Oral History and Public Memories

Understanding how individual perspectives on history build collective memory

Explores the relationship between the well-established practice of oral history and the burgeoning field of memory studies. This work explains the processes by which oral histories move beyond interviews with individual people to become articulated memories shared by others.Oral history is inherently about memory, and when oral history interviews are used \u0022in public,\u0022 they invariably both reflect and shape public memories of the past. Oral History and Public Memories is the only book that explores this relationship, in fourteen case studies of oral history's use in a variety of venues and media around the world. Readers will learn, for example, of oral history based efforts to reclaim community memory in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa; of the role of personal testimony in changing public understanding of Japanese American history in the American West; of oral history's value in mapping heritage sites important to Australia's Aboriginal population; and of the way an oral history project with homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio became a tool for popular education. Taken together, these original essays link the well established practice of oral history to the burgeoning field of memory studies.