not final since I am yet to come up with a suitable title) will be a micro-historical study of the effects that the “British Winter of Discontent” (1978-79) had on the Gwynedd and the Anglesey Area. I have been fortuitous, since a lot of the people who lived that period of time in the local area are still alive today. As a result their opinions and experiences will indefinitely aid me in assessing the mentalities of the time. Whilst Newspapers and other forms of primary documents will be my closest friends during my research, I was wondering if academics and historians, on this reddit page, had much of an opinion on the developments in “Oral History” as an effective form of Historical evidence. In slightly touching upon the subject as one of the modules last year, I was always put off by the Taylor quote that it was just simply: “Old men drooling about their youth” – Therefore I have a few questions:
Thank You, in advance, for the replies!
TL; DR – How useful is Oral History?
I imagine you could plausibly conduct your research without doing oral history work, depending of course on what angle you intend to take with the project. A top-down focus on policy or global economic shifts would be much less likely to benefit from oral history work than a project done from the bottom-up.
That being said, that Taylor quote is absolute nonsense. What it suggests to me is the way in which Western-trained historians sometimes tend to fetishize the written word. Yes, oral history interviews need to be contextualized, corroborated, and verified. But if you're not doing the very same thing with your written sources, you're doing it wrong. Oral history interviews can not only shed a different light on your project -- depending of course on the nature of the event and source material -- but collecting those interviews can be a profoundly empowering experience for you as the historian. After having spent some six months squirreled away in an archive, it was a thrill and a relief to start doing oral history interviews. I no longer have to wait for the sources to come around to my topic -- now I can ask outright.
Now, there is some valuable recent work on the nature of historical memory, and it's certainly worthwhile to be familiar with the potential pitfalls in actors reframing narratives about themselves. But to my mind that still falls within the realm of reading any source critically -- and it's certainly no reason to avoid collecting oral histories altogether. If you think it would be worth your time and contribute to the project, do it. But if it's not necessary, don't feel guilty about skipping the interviews this time.
As a medieval historian, one has to deal with oral history, with varying degrees of authenticity, most of the time. Indeed, most written records do, at some level, come down to oral history. At the lowest level, there are questions of effective retention across generations. This doesn't seem to be relevant to your own question, so I'll skip it, but suffice to say that lots of (anthropological [WARNING, WARNING!]) research has been done in primarily oral cultures and it appears as if not much time needs to pass before traditions become distorted. /u/VermeersHat mentions the validity of historical memory, which is of course an issue that you would have to explore if you decided to incorporate oral sources into your dissertation.
For your own period, the modern age, oral history is obviously different to other sources. However, I don't believe this makes it unsuitable to research; in fact, just the opposite. Oral histories can highlight local, ground-level responses to historical events which otherwise might be ignored in more formal written records. There is, naturally, a level of bias in oral records, alongside the problem of these people actually remembering what happened in the past, but a good historian can work around this kind of thing. This is all very general, so I'll give you one example of post-war British history where oral records have been used to great effect. David Kynaston has been publishing a number of volumes of his Tales of a New Jerusalem series since 2007, aiming on a sequence about Britain from 1945 to 1979. At the moment, I think he's only covered through to the beginning of the 1960s, but I think I might be wrong. He uses eyewitness account, newspapers and diaries to construct a personal narrative; I suppose one might call it a social history. Specifically, Kynaston uses the Mass Observation archive, a database of personal responses written at the time. His works, though often very general and personal in nature, give a wonderful picture of the time period. I'd reccomend reading them as an example of how one might incorporate oral evidence into a historical piece.
I hope this has all helped. I primarily focus on Welsh history, and north Wales for that fact, and would be fascinated to read local responses to the Winter of Discontent. As Kynaston's histories often show, writing oral history is less analytic and judgmental than histories based on written records. Major events tend to be far more discussive and subjective; one cannot say firm things about oral evidence, but rather describe the experiences of a specific speaker and make a call on whether this is a general, usual response. However, this kind of source material is, I'd argue, useful and interesting. Different, but still contributes a huge amount.