What Is Oral History? Definition, History and How to Start a Project

Oral history is the collection and study of information about the past through recorded, planned interviews with people who lived through it. An oral history is also the name for one such recording: a person's own account of their life, work or a particular event, kept as audio, video or a transcript so that others can hear and use it later.

What oral history means

Three things set oral history apart from simply remembering out loud:

• It is first-hand. The speaker describes what they saw, did or felt, not what they read about.
• It is planned and recorded. An interviewer prepares questions, records the conversation and notes who, when and where.
• It is kept for others. The recording is labeled, preserved and, with the speaker's permission, made available to family, researchers or the public.

Oral history can capture lives that rarely appear in official records: factory workers, farmers, migrants, nurses, soldiers, people in small towns. It records not only what happened but how it felt, in the speaker's own words and voice.

Oral history vs oral tradition vs a conversation

The terms overlap, so it helps to compare them.

	Oral history	Oral tradition	Casual conversation
Source	A witness speaking about their own experience	Knowledge and stories passed down by word of mouth over generations	Anyone, about anything
Time span	Within the speaker's lifetime	Often many generations	Usually the present
Form	Planned interview, recorded	Performances, songs, tales, genealogies, retold	Unplanned, usually unrecorded
What happens after	Preserved, summarized or transcribed, shared with consent	Kept alive by retelling	Mostly forgotten

Historians usually describe accounts that are passed along second-hand, heard from someone who heard it from someone else, as oral tradition rather than oral history. For more on that older and broader practice, see our guide to what oral tradition is.

A good family chat at the kitchen table can become oral history, but only once it is prepared, recorded, labeled and kept.

A short history of the field

Before the tape recorder

People have always asked witnesses what they saw, but the modern field took shape in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project, part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), sent interviewers to collect accounts from many groups of Americans. Its best-known result is the collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people, gathered from 1936 to 1938 in seventeen states. The Library of Congress holds about 2,300 first-person accounts and more than 500 photographs from this work, presented as Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938.

Recording begins

In 1946, David P. Boder traveled to Europe with a wire recorder and came back with some of the first recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Two years later, in 1948, the Columbia University historian Allan Nevins established the Columbia Oral History Research Office, now the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. It was one of the earliest academic oral history projects, and it is often described as the oldest organized oral history program in the world. The Regional Oral History Office at the University of California, Berkeley, followed in 1954.

A growing movement

Oral history spread widely in the 1960s and 1970s, when portable tape recorders became affordable. American oral historians founded the Oral History Association in 1967, and British practitioners founded the Oral History Society in 1969. Since then the field has moved from tape to digital audio and video, and from universities into libraries, museums, schools, community groups and families.

What oral history projects do

An oral history project is an organized effort to record a set of interviews around a theme, place or community. Typical projects might record:

• members of a congregation, club or union before a building closes;
• residents of a neighborhood that has changed;
• workers from a factory, mine or hospital;
• veterans, immigrants or the people who lived through a disaster;
• several generations of one family.

Most projects follow the same cycle: research, consent, interview, labeling, summary or transcript, safe storage, and sharing. The aim is a collection that someone who never met the speakers can understand and use.

Well-known oral history archives

• American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Created by Congress in 1976 to preserve and present American folklife, the Center houses the Archive of Folk Culture, begun at the Library in 1928. It is home to several of the collections below.
• Veterans History Project. Established by Congress in 2000 and run by the American Folklife Center, it collects and preserves recorded interviews, letters, diaries, photographs and memoirs from US veterans.
• StoryCorps. Begun in 2003 by the radio producer David Isay, StoryCorps records 40-minute conversations between two people who know each other, guided by a facilitator. With participants' permission, a copy of each interview is archived at the American Folklife Center, and selected segments air on NPR's Morning Edition.
• Columbia Center for Oral History Research. The successor to Nevins's 1948 office, holding thousands of recorded memoirs.

Many state historical societies, university libraries and public libraries also collect local oral histories.

How to start an oral history project

1. Choose a focus. One family, one street, one workplace or one event. A narrow theme produces better interviews.
2. Find a home for the recordings first. Ask a local library, historical society or family archive whether it will accept them, and what formats and forms it needs.
3. Prepare a consent or release form. Explain who will hear the recording and how it may be used, and get the speaker's agreement in writing.
4. Research each speaker. Dates, places and photographs help you ask better questions.
5. Write questions, then hold them loosely. Our list of oral history interview questions gives sixty starting points.
6. Record in a quiet room and state the date, place and names at the start.
7. Label, back up and summarize every recording the same day.
8. Share as agreed. Give the speaker a copy and deposit the collection where you planned.