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Going forwards —although I’m an early modernist at heart— I expect to be doing a lot more oral history. It’s exciting to be collecting data in this way. As a historian focused on a period where the people who lived during that period are long dead (or, who knows, perhaps there are some immortal vampires out there) you’re mostly confined to what the material in archives and museums can tell. There’s something refreshing about the concept of actually interviewing living, breathing people to collect their recollections —their lived experience. There’s also something terrifying about it.

I’ve done a few oral history interviews in the past, but with going into museum work, I’ll have to do a lot more of them. I face that prospect with trepidation and yet I think it’s very important. There are voices out there that will disappear, and these voices can fill in the gaps in missing histories that I think deserve to be preserved and circulated. We know that past people’s mental worlds were different. How we perceive ourselves and the world around us is temporal, spatial, and ephemeral. Smaller museums tend to focus on particular aspects of a place’s history and there’s nothing wrong with that. The reasons for that are many, no doubt Salem’s witch trials sell tickets. No doubt the industrialisation of Manchester is important to local people in Manchester because it informs their self-understanding in some way. Humans use history in various ways, to various effects, and for various reasons. History is important to us whether we realise it or not. For my hometown, the second world war —when it was occupied by the Nazis— is one of those key periods that will always stand out in the collective memory —and for the collective identity— of the place.

There is nothing wrong with keeping the memories and histories of the second world war alive at the museum. That is important, but we must not let it obfuscate other histories or let it lead us to overlook them. I think it is easy to do just that. One reason —a reason I often think of— is how we take some knowledges for granted. To give you one example, let’s say an American said to a non-American that they received a scary letter from the IRS. If the American offers no further explanation, they are assuming that the non-American knows what the IRS is or what it stands for. We all do this, in our daily lives. I bandy about abbreviations and facts about university history that presume that presume that the non-specialist already has a level of familiarity they may not have. Luckily, people ask when they do not know. I think the same goes for when we select what to save for posterity. This is not just true of doing oral history interviews, we see it all the time in the archives. There’s a discrepancy between what people thought was worth putting down on paper and what we —hundreds of years later— would really like to know. Some things are so blatantly obvious to us in the moment that we do not think to describe it to the outsider or even to assume that it would need explaining.

For oral history interviews this means teasing out what needs explaining. I think some important cases would be crafts (håndverk) and housework. If we look at preserved material culture in a small-town museum, we might know enough to label objects, but we don’t always know exactly how they were used, what they were used for, when they were used, who they were used by, or whether this was something everyone had or just a select few. For some objects, all these aspects may have been obvious then, but are they now? Look at the ‘save icon’, I’m old enough to know that that’s a floppy disk, but young people today can’t be expected to have seen a floppy disk or to know the what-when-who-how and if everybody with a computer had them or perhaps it was only used by corporations. If you’re not convinced, consider this. If I told you to write the word ‘hello’ in uppercase letters instead of lowercase letters (as I just did) do you know where ‘upper and lower case’ comes from? No? They come from printing. To assemble type for printing, printers had a set up with a case full of the uppercase versions of letters and another case with the lowercase letters; as you might guess, one case was above the other.

But it’s not just limited to cases like ‘how did fishermen use this particular hook and why did they stop’, it’s also related to understanding how people perceived the world around them. When my dad was sixteen years old, in 1960, he took a job on a ship transporting jet fuel around the world. He’s told me that was the thing to do back then, it was either that or going into fishing. There was no concept —in that time or place— of going off to university. When I was sixteen, the thing to do was to go to upper secondary school, I wouldn’t even know how to get a job on a ship like that if I wanted to. What we are dealing with here are different mental worlds; not only was the world actually different, but how one understood it was different. My dad’s perceptions have of course changed with time —indeed, the world’s changed massively seen he was born in the burnt down ruins of my hometown— and that is another issue with doing oral history. How we remember things are different from how they were. If we’re looking for unmediated, unfiltered factual data about the past we are out of luck unless we can corroborate that with other information. Memory is a difficult thing. That said, memory has an important place, and memories of how things were are —in and of themselves— crucial.

That brings me to the massive hurdle with oral history. As if deciding, as the ‘collector’, what is worth preserving isn’t pressuring enough, there is another difficulty. How do you get people to talk about the past and how do you make sure you can use it? What I mean is that it is difficult to know if you’re asking the right questions. Sure, you might get someone to talk about what their household looked like in the 1960s in a small town but are you asking detailed enough questions. Or will you sit there months later realising you forgot to ask how many rooms were in the house, whether they shared with another family. Or perhaps you realise they might not have been representative because they were the priest’s daughter and where socio-economically likely better off than most other families. I don’t expect there to be a right answer to that, I expect oral history to be an art; by doing it you learn to ask the right questions to the right level of detail.

The second issue is how do make sure you can use your oral history interviews? You need the participant’s consent for you to not only record the interview but to store it and use it for historical scholarship —be that museum exhibitions or publications. What I have found is that older people are worried about giving you that consent. They don’t want to be misconstrued. They feel a pressure to get things right and are worried that they misremember facts and that others might get mad with them for having ‘lied’ (in their view). There’s no easy solution to this other than to try and explain that even if they’re factually wrong about something, how they perceive or remember the past is more important than an error. More importantly, without their recollections, lived experience could go lost. Especially lived experience that I think is equally as important to preserve as the lived experiences of the second world war.

And that is why, although I’m terrified and see many difficulties with doing oral history, I think oral history is worth doing.

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