Reflection on Oral History and Memory
In most instances, the oral history of American history has courted controversy and debates in equal measures. Such discussions and debates undoubtedly emanate from the role played by memory, age, and the ability of an individual to correctly recall the developments and undertakings before passing them to other generations through word of mouth. From a personal perspective, I believe such controversies emanate from the fact that individuals are fallible and are bound to concoct various existing oral traditions and the history of American society to suit their interests. In that regard, oral history is at the mercy of memory, an aspect that hugely depends on the age of the narrator, consistency in memories, and other emotional elements that affect recollection and reconstruction of thoughts to a great magnitude.
Based on the findings of the psychologists regarding the role that memory plays towards oral history, it is evident that the narrators remain infallible and could reconstruct the historical events in an angle that better befits them. Such aspects affect the experience of the people that listens to them and subsequently create a massive gap in knowledge among different individuals. Failure to remember past events could be directly tied to the advanced age of the narrator as the excerpt notes that “subsequent memories often crowd out earlier ones.” Compared to adolescents, there are several instances when individuals have their memories deeply clogged due to old age. The development calls for the “rehearsal of the salient memories with the relevant information” to aid recollection.
On the other hand, from a personal perspective, memory lapses could be the most significant contributor towards inaccurate historical issues despite the denial in the excerpt that old age does not immensely contribute towards the detailed memory of individual narrators. For instance, the passage highlights that “various individual narrators rely on daily recall and emotional stability to be accurate and correctly report multiple aspects that are related to a given historical event” (6). Thus, such development means that in case that one is emotionally unstable or does not regularly rehearse, they are bound to make multiple mistakes, misrepresent historical facts, or even deviate from the accepted norms that require that the narrator remains spot on. Past events and undertakings define a given nation or the people involved in the creation of history. Thus, misrepresentation of facts through memory lapse would not only be detrimental to the individuals but will also amount to an alteration of the historical events that define such individuals.