Oral History in Britain and Northern Ireland
Since the early 1970s, oral history in Britain has grown from being a method in folklore studies (see for example the work of the School of Scottish Studies in the 1950s) to becoming a key component in community histories. Oral history continues to be an important means by which non-academics can actively participate in the compilation and study of history. However, practitioners across a wide range of academic disciplines have also developed the method into a way of recording, understanding, and archiving narrated memories. Influences have included women's history and labour history.
In Britain the Oral History Society has played a key role in facilitating and developing the use of oral history. A more complete account of the history of oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland can be found at "Making Oral History" on the Institute of Historical Research's website.
During 1998 and 1999, forty BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for the series The Century Speaks. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, the Millennium Memory Bank (MMB). The interview based recordings are held by the British Library Sounds' in the oral history collection.
In one of the largest memory project anywhere, The BBC in 2003-6 invited its audiences to send in recollections of the homefront in the Second World War. It put 47,000 of the recollections online, along with 15,000 photographs.
Read more about this topic: Oral History
Famous quotes containing the words oral history, oral, history, britain, northern and/or ireland:
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of her land,
And guardian angels sung the strain:
Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!
Britons never shall be slaves.”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
“That we can come here today and in the presence of thousands and tens of thousands of the survivors of the gallant army of Northern Virginia and their descendants, establish such an enduring monument by their hospitable welcome and acclaim, is conclusive proof of the uniting of the sections, and a universal confession that all that was done was well done, that the battle had to be fought, that the sections had to be tried, but that in the end, the result has inured to the common benefit of all.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)