Of course, who would disagree with any of that? As both a journalist  
and as a historian I am always aware of the limitations  obtaining  
with eye witness commentary. I obviously misread you, and apologize  
for mischaracterizing your views.

I spoke to those who maintain the narratives have little or no value  
because the interviewers were white and the informants African  
Americans, and they imposed their views on the proffered material, as  
if in some kind of white revisionist cabal. My concern was that both  
the narratives and the motives of the interviewers not be unfairly  
diminished.

-- Stephan



On 7 Oct 2008, at 01:37, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> In what sense have I been guilty of "dismissing" the work of the  
> people who conducted these interviews?  I think you have misread my  
> words.  Nothing I have written should be used to infer a lack of  
> respect for the people who conducted these interviews, or the  
> elderly African Americans who took the time to be interviewed.
>
> The WPA interviews are an extraordinarily rich and useful body of  
> sources.  But having said that, they still must be used with care.   
> Like any primary source, they speak most authoritatively to the  
> time at which they were recorded.  This is true of *all* primary  
> sources.
>
> Let me give you another example.
>
> William Wirt wrote the first biography of Patrick Henry, which he  
> published about a decade, more or less, after Henry died.  In order  
> to write that biography, Wirt wrote letters to various men who knew  
> Henry, and asked them to respond to a series of questions.  Several  
> of the replies that Wirt received survive, and are now on deposit  
> in the Library of Congress.
>
> While these letters are valuable sources, and while some of them  
> speak to Henry's early life in the 1750s, it would be  
> methodologically unsound to use them uncritically.  The letters  
> represent the recollections of old men, speaking about a revered  
> elder statesman in the decade after Henry had died, and at a time  
> in which many Americans were acutely aware that the generation of  
> men who had fought the Revolution was dying.  They speak quite  
> intelligibly about a particular moment in time--Virginia in the  
> early decades of the 19th century, as post-Revolutionary Virginians  
> began to memorialize their past.  They *may* also speak to the  
> Virginia of Henry's young adult hood.  But it would be a mistake to  
> read them as if the years between the 1750s and the 1810s had not  
> happened.  Lots of things *did* happen in those years, and those  
> things colored the way that Wirt's correspondents remembered  
> Patrick Henry.
>
> We always see the past through a glass darkly.  Part of what it  
> means to be a careful scholar is to keep that basic fact in mind.   
> Every source has to be treated critically.  That is as true of oral  
> history as it is of any other kind of source we have about the past.
>
> All best,
> Kevin
>
>
>> It is wrong, poor scholarship, and disrespectful of these
>> interviewers, and their informants, to dismiss what was for many a
>> labor of love and atonement.
>>
>> -- Stephan
>>
>>
>> Stephan A. Schwartz
>> Email:
>> [log in to unmask]
>> Personal Website:
>> www.stephanaschwartz.com
>> Schwartzreport:
>> www.schwartzreport.net
>> Explore - Schwartzreport Column:
>>  www.explorejournal.com
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> James Madison University
>
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