Importance Of Oral History

Like any other source of information oral history is a valuable source for historian. Therefore historian should take oral history as a legitimate source of information because it has the potential of providing rich primary sources. While oral history has the potential of highlighting individual experiences of past events and reassert ordinary individual inherent agency as people, it is not without its pitfalls; any historian approaching oral history must approach it with a critical lens and not take everything on face value, but question and critique the validity of the information they are receiving. Oral history faces many fallacies and these fallacies are particularly attributed to the human element of oral history. Like all historical sources interview contain personal biases, however these biases may themselves constitute important data for the historian 's consideration. Given the fallacy of human memories and desire to represent the best version of themselves, or those close to them a researcher should be caution because individual …show more content…
Oral history recognizes that everyone 's memories matters, memoirs of everyday people and not just rich and famous have a historical importance. Oral history allows the author to learn about the perspective of individuals who might not otherwise appear in the historical record. Ordinary individuals often perspective or experience of history often goes unnoticed in written record. Politicians, activists and business leaders may appear in history records, but the ordinary or every day individuals often are displaced in historical record the significance of oral history is that it provides these individuals a place in history. This is particularly important when talking about Canadian or American 's History because of racism that is embedded within both nations colonial history whether against indigenous, or Black