Oral History and Working Class History: A Rewarding Alliance

Since the 1960s, if not before, oral history and working-class history have been a dynamic duo, complimenting and overlapping, but also challenging and questioning each other. Both lay and professional historians have been in the forefront of efforts to recuperate, interpret, and preserve the oral histories of working-class individuals and communities across the globe. They created written histories, archival collections, museum exhibits, and community projects that gave workers, their families, and their communities -those who were less likely to leave archival and written sources for posterity -a new voice, and a new place in history. Working-class oral history has also encompassed far more than recovery and preservation. Labour historians have enriched the field of oral history by addressing questions about method, theory, and approach, by offering critical reflections on our assumptions and expectations about oral history practice. Oral history has similarly enriched the field of working-class history, posing new questions, challenging existing interpretations, and encouraging the diversification of the themes and subjects we study. In recognition of this dynamic relationship, and the ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between oral and working-class history, Oral History Forum commissioned this special issue. Periodizing and classifying the historiography of working-class oral history is not an easy task. It is always dangerous to talk about the origins of a turn towards the use of oral history, since there are inevitably antecedents to consider: folklorists, anthropologists and popular writers were all using oral history long before the 1960s, sometimes with the expressed purpose of preserving the voices of ‘ordinary’ working people. Eye witness recollections, as Paul Thompson noted decades ago, have long been a historical source; however, the increased emphasis put on archives and documents, as history professionalized in the late nineteenth century, did marginalize oral accounts. Nonetheless, after the Second World War in some countries, and certainly by late 1960s, there was a new openness towards oral history in the historical profession, as more practitioners embraced a method previously associated with the social sciences, especially anthropology, and journalism. As oral history assumed more

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