The Great War -- I Was There
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- Date Submitted: 03/19/2011 06:31 AM
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The Great War… I Was There!
The Great War… I Was There!
The use of memory, whether as oral testimony or autobiography, is seen by many as a recent entry onto the stage of historical study, as John Tosh points out Arthur Marwick made no mention of oral sources in ‘The Nature of History’ [1] and in the same book, Marwick advises that autobiography, should ‘be treated with even greater circumspection then the straightforward primary document.’[2] If autobiography is treated in this way, oral history, when it is mentioned, fairs little better for although it is recognised by most historians that oral history has always been with us, and as Paul Thompson says ‘oral history is as old as history itself’[3] this has not helped all historians from accepting its usefulness and it is only in more recent times, probably since Paul Thompson’s contribution to this area has been taken more seriously. Even so, most that is referred to has been done fairly recently with George Ewert Evans book ‘Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay’ published in 1956, being cited by David Hey as pioneering the approach of looking at the history of ordinary men and women.[4] So does this mean that there has been little, or no, work collecting, and recording, the memories of the ‘ordinary’ person until recently, especially the recent great race to record everyone for the millennium!
World War One
War has been a popular area of memory work in recent times whether focused on an anniversary like the that of the D Day landings which was the basis for a recent television series ‘Band of Brothers’,[5] or the desire to record personal experiences of war before that task becomes impossible, as in that of World War One. These personal histories give us a different view of events and are different from the traditional history stories, but not all historians make great use of these sources and therefore it is often the traditional ‘big’ stories that are told in the history books that take up most of the...
The Great War… I Was There!
The use of memory, whether as oral testimony or autobiography, is seen by many as a recent entry onto the stage of historical study, as John Tosh points out Arthur Marwick made no mention of oral sources in ‘The Nature of History’ [1] and in the same book, Marwick advises that autobiography, should ‘be treated with even greater circumspection then the straightforward primary document.’[2] If autobiography is treated in this way, oral history, when it is mentioned, fairs little better for although it is recognised by most historians that oral history has always been with us, and as Paul Thompson says ‘oral history is as old as history itself’[3] this has not helped all historians from accepting its usefulness and it is only in more recent times, probably since Paul Thompson’s contribution to this area has been taken more seriously. Even so, most that is referred to has been done fairly recently with George Ewert Evans book ‘Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay’ published in 1956, being cited by David Hey as pioneering the approach of looking at the history of ordinary men and women.[4] So does this mean that there has been little, or no, work collecting, and recording, the memories of the ‘ordinary’ person until recently, especially the recent great race to record everyone for the millennium!
World War One
War has been a popular area of memory work in recent times whether focused on an anniversary like the that of the D Day landings which was the basis for a recent television series ‘Band of Brothers’,[5] or the desire to record personal experiences of war before that task becomes impossible, as in that of World War One. These personal histories give us a different view of events and are different from the traditional history stories, but not all historians make great use of these sources and therefore it is often the traditional ‘big’ stories that are told in the history books that take up most of the...