Using Oral Histories to Recover Forgotten Voices

In a modest home in the Jago community of northwestern Mississippi, a historian placed a small recorder on a kitchen table. The elderly resident across from her began to speak—not of great battles or famous men, but of a town founded by freed slaves during Reconstruction, of streets and churches, of a community later absorbed into a majority white municipality. The story, repeated in living rooms and porches across the American South, was not in any official archive. It lived only in memory. This is the essence of oral history: a deeply social practice that connects past and present, and at times connects narrative to action. It is a method that has recovered the voices of the forgotten, the silenced, and the overlooked—from the Jago community to the Pontchartrain Park neighborhood in New Orleans—and transformed how we understand the past.

What Happened?

The practice of oral history—systematically recording and preserving the spoken memories of individuals—gained traction in the mid-twentieth century as a way to document the experiences of ordinary people. By the 1960s and 1970s, historians were increasingly turning to interviews to fill gaps left by written records. The approach became particularly valuable for communities whose lives were rarely documented in official sources: African Americans in the segregated South, immigrants, workers, and other marginalized groups.

In 2017, an article in Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals documented how oral histories and ethnographic interviews were used to recover the story of two such communities. The first was the Jago community, an all-black settlement founded during Reconstruction in northwestern Mississippi. Although it was a thriving community with its own institutions, it was absorbed by a majority white municipality during the mid-1900s, and its history was largely erased from public records. The second was Pontchartrain Park in New Orleans, a neighborhood that was a center of Black middle-class life in the mid-twentieth century, which faced significant challenges after Hurricane Katrina. The researchers used oral history to bring light to these communities, showing how the “authentic” voice of the people was best accessed through their own testimonies.

The practice of oral history is not without its critics. In 2018, Midge Gillies, in a PhD thesis titled “Clamouring to be heard: a critique of the forgotten voices genre of social history of the early twenty-first century,” argued that the “forgotten voices” genre—popularized by books like Forgotten Voices of the Great War—often oversimplifies and misrepresents the complexity of memory. Gillies highlighted the need for careful methodological and ethical considerations. This critique has shaped how historians today approach the recovery of marginalized voices.

How It Was Seen at the Time

Contemporaries understood oral history as a way to bypass the biases of official records. As Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes wrote, “Oral history is at heart a deeply social practice connecting past and present and, at times, connecting narrative to action.” This perspective was echoed in the 2017 study, which argued that the “authentic” voice of communities and individuals is best accessed through oral histories and ethnographic interviews. The method was seen as a way to “unearth and recover remarkable stories from our past” that were otherwise absent from archives.

“Oral histories and ethnographic interviews allow researchers to unearth and recover remarkable stories from our past.” — Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, 2017

This belief in the power of the spoken word was widespread among practitioners. They saw oral history as a corrective to the silences of the written record, a way to give voice to the voiceless, and a means of building community memory. Yet even as the method gained popularity, some scholars warned against treating it as a simple recovery. They argued that memory is not a perfect mirror of the past, but a creative act that requires careful interpretation.

Historical Snapshot

What People Knew at the Time

Eyewitness Accounts

The very essence of oral history lies in the eyewitness accounts of the people who lived through the events. In the 2017 study, the researchers recorded the memories of elderly residents of Jago, who described the town’s founding, its schools, churches, and businesses, and the pain of being absorbed by a white municipality. One resident recalled how the community’s story was never written down—only passed from generation to generation. In Pontchartrain Park, residents described the neighborhood’s role as a haven for Black families in the segregated South, and their struggles after Hurricane Katrina.

The researchers noted that “the authentic voice of communities and individuals is best accessed through these methods.” They quoted Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes: “Oral history is at heart a deeply social practice connecting past and present and, at times, connecting narrative to action.” This connection between narrative and action is central to the power of these accounts.

Different Perspectives

Community Perspective

The residents of Jago and Pontchartrain Park saw themselves as the keepers of a history that was not in the books. Their oral testimonies provided a counter-narrative to the official record, which had either ignored or misrepresented them. They viewed their memories as a vital archive, one that had been preserved through storytelling, music, and family traditions.

Academic Perspective

Scholars like Midge Gillies have critiqued the “forgotten voices” genre for its tendency to treat the spoken word as a transparent window into the past. Gillies argued that the genre often ignores the complexities of memory and the role of the interviewer, and that it can inadvertently reproduce stereotypes. This academic perspective calls for a more reflexive and ethical approach, as outlined in a 2026 book chapter that emphasizes the need to transform silence into source without reproducing epistemic injustice.

What the Sources Got Wrong

Contemporary sources often romanticized oral history as a pure recovery of the past. The 2017 study, for example, celebrated the “authentic voice” of the communities without fully addressing the power dynamics between interviewer and interviewee. Critics like Midge Gillies point out that the “forgotten voices” genre—such as the popular Forgotten Voices of the Great War—often presents edited and decontextualized memories as if they were complete and objective truths. In reality, memory is fallible, and the act of telling a story is shaped by the audience, the setting, and the emotional state of the speaker. The early sources also tended to treat oral history as a simple remedy for the omissions of the written record, but as modern scholarship shows, oral traditions are not just supplementary; they are archives in their own right, with their own rules and logics.

How Historians See It Today

Today, historians view oral history as a complex and collaborative process, not a simple transcription of memory. The 2026 book chapter “From Silence to Source” argues that oral traditions, material artifacts, art, and music are not supplementary but constitute vital archives in their own right. Historians now emphasize the need for ethical methodologies that foreground agency over victimhood, and that address issues of consent, ownership, and representation. They also recognize that oral history is not a neutral act; it is a conversation that shapes the past in the present. This shift has led to more inclusive and community-engaged approaches, where the people being interviewed are partners in the research rather than subjects of it.

Related Primary Sources

• Oral History Interviews from the Jago Community Project, held in the University of Mississippi Special Collections (as described in the 2017 study).
• Pontchartrain Park Oral History Collection, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.
• Forgotten Voices of the Great War by Max Arthur (in association with the Imperial War Museum) – a popular example of the genre, but one that has been critiqued.
• The Imperial War Museum Sound Archive – contains thousands of oral history recordings.
• The Oral History Association (OHA) – provides guidelines and resources for oral history practice.

Oral histories have transformed our understanding of the past by bringing to life the voices that were systematically left out of the written record. They remind us that the archive is not just a place of paper, but also a place of memory, sound, and human connection. As we continue to listen, we learn that the past is not a fixed story, but a living conversation—one that we can still join.