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• Thursday, December 7, 2006 05:31 PM

  Maybe you should be an "oral historian"

  Many of us in the public history field are compelled by the same civic-spirited motivation & love of stories as the best of journalists. If you're truly interested in people's stories & how their seemingly ordinary lives fit into the historic context, public history might be a viable alternative. Oral historians (one aspect of public history) interview an extraordinarily wide variety of public & private persons as part of their work--actually "passion" would probably be more precise. This isn't to say that the oral historian does not ask tough questions--these are usually the ones that merit asking! But you're not under the same type of deadline pressure or other conditions which detract from the final product or your relationship with the informant or interviewee as a fellow human being.

  Oddly enough in the late 60s/early 1970s, I wanted to be a TV journalist. While some of my friends in junior high sang into their hairbrush "microphones", with hairbrush bristles inches from my lips, I pretended I was Walter Cronkite reading the news from the pastel-colored pages of US News & World Report. Life didn't work out quite the way I'd planned but I can say that as a public historian for these past 30 years, I have been extremely fulfilled & satisfied interviewing the witnesses, victims, survivors, & shapers of history.

  —Patti Pagan Read Patti Pagan's other letters
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