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Studs Terkel is a familiar name to any historian, especially social historians like me. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author established oral history as a serious genre, fueled an oral history movement and helped to truly define history from a bottom-up approach. He died, as son Dan Terkell reassures, a peaceful death Friday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

For nearly half a century Terkel spoke with ordinary, or “non-celebrated,” people about their lives, articulating the voices of the often unarticulate: police officers, farm workers, hair stylists, elevator operators, prostitutes. His common-man approachability, characterized by his wayward white hair, rumpled red-and-white-checked shirts and well-chewed cigar, encouraged people to open up about work, family, war, dreams and fears, revealing the often extraordinary lives of otherwise ordinary people. He wrote books like Working, Hard Times and his Pulitzer Prize winner, The Good War to help jog the nation’s memory from what he coined a “national Alzheimer’s disease.” His was an ambitious mission to help people rediscover the human voice, to capture history and in the process, to save humanity. In all, Terkel wrote nearly a dozen books of oral histories, probing the lives of others nearly to the end of his own.

People sometimes think it odd that I, a journalist, have not a journalism, English or communications degree but rather, one in history. But the telling of history is the telling of stories and to do both truly well, as Terkel did, is to give stories and history back to the very people who helped create it. In rediscovering the human voice, we often discover our own; in capturing history, we break its hold; and in the process, we not only save humanity, we save ourselves. Studs Terkel did that and so too, I hope, will I.

Related articles:
NY Times: Studs Terkel, Listener to Americans, Dies at 96
Associated Press: Chicago author, activist Studs Terkel dies at 96