Bancroftiana, Number 119 Fall 2001: From the Regional Oral History Office New Directions: Richard Cándida Smith

From the Regional Oral History Office New Directions: Richard Cándida Smith

Richard Cándida Smith joined the Berkeley faculty in July as professor of history and director of the Regional Oral History Office, and already he's putting new ideas to work.

"I plan to build on ROHO's outstanding record by making the oral history program the nucleus for a Center for Living History," he says. "The new center will combine research, classroom education, collection development, and dissemination. We'll continue existing work while initiating and developing several large-scale projects, possibly in collaboration with other parts of the campus."

One of Cándida Smith's priorities is to launch an academic program where undergraduates can learn practical skills required to organize and conduct research projects. He hopes that, eventually, graduate students will apply to Berkeley with the idea of working with the center and Bancroft as they develop their dissertation topics. He will invite scholars from around the world as visiting faculty.

"I feel strongly that no activity in the university should be divorced from teaching," he says. "Classroom and mentoring situations push researchers to share their ideas with an educated, interested public."

In his own teaching Cándida Smith has observed that oral history has practical benefits for students. "Oral history gives them a feel for the connections between everyday life and the larger political, economic, and social changes that occur," he says. "It also allows them to create original historical sources that others can use, teaching them that scholarship is not just a question of going to the library. Oral history encourages students to think creatively about how to integrate their own backgrounds, interests, and experiences into what they are learning."

Cándida Smith comes to Bancroft from the University of Michigan, where he was professor of history and director of the Program in American Culture. Before going to Michigan, he was associate director of the oral history program at UCLA. He also is a former president of the Oral History Association.

Though he has been away for some time, Cándida Smith is personally quite familiar with California and western history. He was born in San Francisco, as was his wife, Katherine, and their two sons. He also has a grandchild here. His family has lived in the state for many generations, and one son is now a student at Berkeley. He attended Berkeley himself for three years in the 1960s before going to UCLA to complete his undergraduate work.

"Returning to the Bay Area has been a great personal pleasure, particularly renewing my ties to this campus," he says. Cándida Smith is especially interested in exploring the personal aspect of history, using oral history accounts to deepen our understanding of the past. "Some historians worry about whether oral accounts provide accurate information," he says. "They often neglect what I believe these accounts can offer—factual information about past events and relationships not available in other sources.

"Oral histories also provide evidence about how different groups of people have formed and shared their own understanding of the past," he says. "This information can be very important for interpreting the choices people have made."

Cándida Smith points out that today, as in the past, people create and sustain a shared imaginative life whenever they gather and converse, be it at the kitchen table, the tavern counter, or university hallways. "These informal collective understandings permeate every decision groups make and form the background for every interview," he says. "Oral history accounts are both personal and social, providing evidence for reconstructing the past concerns and conflicts of different communities. Oral history allows for recovering ideas that were important but which might not be documented in print."

Launching the Center for Living History will require extensive planning as well as creation of a permanent fund to support core staff and activities. With the cooperation of campus departments and teaching programs, the center will offer academic courses to undergraduates and graduates, teaching oral history research techniques and analysis of oral history archives.

Two oral history courses will be offered next spring, one of which Cándida Smith will teach. He plans to offer a summer institute in oral history in the near future. Finally, in order to have the research speak more loudly and clearly to a larger audience, he plans to publish and disseminate the oral and living history to the larger community using digital publishing and CD-ROM technologies.

"ROHO and the new center that will form around it will provide a model to scholars all over the world by showing how to make oral sources and personal testimonies even more relevant to research, education, and public culture," he says.

—Camilla Smith, Editor, Bancroftiana
with Laura McCreery, ROHO