From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local
Historical Research. By Barbara Allen and William Lynwood Motell. Nashville:
American Association for State and Local History, 1981. Bibliography. Index. 172
pages. $12.50.
Reviewed by Professor Ray T. Smith, who, in conjunction with
the San Diego History Research Center of San Diego State University, is
compiling a collection of oral interviews with Southeast Asians in San Diego County.
This little book is useful in several ways, but it is limited
by the authors' almost exclusive reliance on folkloristic evidence and models of
research with a rural or small-town bias. Both authors are specialists in
folklore. That, however, can be no excuse for narrowness in overall perspective.
Conceptually the book starts well. Allen and Montell
generalize appropriately about the uses of oral history to illuminate local
history. They properly distinguish "folklore" from "oral history," and they
outline and discuss the basic characteristics of "orally communicated history."
They discuss arrangements for oral history recording and the usual range of
narratives, and they refer to the special uses of "kernel narratives" and the
life-history approach. One significant chapter deals informatively with ways of
testing the validity of oral sources by the use of motif-indexing, narrative
collation, evidence from material culture, and documentary
sources. Another chapter deals with the importance of orally expressed attitudes
toward events or institutions as important historical "facts" in their own
right. A practical chapter on transforming oral source materials into manuscript
form completes the main text of the book.
Bewilderment follows, however, with a lengthy "Appendix A"
titled "The Legend of Calvin Logsdon," which evidently is supposed to serve as a
model of locally applied oral history research. This appendix is not introduced
or explained well, and it betrays a rather narrow conception of what is a useful
topic for oral history. The authors seem to suggest that a "legendary" triple
murder in small-town Tennessee in 1868 is (or ought to be) a typical subject for
"local" historians today. That slights the relevance of local historians to
contemporary concerns such as ethnic enclaves and their interaction with urban
majority communities. Ethnic communities receive only the scantiest comment or
citation either in the text (e.g., pp. 21, 67 and 91) or in the
bibliography. As for more traditional subjects that are of continuing concern
today, immigrants and immigration history receive only passing attention in the
text (e.g., pp. 39 and 96) and no citation whatever in the index. Urban
contexts of oral history are almost invisible.
This raises the basic problem of focus. Allen and Montell
scarcely address topics such as urban history, ethnic community history, and
the experiences of immigrant groups, all of which have become major concerns
among contemporary researchers in both oral and local history. In a book
dedicated to the use of oral sources in local history research, the reader needs
to be exposed to a more balanced selection of topics and bibliographic sources.
For broader fields of view, see the articles by Kathleen Conzen and H.T. Hoover
in The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States,
edited by Michael Kammen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press for the American
Historical Association, 1980), pp. 270-91 and 391-407.
