This is an interesting discussion from the National Council on Public History conference blog. I’ve mentioned before that we need a new term to describe this wonderful phenomenon of more and more people documenting their lives publicly, and projects like StoryCorps, that fall somewhere between journalism and oral history.
Opening keynote speaker Jill Lepore, keying on a New York times article that talked about an “unprecedented pileup of historic news,” bemoaned the lack of depth or analysis in most of the discussions of historic candidacies, elections, meltdowns, and what have you, and pointed out that the current feeling of “cuspiness”–being on the edge of momentous change–is, in fact, hardly new. Referencing the Studs Turkel model of oral history and clips from the New York Times “New Hard Times,” which invites readers to videotape and upload their own families’ stories about the last Great Depression, Lepore argued that such projects, driven by shorter and shorter news cycles, are deeply at odds with the historian’s responsibility to make careful, in-depth analyses about the past. In an age where everyone is increasingly his or her own historian, Lepore made a case for the unique role of the historian in showing how the past relates to the present.
