Active History: Personal Encounters in the Ivy Project
Steven Park, University of Montana
When I went with Professor Dorothee Kocks to help her sell the Ivy Project
at the H-Net conference in 1997, it felt like a reincarnation of helping
Mrs. Starbuck move into a new classroom at the end of ninth grade-I didn't
know why she chose me, but hauling books or not I felt special just being
able to associate outside of the classroom with what I thought to be the
source of truth and knowledge. Through Dorothee's persistence, I've come
to know her not as the source of truth, but as a source for wisdom and,
more importantly, true friendship. And in attempting to erase that
hierarchical boundary of teacher/student, she has made it easier for me to
understand the meat of the Ivy Project, the project as itself, not as
connected to a wizard of academia.
It is the meat of the Ivy project I speak of now: its ability to
personalize, or democratize as Dorothee described it, the practice of
history. I do not want to show and tell a project created two years ago
by Dorothee and students in her Modern American West history class. You
can listen to Dorothee discuss the Ivy Project in Real Audio at the web
version of the 1997 H-Net conference, Envisioning the Future: Creating the
Humanities Classroom of the 21st Century. In short, the Ivy Project is a
collection of student-generated oral history web pages with aspirations
for growth. You can explore most of the project itself at the Ivy Project
home page. What I want to do instead is ask some questions of historical
practice and see if and how a modified Ivy Project can answer those
questions.
The study of history, as taught in secondary and post secondary schools,
does not include spaces of ambiguity, and so leaves no room to engage in
deep play that would make history personal to the player. Instead,
historians strive for a truthful recreation of the past so that the rest
of us can learn lessons from it. But the truths or the lessons are all
provided by hegemonic sources. History professors lecture on campuses
that resemble nothing if not small countries where they are the benevolent
dictators. They write books published by those same universities. Far
from a personal practice, history (at its best) seems to be an
intellectual feast in which the meal is prepared by and consists of
oppressed peoples.
Having said enough to make myself feel anti-intellectual, I'll
back up. History as taught in university or secondary school classes is
not wrong, just incomplete. Professional historians, like professional
auto mechanics or medical professionals, do a great service in being a
source for expertise, but we expect mechanics and doctors to include us in
their diagnoses, so much so that it has become a cliché. Mechanics and
doctors generally ask the driver or patient what they think the problem
is, and why. Good mechanics and doctors will even ask for background
history that led the customer to an analysis of the ailment. Mechanics,
doctors and their customers all expect, and probably rely on this kind of
dialogue; when possible, the dialogue and the expertise lead to a
correction of the problem. This rarely happens in the practice of
history, but it could.
In The Battle of Valle Giulia, oral historian Alessandro Portelli
defines
oral history as "an art dealing with the individual in social and
historical context" where the goal is to "connect them [persons] with
'history' and in turn to force history to listen to them." Oral history
forces established history to listen to unhegemonic people in two ways.
First, assuming someone (or something) publishes the oral histories or
puts them in an archive, they add to the body of published history that
students of history go to for sources or ideas. So oral histories
literally put individuals on the library shelf, perhaps physically
dividing histories that exclude those individuals.
Oral history also forces individuals into history in a very
personal sense-Dorothee refers to it as personal history. Thomas Dublin,
in researching the history of post 1920s northern Pennsylvania coal
mining, found traditional sources of history-"local newspapers, union and
trade association publications, censuses and government reports, and
scattered published memoirs"-unable to tell the complete story of the
decline of coal mining. As a last resort he turned to the people of
northern Pennsylvania since most of them had lived the history he hoped to
retell. He writes that talking to people in the area "opened up a world I
had hardly imagined. The residents of what had seemed to me an
impoverished backwater quickly took on identities of their own."
Dublin's experiment with oral history, then, forced those "backwater"
people onto the bookshelves and into future footnotes, but it also forced
them into Dublin's own consciousness, his personal sense of history.
The historian does not (or should not) walk away from the dialogue
the only participant whose consciousness changed as a result of the
dialogue. If the object of personal or oral history is to force
unhegemonic individuals into history, and in the process turn "spaces of
ambiguity" into "places of solidarity, pooling and reworking," there is an
implication of consciousness raising for the observed, or the unhegemonic,
as well. Portelli argues that "Oral history does not begin with one
abstract person observing another, reified one, but with two persons
meeting on a ground of equality to bring together their different types of
knowledge and achieve a new synthesis from which both will be changed."
Barbara Kopple shows this process of consciousness raising through
dialogue with authority in her 1976 documentary film Harlan County, U.S.A.
The striking miners in the film and especially their wives were very much
conscious of their role in history. Initially, I could not figure out
where it came from. Many of them referred to an earlier labor struggle in
Harlan County in the 1930s, and obviously much of their memory followed
directly from their cultural reliance on folksongs. But most of them
moved on the screen with ease, an ease that doesn't come from folksongs or
even familiarity with strikes; that ease with telling their story came in
large part, I think, from previous dialogue with oral historians,
documentary film-makers and the like.
Twenty years after the production of Harlan County, U.S.A. Alessandro
Portelli also entered Harlan County to write an oral history of the area.
As part of a lesson on interview manners, he describes how colleagues
warned him of unfriendly attitudes toward outsiders among the people who
live in Harlan County. After feeling comfortable in one interview, he
asked why the interviewee had been so nice, so willing to talk. She
explained that she had talked to her sister about Portelli and they
decided to talk to him if, when they met him, he wasn't "too stuck up."
