Remembrance of Things Past: Oral Historians and Long-Term Memory

Abstract

As a group, oral historians have more interest in and contact with human memory than any other professionals except psychiatrists and psychologists. Yet despite the centrality of memory to their task, they have not considered it a suitable topic for study. A review of Manfred Waserman's Bibliography of Oral History, for example, reveals only a handful of articles on that subject.1 This is not to say that oral historians do not worry or speculate about human memory. Whenever they gather at professional meetings their shop talk invariably turns to anecdote swapping about strong, weak, and unique memories. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the unstated assumptions that most oral historians share in light of the predominant theories of long-term memory among psychologists. Some suggestions as to how oral history methodology might be brought into closer congruence with these theories will also be offered. The reasons oral historians have neglected the study of memory are not hard to locate. As participants in an academic growth industry, most oral historians so concentrate upon gathering interviews that there is little opportunity to embark on the study of anything so nebulous as long-term memory. And nebulous it can be, especially if one gets caught up in the ongoing debate among psychologists and other social scientists over the essence of memory. The quantity and complexity of that literature compose a thicket that few oral historians have wished to penetrate.2 Thus

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