As we shift into the Oral History section, you may find some of these concepts familiar. Oral history itself is largely what it sounds like–a documentation of history based on interviews that shine a light on the sides of history often ignored. As I was reading through The Voice of the Past and The Oral History Reader, I started thinking about all the things I knew that fell under the umbrella of oral history.
The most obvious are family stories. In some way, you’ve been engaging with oral history your whole life and you may not have even noticed it. My grandma used to tell me stories about when she was growing up. By the age of 5, all of her siblings had jobs. My great uncles used to shine shoes downtown while she and her sisters would go church to church in search of bread. My mom and her siblings told stories about growing up on the Navy base in Manila. They knew bits and pieces of Tagalog, the language spoken in the Philippines, and remembered the ways the Americans interacted with the locals.
The stories you’ve been listening to your whole life ARE oral history. Oral History Reader emphasizes that oral history doesn’t necessarily need to serve social change. Rather, it serves to share the voice of the voiceless. Without my grandmother telling those stories to our family, they would have been lost when she died. Her experience, and that of her siblings, provides a snapshot of life growing up below the poverty line in the 30s. Her experience highlights a piece of history that is rarely discussed although it happened for so many people.
With the increase of social media, I think we’re seeing an increase in oral history traditions. Many of these are directly linked to social change. Because of the access to social media and other technologies, interviews and first-hand accounts can be shared almost instantaneously. Presenting and maintaining the status quo of history is nearly impossible as individual accounts round out the story. Often, sharing these viewpoints draws attention to the disparity and advocates for challenging that status quo and the dominant voice.
For example, consider protests. Not only are more people attending protests due to advertising via social media, but also those protests themselves are broadcasted. In situations where protesters and police clash, we would only have access to the story as packaged by police and popular outlets. However, through social media, we can hear voices from both sides. We can see the ways that protesters were brutalized or denied their rights.
While working through this chapter, I kept thinking of Hamilton. The musical itself presents the oft forgotten history of founding father, Alexander Hamilton. Due to scandal and destruction of his personal papers, much of Hamilton’s story went untold. Although his story was first revised in print, it gained significance and audience through Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical. The oral presentation, although non-traditional to the genre, proved to connect more directly with audiences. By providing a phase, a narrative, and a voice to a person or cause, you can make people care more.
In fact, Miranda employs the narrative of Hamilton, which provides an oral history of early America, in order to connect with contemporary social issues and generate change. Many of the songs, which focus on issues from Hamilton’s life, also deal with agency and advocacy. Along with this pairing, the most obvious emphasis in Hamilton comes in one of the recurring themes: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
First, Miranda clearly toys with the concept of individualism here. As we work to create a legacy, we must remember that we don’t exist in a vacuum. Community is conducive of legacy. If my grandmother worried only about maintaining her legacy and didn’t create the family she did, her stories would have been forgotten. Second, Miranda deals with the systemic concept of history in which winners, those who live, get to generate the narrative. The example he provides may be Alexander Hamilton, but the issue stretches across history.
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story also plays directly into the tradition of oral history. It voices, or rather sings, the ideas of sharing the voices of those marginalized in history. It also demonstrates that although not explicitly purposed to generate social change, the very act of voicing is in itself radical.