Do you trust oral history? Why or why not?
by 
AnonymousGirl
ANSWERS: 14
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according to who is giving and how i know this person and their history? but we are all human and no one tells the same story the same way...JUSTME:)
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No because no body ever tells exactly what the other has told them. It gets changed too much by work of mouth.
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Well, I like oral.
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No! Because it's like a "rumor". The more it gets repeated, the more disproportionate the truth becomes!
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No. It's not worth the paper it's written on.
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At one time ALL our History was oral or paintings. The Aborigine (Dreamtime) and The American Indian as well as many African tribes have a great deal of oral History
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I take no account of history, no matter what the medium it is presented in, as absolute fact. There are many reasons why I don't. For one, as stated by Justme and Anddeb, nobody tells the same story twice. It always gets changed somehow. Another reason why I do not trust 'history' in general is that it is often one-sided. We often only hear it from one perspective; and that is usually the perspective of the ones who come out on top.
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I try to get validity of it asap!
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It is my belief that oral history is, of course, from the viewpoint and experience of the person providing the history. Everyone sees the same events differently - from their own perspectives. It's like the saying, "Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper." Time and distance could influence the accuracy.
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No its proven that it can't be trusted remember the game you used to play in grade school where every one sat in a circle and the teacher starts off whispering something to the first person like "Obey your mother and father." And by the time it got to the last person it was something like "Jose is a mother f!#ker."
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I do not trust any history. All humans have different perspectives and that makes it difficult to really get an actual account of history.
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I sometimes believe oral histories but sometimes I find oral history absurd.
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Over what? Oral history is meant to compliment "big history", to illustrate it, to show the bottom perspective. It's not meant to be the touchstone of reliability.
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I trust oral history even less than I trust written history. I don't hold that much trust for written history at all. I treat it very sceptically. All history is subjective (potentially even biased and false), and oral history is likely to be even less reliable since without a written record facts it can be even more easily distorted and embellished.
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