Estimates of the number of lives taken by the guillotine during the French Revolution range from 17,000 to 40,000 citizens. It is thought that three-quarters of the executed were innocent. In its glory days, the guillotine took 3,000 lives in one month.
Oral History: Defined. Oral history is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events. Oral history is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s and now using 21st-century digital technologies.
In a lot of ways, it is in a class of its own. Oral tradition is especially important to historians studying various ethnic groups whose history may not be well-documented in writing. Various forms of historical evidence allow historians and other experts to gain insight into the past and propose theories. That doesn't, however, always mean their theories are necessarily correct, as we shall see.