The Technology of History [President´s Message]

The recent discovery of a 78 rpm recording of a speech, delivered in English in April of 1947, by Mahatma Gandhi, started me thinking. How do we know what happened in the past? We have relied on oral, written, visual, and recorded reports, but how accurate and accessible have they been? In societies without writing and with a strong oral tradition, oral histories have proven to be quite accurate when compared with archaeological and other independent evidence. They are accessible to all who can hear them, but are limited by access to the teller of the history. In societies with writing, the histories take on a physical form - stone, clay, paper - that make them permanent and transferable. They may become less accessible if few people can read, but conversely, are more accessible as they can be copied and transported. Most manual copying has proven to have been quite accurate, although errors and variations do occur.