Nevins Starts Taping Interviews at Columbia and Names a Method

Oral history is the systematic recording and analysis of spoken testimony and living memory, establishing what a community's own account of a recent event or practice actually is and how consistent that account is across different tellers. The American historian Allan Nevins founded the Columbia University oral history project in 1948, recognizing that the telephone and radio were displacing the letters and diaries earlier historians had relied on, and set out to preserve, on tape and transcript, the recollections of people whose firsthand knowledge would otherwise vanish, work that grew into the oldest and largest oral history archive in the world.

A living religious community's own account of a recent founding, a conversion experience, a ritual's actual practice as its participants describe it, is exactly the kind of evidence oral history is built to capture and check, comparing multiple tellers' recorded accounts for where they agree and where they diverge rather than accepting a single secondhand summary. The atlas relies on the discipline wherever a modern or recent religious practice is described from the community's own recorded testimony rather than an outside observer's paraphrase.