Oral histories provide such rich “authentic” material from which to study history. The most valuable information in working-class history is found in the oral history interviews of the workers themselves. Each interviewee’s documented recollections offer a unique perspective into the past. I’m excited that the digital age has allowed for more opportunities to use and make new meanings out of these types of histories. These types of oral history interviews were mostly used by public historians and in documentaries, but digital media and the Internet have granted more people around the world access to these types of sources. This has expanded the concept of who or what the “archon” or authority is in the digital space, and led to a variety of new and imaginative approaches to reusing these types of auditory sources. While Dan Warren did not retell history with the “authentic” audio source he chose, the end result is an incredibly imaginative and interesting reuse of the original historical source.

If listeners choose to reappropriate digital or digitized audio materials, more people are then invited into the ongoing interpretative process that is history. Hopefully this also means more people are developing ways to keep history relevant and popular in the digital age. I enjoyed the series of Hardy’s Mordecai Mordant recordings, as they illustrate how one can take oral history interviews and use supplemental audio to make the story come alive and transport the listener back in time. These recordings produce an aural “archive effect” that is not possible to achieve on text alone, something Hardy discusses in “Painting in Sound.”

The “Winnie the Welder” collection I viewed at Quincy’s Thomas Crane Public Library consisted of oral history interviews conducted by middle-school students. It is probably right to assume that these women withheld information about how they were actually treated by their male coworkers. It would be interesting to see what the difference in responses and stories would be if these interviews were conducted by “an adult” that the women may have felt able to say more to. Regardless of this, these interviews still provide a unique glimpse into the past. While it is entirely possible that an interviewee may withhold information or alter a memory/story, these sources still provide “authentic voices” (Hardy, 151) first-hand accounts of history as it was lived.