If writing one's history is significant, then expressing it is necessary. As an archival tool, this methodology preserves many histories that otherwise, over time, would become lost. As a process of reflection and remembrance, oral history opens a space where past and present conceptions of community and place coalesce. The oral history methodology, unlike many methods of social science research, hinges more on the narrative space and possibility of memory than in any absolute value of that memory. Since this project has accelerated into multithreaded narratives rather than resolved on a summary point, the prospect of a single History has already collapsed.
Criticisms are welcome.
Although I have not created the interviews and histories found in this site, I certainly have selected and edited which portions I include in the narrative. Thus, questions regarding this presentation should be directed toward me, rather than the families who have helped this project. After many torqued manifestations, the research was further augmented the following semester in an African-American Historiography seminar led by Dr. Gerald Smith in the Department of History. In March during that semester, I attended the Kentucky Oral History Conference in Louisville for the first time and was enthralled by possibilities of oral history. Throughout the summer I visited and played in the parks, making sketches, photographs, and notes in an attempt to achieve a better familiarity with these spaces.