History
In its contemporary formulation, the techniques of oral debriefing were first explored in the US in the 1940s in New Deal projects to preserve the reminiscences of former slaves and unlettered rural folk, and then in Europe. Its first cheerleader and practitioner was the American social commentator and writer Studs Terkel . Born in 1912 and trained as a lawyer before becoming a journalist and writer, his fascination with the medium came soon after the tape recorder’s commercial exploitation when he started interviewing a whole cross-section of American society in order to piece together a jig-saw of experiences. From taxis drivers and teachers, the poor and the rich, young and old, his books on subjects ranging from race relations to war have provided a rich range of social opinion and attitudes of a nation undergoing rapid social change.
Terkel’s pioneering work was concurrent with the efforts of the US academic Professor Allan Nivens who, after successfully persuading educationalists to introduce oral history as a tool for serious scholarship in the 1940s, founded the Oral History Collection at Columbia University (http://library.truman.edu/microforms/columbia_oral_history.htm). Since then other universities, including Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, have also developed extensive collections of oral history. In the early 1950s Nivens brought oral history to industry when he organised the interview of more than 400 people for a history of the Ford Motor Company. Since then a handful of companies have supported similar programs, among them ARCO, Beckman Instruments, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilley, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, Rohm and Haas and Standard Oil Company.
In Europe, most of the efforts in oral history have been confined to non-business activities, where its use is relatively widespread in sociological and straight historical research. In a rare business-type project called "City Lives”, the National Life Story Collection attached to the British Library Sound Archive has been interviewing about 100 top men and women from financial institutions who have lived through the changes since WW2 (http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/sound/ohist/ohnls/nationallifestories.html). Aside from that, only a small number of British companies have undertaken projects to record the memories and experiences of their employees, among them London Transport, which has made a special effort with their West Indian workforce, the brewers Bass, the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless and, until the project was aborted in 1991 as a cost-saving exercise, Ford UK. The uses to which they have put the information have generally been for museum exhibits or public relations.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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