Description
NOTE: This is a pre-owned hardback book with a small pen mark on the front dust-jacket, and an obscured dedication on the inside page.
George Ewart Evans in his first book about East Anglia over thirty years ago pioneered the writing of oral history in Britain and Ireland. His new book in a conspectus of all the work he has done in this field. It is also a handbook of his methods and the discoveries he has made in meeting, and recording on magnetic tape, dozens of people in the four countries. One of the discoveries he made in the course of this convinced him that the language of the common man – often called dialect – with its preference for the concrete expression, is a worthy model even for his better-read compatriots. Another in his feeling that the historian, at the end of the twentieth century, needs to widen his catchment area to include the material revealed by anthropologists all over the world, in order to make a closer bond between the disciplines. No longer does the historian study documents only, while the anthropologist concentrates on people. Oral history is quickly developing into a fruitful amalgam of both approaches.
Chapters
- Blaxhall: Where it Began
- The Interview
- Folk Life Studies
- Oral History on the Farm
- Ireland
- Wales
- A Port and the Sea
- Broadcasting
- Women and the Horse
- The Important Language
- Migratory Labour
- Recording a Centenarian
- Threshing
- Archaeology and Old Beliefs
- Influences
- Country Dancing
- Conclusion
