Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1Henry MayhewHenry MayhewHenry Mayhew interviewed London's street sellers, scavengers, sweatshop workers and performers for the Morning Chronicle from 1849, later collected as London Labour and the London Poor. He printed long passages in the speakers' own words with details of their earnings and budgets. He edited and…0i
  2. 2Zora Neale HurstonZora Neale HurstonBorn 7 Jan 1891Zora Neale Hurston, trained in anthropology under Franz Boas, interviewed Cudjo Lewis in Alabama in 1927 and 1928, one of the last survivors of the Clotilda, the final known slave ship to reach the United States. She kept his speech in dialect, which publishers wanted to change, and the book…0i
  3. 3Tom HarrissonTom HarrissonTom Harrisson founded Mass-Observation in 1937 with Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, recruiting volunteers to keep diaries and answer regular questionnaires about everyday British life, while paid observers recorded conversations in pubs and streets, often without people knowing. The method…0i
  4. 4Benjamin A. BotkinBenjamin A. BotkinBenjamin Botkin, as folklore editor of the Federal Writers' Project from 1938, organised the thousands of interviews with formerly enslaved people collected in the 1930s and selected them for Lay My Burden Down in 1945. Most interviewers were white and many transcribed speech in exaggerated…0
  5. 5George Ewart EvansGeorge Ewart EvansBorn 1 Apr 1909George Ewart Evans, a Welsh schoolteacher living in Blaxhall, Suffolk, began recording the last generation of farm workers who remembered horse-drawn farming, publishing Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay in 1956. He used a tape recorder early and treated dialect words and working techniques as…0i
  6. 6Jan VansinaJan VansinaBorn 14 Sept 1929Jan Vansina, a Belgian historian who worked among the Kuba and other peoples of central Africa, argued in Oral Tradition in 1961 that spoken histories passed down over generations could be tested like written sources, by comparing versions and asking who told them and why. The method helped…0
  7. 7Studs TerkelStuds TerkelBorn 16 May 1912Studs Terkel, a Chicago radio broadcaster, carried a tape recorder to interview ordinary Americans for books including Division Street: America in 1967, Hard Times on the Depression, Working in 1974 and The Good War, which won the 1985 Pulitzer prize. He edited hours of talk into monologues,…0i
  8. 8Ronald BlytheRonald BlytheRonald Blythe's Akenfield, in 1969, gave voice to a Suffolk village through the words of its farm workers, blacksmith, vet, teachers and gravedigger, recorded in conversations with his neighbours. Akenfield is a composite of real villages, and Blythe reworked what people said into polished…0
  9. 9Elena PoniatowskaElena PoniatowskaElena Poniatowska, a Mexican journalist, assembled La noche de Tlatelolco in 1971 from the testimony of students, parents, soldiers and bystanders about the 1968 massacre in Mexico City, which the government had played down. She set voices side by side without a narrator, letting contradictions…0i
  10. 10Raphael SamuelRaphael SamuelBorn 26 Dec 1934Raphael Samuel, a tutor at Ruskin College in Oxford, the trade union college, started the History Workshop movement in 1967, encouraging working people and students to research their own pasts, often through interviews. His collection Village Life and Labour, from 1975, and East End Underworld,…0