Following in the Footsteps of Studs Terkel

The legendary Studs Terkel and his protégé, Alex Kotlowitz, were featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer last night on Public Broadcasting. The gist of the feature was that these two prominent Chicago-based authors utilize oral histories to gather material for their award-winning books.

On an earlier program, Terkel declared that “what I'm worried about is a national Alzheimer's Disease. That is, there weren't no yesterday. There was a Depression years ago, and the same ones who say there's too much regulation, too much big government, are the ones whose daddies' and granddaddies' butts were saved by government regulation after the crash of 1929. They prayed to the government of Franklin D. and the New Deal, ‘save us,’ and it did. And so we have seemed to have forgotten that, or being not taught that. That's the part that gets me, this national Alzheimer's Disease. So all my books, certainly this one, tries to recreate a memory of what was, and what is, and what can be. Basically, that's what it's about.”

And that’s essentially what we do as oral historians. We capture those memories of everyday people in order that their recollections will not be lost to the generations that follow.

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