Making History
It was 1943, and Bernard Moulton was on the USS Herndon, a ship escorting a friendly fuel tanker through enemy-infested waters near Gibraltar. A German U-boat attacked, firing a torpedo strike that was as sudden as it was terrifying. "We saw [the torpedo] coming; there was no way we could do anything ... it was coming too fast," says Moulton, as he watches the spinning reels of the tape recorder in the living room of his Annapolis, Md., home. "Very fortunately, it was set for a deep-draft ship, and it went under us. That's why we're alive." And that's how his ship earned the nickname "Lucky Herndon."
Moulton, 84, has told this story dozens of times in the six decades since that attack, but today he is more than just idly reminiscing. Across the table, amid a stack of logbooks, maps, and black-and-white photographs, sits Karen Sider, a home healthcare worker and--for this afternoon at least--an oral historian. They are recording Moulton's war memories as part of one of the largest and most ambitious oral history initiatives since the government sent researchers around the country to collect interviews during the Great Depression.
The tape being recorded in Moulton's living room is destined for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. Library staffers will transcribe the interview and archive it in a collection that already includes more than 45,000 interviews, most with veterans from World War I through Iraq and Afghanistan. Launched in 2001, the project relies on volunteers, including high school students, nursing home workers, television producers, and congressional staffers, to document the experiences of Americans who lived through wars. Not limited to veterans, the project also invites contributions from factory workers, merchant mariners, doctors--anyone who has played a role in the nation's conflicts. "We are capitalizing on the tremendous groundswell of Americans recording oral histories, especially stories from family members and neighbors," says Bob Patrick, who directs the Veterans History Project. Indeed, interest in the project has been so great that staffers are months behind in transcribing and cataloging.
Reminiscence. Oral history has never had more currency. From the Library of Congress initiative to record the tales of the eldest veterans to the modern military's use of interviews as therapy for battle-scarred soldiers, oral history--verbatim testimonials about one's experiences--has become an increasingly prominent way to chronicle the past, both near and far. There are oral history projects documenting Hurricane Katrina, for example, at several universities. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg is working with the Shoah Foundation to collect the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. The government and private groups have collected testimonials from witnesses of the 9/11 attacks. Nursing homes use oral histories in what's called "reminiscence therapy" for patients with Alzheimer's disease. And oral histories are gaining on the family photo album as a way for relatives to pass along their stories and genealogy.
Indeed, families are among the most avid oral historians, seeking to capture and preserve the lives of their aging relatives. Patrick and his staff are poised for their collection to expand exponentially soon, because of contributions from many more families. On September 23, PBS will begin airing The War, a 14-hour documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns about the Second World War. Burns's design is to tell the story of the conflict through four American towns (Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn.; Luverne, Minn.; and Sacramento, Calif.), the people who lived there, how they experienced the war, and how the world changed as a result. It relies heavily on the voices of ordinary soldiers and civilians.
Burns says he was prompted to make another war film (his acclaimed Civil War was released in 1990) after reading that more than 1,000 WWII veterans die ever day. As part of the film's broadcast debut, Burns and local PBS stations are partnering with Patrick to solicit contributions to the Veterans History Project, some 60 percent of which deals with WWII. Burns has also partnered with the online networking site MySpace to collect video oral histories online. "The act of taking these oral histories," says James Billington, the librarian of Congress, "is both an exercise in intergenerational bonding and collective history, with a result that's not perishable."
Of course, like all stories, oral histories can be embellished, misinformed, contradictory, confusing, and incomplete. Everyone knows someone whose tales grow slightly taller with each telling. But to focus on the individual shortcomings of these accounts is to miss the larger truth. These narratives are a mosaic--the more pieces collected, the clearer the overall picture. Scholars studying oral histories say that the most challenging aspect is not the accuracy of the accounts per se but the sheer volume of material. Using oral histories is like writing a Russian novel, says Burns. "You piece together the stories of 50 people and interweave and braid them together [to] merge the public and private archives."
The notion of history itself, in fact, comes from age-old oral traditions. The Greek writer Herodotus, called the father of history, was one of the first to include personal accounts of events in his histories. As early as the 1890s, the U.S. government made an effort to record American Indian languages--and history--on wax cylinders. During the Great Depression, the government's Federal Writers' Project sent artists, writers, and historians to document the diversity of the various states. Some 10,000 stories were recorded by such future luminaries as Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, and Studs Terkel, who would later revive the genre as a historian in the 1980s with books like Working and The Good War. Though most of these interviews, conducted with farmers, factory workers, and former slaves, were recorded with notepads, some audio recordings from the project still exist. And in 1948, Columbia University's Allan Nevins launched an oral history department that today holds more than 8,000 taped memoirs.
One of the best-known modern-day oral history projects is StoryCorps, a radio project by producer David Isay. Since 2003, the project has taken some 10,000 oral histories from ordinary people around the country. Excerpted on National Public Radio, the project records many of its tales in a sound booth in New York City's Grand Central Terminal. Participants reserve a time and sit in the booth and conduct a 40-minute interview with a family member or friend on any topic the person desires. A staffer offers question prompts as needed. "If we take the time to listen, we find wisdom and poetry in the lives and stories of people around us," says Isay.
StoryCorps employs professionals to handle the technical aspects of its project. But recording technology today is basic enough that nearly anyone can record an oral history suitable for the Library of Congress (box, Page 53). Susan Kitchens, who got into recording oral histories by talking to her 99-year-old grandfather, runs familyoralhistory.us, a website that offers advice for recording and organizing oral histories and digital scrapbooks. "The trick to oral histories is actually getting it done before it's too late," she says. The Veterans History Project and most libraries accept a variety of digital and analog audio- and videotapes.
Whatever the format, many vets are just happy that someone is listening. As Bernard Moulton winds down his oral history (ending with a description of shelling German positions from his ship during D-Day), he says it is flattering that his story will be preserved in the country's official repository. "It'll be there long after everyone who lived through the war will be gone," he says, sowly walking his chronicler, Karen Sider, to the front door. "You know," he calls to her as she climbs into her SUV, "I have more stories that we didn't have a chance to get into today, if you'd like to come back and hear more."
By Alex Kingsbury