Istoria orală şi conflictele militare
Oral History an Military Conflict

Summary/Abstract: In the last decades, the memory of the war became a recurring topic in oral history research. This article proposes a discussion on the relationship between war and oral history on two levels, the first being the development of the relationship between the two, which has its origins in ancient times and will be institutionalized during the Second World War due to Colonel Marshall's research on the field. After this moment, the use of oral testimony became standard procedure in the U.S. military, several thematic researches being developed(German Military History Program, Senior Officers Program) by special teams of military historians which were created with the task of gathering the testimonies in the shortest time from the researched event. These team shave been posted with the U.S. Army in all theaters of military operations in which the army was involved: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. The second approach discusses the specifics of remembering intense moments and how they can influence the quality and value of oral testimony gathered decades away from the event.In the last part of the article, we mention the research works regarding war memory, as those are reflected in the research topics and articles published by the Oral History Institute researchers in the last 13 issues of the Yearbook of Oral History. The diversity of the conflicts analyzed by specific methodology (World War Two, Afghanistan, Transnistria) assures an important role for the Institute of Oral History in the innovation of historiographical discourse about war in our country.

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