They determined his level of cultural acceptance when he came into their
dirty house and he "didn't look around for a clean place to lay your butt
on." While the lesson on etiquette is important, so is the lesson on
what happens when peoples' memory becomes important to and a part of
history. The woman with the dirty house and all of the people of Harlan
County can be "stuck up" in their own way because they know their memory
is important. They know this in part, I think, from years of talking to
historians, labor organizers, filmmakers, and ultimately, hearing
themselves talk, which facilitates talking to each other.
Though the act of oral history is a dialogue, the final product, and there
is a final product, is still a monologue from above. Thomas Dublin had
the last word on how or what part of his dialogue with people in northern
Pennsylvania would be published. Portelli offers a perfect example of
this problem. One of his subjects disagreed with Portelli's
interpretation of what that subject said, and Portelli's text centered on
that person's story. Portelli solved the problem by including both
interpretations: "Because oral history is dialogic, we still began the
book with the story and our interpretation of it, but we ended it with the
narrator's counterinterpretation, and then we inserted our interpretation
of his counterinterpretation." He adds that the narrator could then,
again, counterinterpret Portelli's counterinterpretation, as could others.
But the narrator cannot continue arguing in print. University of
Wisconsin Press does not run a public forum or "letters to the editor" on
the back cover of its published books. It does print a kind of elite
forum, or letters to the editor from people who matter-"Michael Frisch,
author of A Shared Authority" or "Ronald J. Grele, Columbia University."
With oral history as it stands, then, there are limits: only professional
historians can publish oral histories, thereby making the dialogue
serious, and that dialogue stops when the press rolls and the author gets
paid. Those limits can be overcome. The dialogue can be more inclusive;
it can go beyond hegemonic interviewer and unhegemonic subject. And the
dialogue can be continuous. Both of these goals are possible through use
of the world wide web in conjunction with the practice of oral history-the
Ivy Project.
The internet is an ambiguous space because of its unlimited size
and unlimited access. What if all of the benefits of dialogue that go to
the oral historian and subject were shared with a broader class of
people-students, community groups and interested individuals? Most oral
history tools are already available to everyone: a tape recorder, an
historical question, and a willing subject. One important tool is not:
the ability to put those collected stories on a library shelf so they
become a part of textual history and not just an experience in the memory
(and trash can) of the participants. As important as I have already
indicated dialogue is socially, the quality of that dialogue depends
somewhat on the dialogue becoming a part of textual history. This
expectation on the part of all participants makes the dialogue serious.
Without it, the dialogue is just a chat between friends-no, a chat between
strangers, which can seem pointless and then might become pointless. The
internet, though, is a virtual publisher with unlimited space. And a
publisher with unlimited space will not censor for commercial reasons. In
this way the world wide web functions as a virtual library with unlimited
shelf-space and (most importantly) unlimited patrons who can access many
different publishers and individuals.
Using the internet with oral history can also solve the problem of
the "last word". There are no last words on the internet. Portelli's
example of a narrator disagreeing with him on the interpretation of the
narrator's story would work something like this: Portelli interprets the
interview and publishes it on the internet in some kind of space connected
to a chat room or discussion list, or in a space that publishes multiple
personal histories and is not limited to professional historians; the
narrator counterinterprets his story in the chat room; Portelli
counterinterprets the narrator's counterinterpretation; the narrator's
neighbor has been following the stories/interpretations and so offers her
own story that defies all previous interpretations; Portelli and the
narrator adjust their interpretations to account for her story; a person
from a different country with a similar story tells it and then includes
all previous stories/interpretations into his own interpretation. It
shouldn't stop. Obviously, someone would have to create a structure that
allowed this type of online dialogue, and it would have to be managed,
organized, and easy to use (to encourage the dialogue). But it could
happen, and in a small part, has happened. The Ivy Project is a space of
solidarity for the pooling and reworking of cultural and material
resources, and a space in which a student of history can act within an
historical context. It is a space for people to claim history.
Having made such large claims about how this process of talking to
individuals and telling their stories over the internet-the core of the
Ivy Project-personalizes history it seems necessary to justify that claim.
In 1958 my dad knocked up my mom just as another man with two other wives
was hoping to make her the third. My dad converted my mom to Mormonism;
twenty years and 11 children later my mom divorced my dad because, among
other things, he had become anti-Mormon. My mother then raised the
children who chose to live with her while she ran a daycare in her home
and went to school at night to get her associates degree. We lived on
rice, beans, pasta, the Book of Mormon and a 13 inch black and white T.V.
until about ten years later when she remarried. She is still alive (and
beautiful) so her story does not end there but is still in the making,
still changing with every telling. But you won't find her story, now or
in the future, in a history book because she defies, as do all people,
historical generalizations. Instead, you and I have to talk to her and
talk to each other, and as we do I think we will see old histories break
apart. But as old histories break apart they offer us-amateur and
professional historians, teachers and students-the opportunity to make
something better of broken historical ground-new truths.
We need to claim spaces of ambiguity and transform them into places of
solidarity, pooling and reworking the cultural and material resources at
hand. . . . Those committed to a more just image of the world community
need to engage in deep play with the forces that maintain and exacerbate
inequities. It is a game we seemingly cannot win, but can't not play.