Oral History Collections at Columbia

The Oral History Archives at Columbia (OHAC) is home to thousands of oral history interviews across a range of topics.

Our collections have depth and breadth by featuring interviews with notable individuals in the performing arts, business, the social sciences, humanities and sciences. Understanding the evolution of oral history as an academic discipline pioneered at Columbia offers context for the materials available in our reading rooms and online.

Early biographical interviews focused on distinguished leaders in politics and government — the “Great Men” of history. Over time, the biographical collection grew to include notable people in philanthropy, business, radio, publishing, filmmaking, medicine, science, public health, law, military, architecture, and the arts.

The Oral History Research Office at Columbia conducted several large-scale oral history projects in the 1950s and 1960s including: Radio Pioneers, 1950-1974; Chinese Republican Oral History, 1958-1976; Popular Arts, 1958-1960; Occupation of Japan, 1960-1961; Eisenhower Administration, 1962-1972; Psychoanalytic Movement, 1963-1982; and Nobel Laureates on Scientific Research, 1964.

Beginning in the 1980s, OHRO expanded its collecting approach to include activist histories of the New Left, civil rights, and peace movements, as well as community history. With a new sensitivity to the social construction of memory, our biographical interviews focused on illuminating social, political, and cultural history through the telling of a life story.

Featured on our People and Organizations pages are collections, either reformatted to digital or born-digital, in our Digital Library Collection.

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