Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer

Paper Topic: Oral History

Topic: Select a person (or people)—relatives are OK—who lived through and were substantially affected by an important historical event or experience that has some connection to the United States. Interview them about the event or experience and then write a paper that does two things: (1) Gives a brief overview of what you learned/heard in your interview, and (2) Discusses what the advantages/disadvantages are in learning history in this way. EACH HALF of the paper should be AT LEAST 500 words.

Here is a list of historical events you might discuss with your subject:

1.    The Great Depression
2.    World War II
3.    The Korean War
4.    The Vietnam War
5.    The September 11 attacks
6.    Woodstock
7.    The moon landing
8.    The assassination of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr.
9.    The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War
10.    Beatlemania
11.    Witnessing a notable sporting event, like the Super Bowl, or the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” or the 1988 World Series

Here is a list of experiences you might discuss with your subject:

1.    The booming 1950s
2.    The turbulent 1960s
3.    The wild 1970s
4.    The conservative 1980s
5.    Immigrating to America
6.    Growing up in America
7.    Working in America
8.    Life as a woman/homosexual/member of a minority group in America
9.    Being an entrepreneur in America
10.    How a non-American sees/saw America, or sees/saw President Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, etc.

These are just possibilities; there are naturally countless other things you could discuss. If you choose something that is not on the list, make sure to talk to me about it first.

Here are a few thoughts to help guide your thinking:

1.    There is no such thing as a totally unbiased person, and so you should be on the lookout for evidence of your subject’s BIASES in the story you are told. Note that biases need not be “negative,” someone might be predisposed, for example, to have a positive bias in favor of John F. Kennedy or the British government or the films of Steven Spielberg (to take three random examples). Nor, of course, are all biases “political” or “racial” or “religious.”
2.    Memory is a strange thing, and it is very easy for people to misremember, particularly if 10 or 20 or 30 years have passed. Keep an eye out for potential issues of this sort.
3.    Some people are up to date on “the news” and others are not. So you should try to evaluate how well your subject understands the broader story they are part of—what other people were doing, what the government was doing, why the event was happening, what the long-term impact of the event was, and so forth. Some people may have this awareness while the event is underway, others may only develop this awareness after the event, and some may not have this awareness at all.
4.    The media can have a powerful influence on peoples’ understanding of their own histories. A movie, a newspaper article, a scandal—all can cause people to “rewrite” their memories. Keep this in mind, it can be a worthy topic of analysis.

Here are a few things to AVOID:

1.    Do not forget to do the second part of the assignment—the analysis of oral history as a technique. If you don’t do this (or you only spend 100 words on this) then half the paper is missing.
2.    Make sure to include high quality EVIDENCE. If your paper does not make frequent reference to specific things you learned in your interview(s), it will not be successful. This is particularly important in the second part of the paper—you should support your discussion with specific examples from your interview.

SAMPLE of a good body paragraph:

One downside to oral history is that the subject might engage in self-censorship, for various reasons. As I interviewed my grandfather about his experiences in China during World War II, for example, he invariably sped quickly past post-battle details. It was clear that—understandably—he prefers not to recall the blood, and the suffering, and the deaths of his comrades. Similarly, when I asked him whose fault it was that his unit got ambushed during the Battle of West Hunan, he was unwilling to give a specific answer—my sense was that he did not want to throw any of his fellow soldiers “under the bus.” Most obviously, when I asked him why he volunteered for service, he told me this:

Well, when the Jap…anese attacked Pearl Harbor, the young men of my hometown declared that we wouldn’t let a bunch of di…darned Jap…anese soldiers get away with something like this. So, a dozen of us all signed up together the next day.

It was obvious from his stutters (indicated by ellipses above) that the phrases that came to mind were actually ‘Japs’ and ‘dirty Japs,’ which were both socially acceptable in 1941. They are no longer acceptable, however, and so he felt the need to soften his verbiage