TAR 302 - Verbal and Local History Studies

Oral History is a historical method for collecting and evaluating the past knowledge by producing the primary sources. In this approach, the historian directly produces its sources as he/she registers the personal testimony and experiences of his living sources through interviews. The aim of the field of Oral History is to reveal the hidden voices of the past (peasants, women, migrants, workers, minorities, etc.) who are often ignored or forgotten in classical studies of history. It is interested to research how the people from various social groups have perceived the social developments or political events in the past. Oral History tries to reveal the life experiences and testimonies of the so-called common people, whose memories usually are not registered in the written sources. This historical approach is interested in the human and social events of all kind, from peasant life in rural areas to migration and social change, family life, life in small places or villages, daily life in the cities, traditions and customs, history of neighbourhood, etc. 

The aim of this course is to introduce the students with the methodology of oral history writing, so that they can apply this approach by making interviews themselves and by analysing their living sources of the past they can understand its value better.

Oral history writing provides important opportunities in the reconstruction of the past. Written sources and testimonies of living people are both materials for history writing. Oral sources can be seen as a supplement to written sources and oral history has a methodology that enriches the classic ways of studying history. For instance, if there is no document or written source about a specific field or period, the production of oral sources or the registration of the memories of living people can give useful information on a specific subject. Furthermore, the modern recording technologies offer easy opportunities to record these testimonies for our research and for the use of other historians. Oral history is an auxiliary tool that reveals the unseen and unheard dimensions of the past reality, which are usually missing in the written sources. Oral history thus provides very useful and complementary historical data and knowledge to study the past.