Community oral history: where we have been, where we are going
by Linda Shopes, Oral History Society
Abstract: This article is a slightly revised version of Linda Shopes’ keynote address to the Oral History Society’s 2014 conference in Manchester, UK. In it she addresses the conference theme, ‘Community History: Oral History on the Ground’, by reflecting on her experience with a community-based oral history project in Baltimore, Maryland, in the late 1970s/early 1980s and then using that as a springboard for assessing both advances and continuing issues in oral history over the last three-and-more decades. She considers the tensions between popular and professional understandings of history and the sanitized version of the past promoted by some local history projects; the problematics of conceptualizing community solely around residence in a specific locale and of structuring community oral history projects around a series of life history interviews; the relationship of history to social change; and issues of sustainability. While offering no easy solutions to these concerns, she suggests potentially fruitful ways to approach them: focusing on dynamic issues rather than biographical narratives in community projects; recognising real differences within a community; exercising leadership within a relationship of shared authority in addressing these differences over the long haul in the civic arena; setting realistic goals; and above all, recording multiple, contradictory stories across a spectrum of social differences and then trusting the power of these stories to communicate broader social truths.
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