Oral History: Creating New Understandings of the Past

We often think of oral histories as productive spaces for people to wrestle with the meaning and impact of the past on the present and the future. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people experienced an exceptionally unsettled relationship to the flow of time, and in particular to history and the future. Covid-19 oral histories are a particularly fertile space in which to observe and understand how historical thinking happens. In the New York City Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project, our team at Columbia University recorded oral histories with almost two hundred New Yorkers in the early months of the pandemic, and then again later that year. We can study these oral histories to observe how narrators and interviewers collaborate in the oral history interview to create new understandings of the past which are useful to understand these times of deep uncertainty. In this session, I will discuss how our work on Covid in NYC was grounded in our work on 9/11 over twenty years earlier, and how each oral history project teaches us about the uses of history in dynamic moments in time.