Oral history provides students with an important tool to make such connections. Interviewing people who experienced the poverty of the Great Depression, the violence of school integration, the turbulence of the Vietnam War era, or the fears of the Cuban missile crisis dramatically underscores the evolutionary nature of American history. As part of my teaching curriculum, I require my students to conduct historical interviews for their term paper assignments and to present their findings during class discussion. I instruct each student to choose one event covered in class and to interview at least two people who lived through that event. That process alone can raise as many questions as it answers.
Students often discover during an interview that individuals forget or gloss over painful subjects.
For example, several students discovered that their interviewees resisted answering questions about their involvement in conflicts over the Vietnam War. Other people refused to talk about attitudes and activities of theirs that were once commonly accepted but are considered unacceptable today. This resistance especially emerged in dealing with school integration. Students often found that while many African American interviewees readily discussed their traumatic integration experiences, white respondents frequently failed to recall any aspects of desegregation even when it occurred in the schools they attended. One interviewee told her daughter that her school's integration had little effect on her high school years, although she acknowledged that several of her fellow white students routinely abused their black counterparts.