What Is Oral History? A Historian’s Plain-Language Guide

Oral history is a way of recording, preserving and interpreting the memories of people who lived through the past, in their own voices, through a planned interview. What separates it from an ordinary conversation is the work around the recording: research before the interview, the narrator’s informed consent, and an archive that keeps the recording and transcript so that others can learn from them.

This guide explains what oral history is in plain language, how historians use it, and where you can hear strong oral history examples, including a set of interviews recorded in East Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, beginning in 2025.

What is oral history, according to historians?

The OHA describes oral history as both a method and a field of study. The method is the recorded interview. The field is the body of practice, ethics and scholarship that has grown up around gathering, keeping and interpreting those interviews.

The practice is ancient. The OHA points out that people passed down knowledge by voice long before anyone wrote it down. What is modern is the recording, which has moved from wax cylinders to wire recorders, analog tape and today’s digital files.

The value of an interview, in the OHA’s words, lies largely in how it places people’s experiences within a larger social and historical context. A document can tell you that a factory closed. A former worker can tell you what the closing meant for a family, a church and a street.

How is an oral history different from an ordinary interview?

The OHA calls the hallmark of an oral history interview “a dynamic, collaborative relationship between the interviewer and the narrator.” The interviewer prepares questions from research. The narrator decides what is relevant, meaningful or appropriate to share, and so shapes the record as much as the interviewer does.

Consent is the second difference. Under the OHA’s guidance, narrators may decline any question, take a break, end the interview, or ask to restrict access or use a pseudonym. An interview goes into an archive only when that is legally and ethically feasible, and only with the written permission of both the interviewer and the narrator.

The third difference is purpose. An oral history is made to last. The OHA lists four key elements of the work: preparation, interviewing, preservation and access. A recording that sits on one phone, with no release and no description, has skipped the last two.

What kinds of oral history interviews are there?

The OHA describes two broad kinds. A life history interview follows a narrator from childhood forward and lets the larger story emerge from one life. A topical interview selects narrators for what they know about a particular subject or event, such as a strike, a congregation, a school or a neighborhood.

Many family interviews are life histories, and they are the easiest place to start. Our guide to questions to ask your grandparents covers that kind of conversation. Community projects tend to combine both kinds, with a shared theme and many narrators, which is the subject of our step-by-step guide to planning a community oral history project.

What are some well-known oral history examples?

The Veterans History Project. Congress created the project in 2000 as part of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, to collect and preserve the accounts of U.S. military veterans and Gold Star families. Its field kit lets any interviewer aged 15 or older contribute, and it requires signed release forms before the Library can keep a collection.

StoryCorps. Since its founding in 2003, StoryCorps says it has helped more than 750,000 people record conversations about their lives. Those recordings are collected in the Library of Congress and in the organization’s online archive.

Cleveland Voices. The Cleveland State University Center for Public History + Digital Humanities has collected oral history interviews since 2002 and publishes them online at Cleveland Voices under a Creative Commons license. Anyone can listen and read the transcripts for free.

The East Cleveland Oral History Project. Its 25 transcribed interviews, most recorded in 2025 and all archived in Cleveland Voices, document residents’ memories of education, migration, faith, entrepreneurship, community development and neighborhood revitalization. You can read about the people and themes in our overview of the East Cleveland Oral History Project.

Can you trust what people remember?

Memory is not a recording. People forget, compress and reinterpret, and two narrators can remember the same event differently. Historians treat an oral history as a primary source like any other: valuable, personal and in need of comparison with other evidence.

Cleveland Voices makes the point in its site footer, where listeners “are encouraged to verify stories through additional research.” The OHA asks people who use interviews to put excerpts in context, avoid stereotypes, and cite the full oral history rather than a single line lifted from it.

What memory offers, and what documents rarely do, is meaning. An interview shows how an event felt, what people believed at the time, and how a community explains its own past. That is why oral history sits at the center of much public history work.

What happens to an oral history after the interview?

Good practice continues well after the recorder stops. The OHA’s best practices call for a signed release, ideally at the end of the interview, and for keeping redundant copies of the recording in different physical locations, in formats that do not depend on one company’s software.

Most archives also want a written record. The National Park Service estimates that transcribing one hour of interview takes six to eight hours, and it suggests a timed index or an abstract when a full transcript is out of reach. Narrators should know that once an interview is public, it may not be possible to remove it completely, which is one more reason to settle permissions before anything is shared.

Why does oral history matter now?

Every year, people who remember the middle of the twentieth century, the Great Migration, the civil rights era and the decline and rebuilding of American cities grow fewer. Their memories hold details that rarely reach a newspaper or a census form. Oral history lets communities, in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County as anywhere, describe their own past in their own voices, on their own terms, for anyone who listens later.

Mays HisToracle Consulting designs and carries out oral history projects for families, congregations, schools and community organizations, from the first plan to the archive.