Addressing Oral History

Wallace’s “The Virtual past: Media and History Museums”

Continuing his saga on public history, Wallace turns to the Internet and its products, which surround us all over these days. There is a multimedia for each and every taste, age, orientation and background, created by big and small museums and offering variety of choices, thus immensely increasing the number of virtual visitors able to drop-in at anytime. What is important, though, that people could interact with each other, send notes to the curators and observe of or participate in occurrence of actual events.
There are pros and cons, of course. Some argue that virtual museums are belittling the actual historical knowledge, while others advocate for the alternation rather than replacement. Today’s situation is obviously much easier when the author publish it in 1996. The author’s concern of the web privatization, virtual replication of the objects and attachment to the actual historical context is well understood. But the author’s idea on “interpreting the world of media itself” (p. 110) is not clear. It may well worked for the modern history, which is well documented and filmed but to recreate the far past – there, again, is a need for virtual history. Here is a necessity to distinguish between heroic stereotype and historic reality, between memory and altered media.
The future of the museums is, no doubt, with the media. But it should be applied carefully, so it won’t damage the vulnerable and carefuly preserved past for the price of the admission ticket.

Smith’s “History on the Web”

Along with variety of historical presentations available today to a Clio’s servant, Smith examines the relatively new “kid on the block” – the historical websites. The major argument he proposes is whether the history being brought by such a mean of presentation is, in fact, a serious history.
The author analyzes this problem by sharing his own experience during the “Great Chicago Fire” museum exhibition in 1996, of which he was an on-line curator. In presenting the pros and cons of this undertaking, the author first describes the way as to how the website was set up: 350 web pages divided in several subchapters, which included vast amount of eyewitness accounts, documents, original photos and the like, including a panoramic view of Chicago as it looked in 1858. It produced a great response, but response of a different kind than is coming after a scholarly book. Thanks to the practically unlimited ability to include as many objects as possible, this website gave an incredible opportunity for many to “visit” this virtual museum time and again. It corresponded with the series of essays accompanying the website, which allowed learning on the city’s history and its population, thus providing a valuable resource for scholars and buffs alike; it offers learning rather than compels on it. It is not better or worse of a history traditionally expressed by the printing material – it is just different type of historical presentation, which attracts its own growing audience and assists in better understanding in more accessible way. We just need better composed and thoroughly researched historic websites.


Wiese’s “The Other Suburbanites”

If we put aside the problems of the housing market and system of suburban development in the north before 1950s, which made up certain African-American communities, Wiese’s article provides an interesting example of how historians in nowadays are using oral history in their attempt to reconstruct the past.
The author is researching a black suburb in Chagrin Falls Park, Ohio, which was established back in 1920s, a suburb that many people living there called home. He based his analysis on several dozen interviews with its former residents with the attempt to answer the simple question – what was it like to live, as a black, in suburban America after WWII?
It was not a suburban “bourgeois utopia” but rather an average “residential black suburb” (p. 1500), which was populated by low income, blue-collar hard-working African-American men and women. Chagrin Falls Park has developed to promote subdivision between rural and urban living, thus addressing various racial problems but also a possibility of a home ownership for the black families migrating from the South.
To paint the full-scale picture of 1940s and 1950s Chagrin Falls Park, the author, along with the direct interviews examined variety of documents, such as deed records, membership rosters, church books and the like. The picture is not very bright: most of the residents did not have usual utilities, which are so common in our days. But, nonetheless, residents managed to survive, raise families and more importantly, create a community, which answered their local needs. As a result of the conducted interviews with survived residents, we could picture the mode of life in African-American suburbia in contrast to the big cities. The major conclusion is that for many, the home ownership became a basic symbol to elevate one’s status in the then segregated America.
“If you never start anything, you never get anything,” said Mr. Adams to his inquiring wife, worrying about the money for their house. But this also sounds about right in our modern time, isn’t it?