Explaining how a book redirected my work, my career, and my life is best done through stories.
My history dissertation involved nineteenth-century American urban history, the field for which I was hired by the State University of New York at Buffalo, a once-private university incorporated in a new state university, becoming the system's flagship research university. The expanding History Department placed my office in an annex on the campus border. Next door was a new American Studies program grounded in cultural anthropology rather than the usual history–literature combination. There I met a remarkable cohort of graduate students, most involved in cultural/political activism, who started a radical journal of American studies. They secured funding, a printer, and an agent obtaining subscriptions from around the world before there was a first issue.
Each issue was to be thematic. The first theme was Native Americans, a defining axis of the new AMS program. To honor that focus, the Buffalo setting and, not incidentally their far-left politics, they named the journal Red Buffalo, and planned a second issue on oral history. (It turned out to be the last: for years, letters arrived from subscribing libraries in New Zealand asking when they'd get their remaining issues.)
As a professor connected to the program, I was asked if I couldn't write something for the issue. I didn't know much about oral history, but I was then reading, for my American History survey course, Studs Terkel's book about the Depression.Footnote 1 I said, Well, I'm reading Hard Times, it's an oral history of the Depression, so I could write a review essay about that.
I knew what I might say for an article about the 1930s – but not for an oral-history journal. I remember looking at the “blurbs” on my paperback's cover: “This is the voice of the people, it's an anthem in praise of the American Spirit, it's Carl Sandburg and the nobility of the ordinary, just listen to these voices – this is the way it really was.” I thought, that's not the book I just read, which seemed darker and more complicated. I noticed Terkel's very first line: “This is a memory book.” My review essay ended up focussing on what a “memory book” might mean – and what Terkel was saying through his oral history.
Hard Times is a mosaic of over 150 interviews about American lives in the 1930s, collected and mediated by Studs Terkel, a Chicago radio interviewer with a gift for careful listening. I was struck by how the book conveyed pain and lost dreams, and how people felt that they had failed rather than something failing them in society. My essay explored how these sensibilities informed Terkel's selection, editing, and presentation – offering oral histories as primary sources and as a historian's interpretation.
Side note: the Red Buffalo editors commissioned an introduction, which saw oral history as a way for the memories of ordinary people to guide us – a left-populist version of the paperback blurbs. The editors thought it was terrible and so the issue appeared with two intros – one as commissioned, the other their own left-theoretical hegemonic critique of false consciousness.
My review essay didn't have that tonality but it did explore the complexity of memory – given and received – as a source of history. This seemed to strike a chord with readers similarly looking beyond the romantic “blurbosphere,” and that was the beginning of oral and public history as an emerging, ongoing focus of my work, in both theory and practice. I joke with friends that a great way to get known is to write a pretty good article that nobody can find: Well, there's this interesting article in Red Buffalo. What is Red Buffalo? Does anybody know where I can find Red Buffalo?Footnote 2
A follow-up story involves Terkel himself. Ronald Grele's 1975 Envelopes of Sound presented a panel with several leading oral historians … and Studs Terkel.Footnote 3 At one point, Terkel said something to the effect of, “Well that kid, what's his name, Buffalo Red, he made a good point.” Years later, the Oral History Association honored Terkel at a 1990s annual meeting in Milwaukee, a controversial step upsetting some who felt that a best-selling popular author could not really be a legitimate, respectable oral historian. I had never met Terkel, but an elevator door opened and there he was, in his trademark knit tie and checkered shirt. I was starstruck, but managed to say, “Mr. Terkel – Great to meet you, I'm … Buffalo Red.” He broke into a grin, gave me a big hug, and we talked about the essay.
I continued to follow Studs Terkel's work, and after his 2008 death I was invited to provide a commentary for History Workshop Journal.Footnote 4 My reflections responded to a severe obituary by a New York Times critic offended by discovering that Terkel's oral histories embodied an interpretive point of view. I accepted the observation but reversed the conclusion, arguing that in his conducting, editing, and presenting oral history, Terkel functions as a historian like any other – as an active, shaping historical intelligence in dialogue with his sources. This is the broader point I had been exploring since Red Buffalo: working with and presenting oral history needs to be understood as involving, by definition, both documentation and historical construction.
