Introduction

The human voice, in the act of meaningful communication, consists of carefully crafted and culturally shaped pressure waves traveling through the air in the form of words, woven together in the form of a story. Stories, formed by memory and performed in narrative either resonate and engage, are possibly preserved and imprinted in memory, or they go unremembered and are lost to time. History is made up of the stories of humanity, based on fragments preserved in time. While material culture—architecture, art, broken clay pots—along with the written words—diaries, records, books—leave a tangible, touchable inheritance for those seeking to understand the past, the spoken word performed in the form of stories has traditionally proven more elusive to preserve. Yet, it is the voice, the firsthand accounts, and the privilege and opportunity for scholars to ask direct questions and grapple with spoken answers of the past that the historian seeks.