Blog: Oral History and Impostors: What to do? The first time I read about an impostor who had fooled an oral historian was Bruce Jackson’s “The Perfect Informant,” originally published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1990. In this account, Jackson...
Blog: Disappearing Sounds It is easy to forget that oral history practices developed differently in different countries. The U.S. model – or, more precisely, the model developed by Allan Nevins, Louis Starr, and Elizabeth Mason at Columbia University in the 1950s...
Blog: Canadians Do Oral History? Oral historians in the English-speaking world have been rewarded with a number of excellent compendiums over the past few decades, including an anthology, a reader, and two handbooks. Yet, to the international readership of these...
Blog: Oral History and the Common Good In my last blog post, I wrote about the Oral History Centre’s motto of “democratizing history.” Today, I continue this idea by asking how the notion of the Common Good can help us understand oral history’s democratizing...
Blog: Democratizing History: The Role of Oral History “Democratizing history” is the motto of the University of Winnipeg Oral History Centre. What do we mean? History and democracy are two big ideas that have shaped the modern world. We often see them as static...
