1. What is oral history

2. What is oral history Definitions History of Oral History
Reliability of OH
Tool for the study of Pentecostalism

3. What is Oral History
“Oral history is the tape recording of reminisces about which the narrator can speak from first hand knowledge”.
Willa U. Brum

4. What is OH?
Oral history is the systematic collection of living people's testimony about their own experiences. Oral history is not folklore, gossip, hearsay, or rumor. Oral historians attempt to verify their findings, analyze them, and place them in an accurate historical context. Oral historians are also concerned with storage of their findings for use by later scholars.
Judith Moyer

5. What is OH?
Oral history refers both to a method of recording and preserving oral testimony and to the product of that process. It begins with an audio or video recording of a first person account made by an interviewer with an interviewee (also referred to as narrator), both of whom have the conscious intention of creating a permanent record to contribute to an understanding of the past. A verbal document, the oral history, results from this process and is preserved and made available in different forms to other users, researchers, and the public. A critical approach to the oral testimony and interpretations are necessary in the use of oral history.
Oral History Association

6. Oral Historian's Anxiety Syndrome
OH Sequence
Event Narrator Interviewer Historical Record
Oral Historian's Anxiety Syndrome

7. How does OH differ?
Oral history is distinguished from other forms of interviews by its content and extent. Oral history interviews seek an in-depth account of personal experience and reflections, with sufficient time allowed for the narrators to give their story the fullness they desire. The content of oral history interviews is grounded in reflections on the past as opposed to commentary on purely contemporary events.

8. The oh ideal
Careful attention to copyright and other legal and ethical issues,
A structured, well researched interview format,
A controlled, recorded interview setting,
Collection of first-hand information,
Use of high quality sound or video equipment,
Adherence to careful processing techniques, and
Provisions for making interviews available at an accessible repository.

9. History of oh
OH as a formal methodology developed in the middle of the 20th Century
"Oral history is as old as history itself. It was the first kind of history" Paul Thompson
"I am not dependent on any one author, but on countless faithful witnesses who either know or remember the facts, apart from what I know myself.” Bede the Venerable

10. OH as Alternative methodology
"When I say oral tradition, I mean national tradition, which remained generally scattered in the mouths of the people, which everybody said and repeated, peasants, townsfolk, old men, women, even children; which you can hear if you enter one evening into a village tavern; which you may gather if, finding on the road a passer-by at rest, you begin to converse with him about the rain, the season, then the high price of victuals, then the times of the Emperor, then the times of the Revolution.” Jules Michelet

11. Continued use of Oral sources
Folklorists
Anthropologists
Sociologists

12. OH as supplement to texts
Allan Nevins: Columbia University
Coined term “Oral History” May 18, 1948
Student took notes—no recording
“Debrief” great men before their passing for additional historical information
Addition of the portable tape recorder
Oral History Association (1967)

13. Intellectual history Great men Great documents Great wars
Founders and presidents
Great documents
Constitutions, peace treaties
Great wars
National and global changes
What is left out?

14. Social history
"By introducing new evidence from the underside, by shifting the focus and opening new areas of inquiry, by challenging some of the assumptions and accepted judgments of historians, by bringing recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored, a cumulative process of transformation is set in motion. The scope of historical writing is enlarged and enriched; and at the same time its social messages change. History becomes, to put it simply, more democratic.”
Paul Thompson

15. OH and Pentecostalism
Is Oral History a good methodology for the study of pentecostalisms in Latin America?
Why?
Why not?
Opportunities?
Challenges?

16. Pentecostalsims in 21st century
More southern (Latin America, Africa)
More peoples of color than Caucasians
More developing world than majority world
More women than men
More children than adults
More urban than rural
More uneducated than educated