ORAL HISTORY FOR RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST     2400W

Oral history has a fairly chequered reputation within the historical scholarly tradition. The idea of memory as a useful historical source took a long time to establish itself and even then continued to be regarded with contempt by many academics. This question is borne out of that past, but bears little relevance to the current historical understanding of memory, oral history and its usefulness in our scholarship. The question is also ambiguous, for example what exactly does ‘reliable’ or ‘reconstructing the past’ mean? In terms of oral history reliability has been defined as the “consistency with which an individual will tell the same story about the same events on a number of different occasions.

” [1] However the question implies a comparative with documentary sources, so this definition cannot stand. It seems a better definition will allude to the use of the source in order to better ‘reconstruct the past.’ Reconstructing the past is an exercise in futility, but that does not preclude the admirable nature of the attempt, for the purpose of this essay, it seems prudent to accept this as the