Literature and the Arts

What is the origins of oral history?

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Primitive societies have long relied on oral tradition to preserve a record of the past in the absence of written histories. In Western society, the use of oral material goes back to the early Greek historians Herodotus (in his history of the Persian Wars) and Thucydides (in his History of the Peloponnesian War ), both of whom made extensive use of oral reports from witnesses.

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