The Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at U.C. Berkeley will interview you
only if you have a sponsor to put up $20,000 - $30,000 or so.  This assures,
as a friend put it, "that privilege will be well represented". Therewith is
another source of spin in oral history archives.

Evelyn Forget is totally right about the subjectivity of some such history.
Berkeley's ROHO interview with Paul Taylor is a case in point. The
interviewer, an old friend of mine, asked him about my work on reform of
land and water tenures. Taylor dissed and dismissed me thus: "Oh, he's just
a single taxer" - case closed. Taylor had been Chair of Economics at
Berkeley, which says something about his attitudes, possibly reflecting his
colleagues' too. Funny thing, Taylor himself was known as a radical land
reformer, but evidently one had to be his particular kind.

Evelyn Forget shows great international tolerance by writing of "oral"
history. Up there north of the 49th where "four strong winds blow lonely" it
is "aural" history. In B.C. transcripts are (or were in 1976) kept in the
Provincial Archives, publicly financed. A professional historian, one Derek
Reimer, interviewed me at length, and there was no charge. We both tried to
keep my subjective biases out of it, but probably did not entirely succeed.

Anyway, Oral History, like most history and most things, is no more
objective than the people involved.



-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Evelyn L. Forget
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2011 6:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Oral histories

The Presidential LIbraries, of course, have a major "oral history"  
project that collects material from a variety of economists (and  
others) involved in policy making at senior levels.

The Columbia University Oral History Research Office is another  
source. I believe Tiago Mata has written about other sources.

Personally, I've always been a bit taken aback by the willingness of  
historians of economic thought to use oral histories as a source for  
"factual" data. Oral histories are incredibly rich and enlightening,  
but the ways in which the past is re-interpreted (consciously or  
unconsciously) by the principles is much more interesting than what  
they think they remember about events that happened five decades ago.  
We could do much more with this technique than we have to date.

Evelyn Forget
---------------

At Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:03:08 +0100, Dr Robert Anthony Cord wrote:

> Dear all
>
> The British Library is currently engaged in a major project which will
> collect the oral histories of 200 eminent British scientists, previously a
> major gap in the effort to understand the development of British science.
> I can find no equivalent in economics, the closest arguably being Ross
> Emmett's Chicago Economics Oral History Project. Is there anything else
> out there and what are the views of the list on this method of research?
>
> All the best
>
> Bob
>
>