Who among the following was a major advocate of oral history?

The correct option is Paul Thompson.

Oral history is a method of gathering, preserving, and interpreting the memories and voices of people, communities, and participants in past events. It plays a crucial role in documenting history from the perspective of ordinary people, often capturing narratives that are excluded from traditional written archives.

Paul Thompson is a British sociologist and historian who is widely recognized as one of the pioneering figures and major advocates of oral history. He is particularly famous for his seminal book, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (first published in 1978), which provided a methodological and theoretical foundation for the discipline. Thompson argued that oral history could democratize historical research by giving voice to marginalized groups and shifting the focus of history from elite institutions to everyday lives.

Let's look at the other options to understand why they are not the primary advocates of oral history in this context:
1. Sylvia Plath was a renowned American poet, novelist, and short-story writer, best known for her confessional poetry and her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.
2. Esther Greenwood is the fictional protagonist of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, not a real historical scholar.
3. Carolyn Steedman is an English historian and scholar known for her work in social history (such as her book Landscape for a Good Woman), which uses autobiographical memory and biography, but she is not the primary founding advocate of the oral history movement like Paul Thompson.