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Digital Librarian is maintained by Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York

Oral History Collections

Archibald Cox Oral History - "Conducted by legal scholar and law professor Thomas Hilbink in June 2000, four years before Cox's death." (Columbia University Libraries Oral History Office.)

Archives of American Art - Smithsonian Institution. Has an extensive collection of oral histories.

Art Institute of Chicago: Chicago Architects Oral History Project - Has a 452 page Master Index

Black Oral History Collection - "Interviews conducted by Quintard Taylor and his associates, Charles Ramsay and John Dawkins. They interviewed African American pioneers and their descendents throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, from 1972-1974." (Washington State University Libraries)

British Library Sound Archive - Search the Sound Archive Catalogue for "interviewed by" and a name or subject. The National Life Story Collection has extensive oral history holdings. Most of the material is not available online but there are often detailed summaries of the interviews. Selected transcripts are available including:

Eileen Agar - Interviewed by Cathy Courtney, April 18, 1990, (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives).

Margaret Augstein - Provides detailed descriptions of concentration camp life. (In Archival Sound Recordings there are 186 online interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.)

Kenneth Armitage - Interviewed by John McEwen and Tamsyn Woollcombe, June 8, 1991 (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives).

Dame Elisabeth Frink - Interviewed by Sara Kent (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives).

Stephen Cox - Interviewed by Denise Hooker, May 12, 1995, (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives).

Ken Campbell - Interviwed by Cathy Courtney, January 17, 1995 (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives).

Stuart Brisley (1933-) - Interviewed by Melanie Roberts, September 12, 1996 (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives). See description.

Patrick Caulfield - Interviewed by Andrew Lambirth (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives). See description.

Norman Adams (1927-) - Interviewed by Melanie Roberts, February 28, 2000, (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives).

Michael Kidner - Interviewed by Cathy Courtney, March 16, 1996 (National Life Story Collection: Artists' Lives).

Caltech Archives Oral Histories Online - Includes an interview with Frank Oppenheimer, the younger brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

CRS Center Archives - Archives at the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University. "CRS (originally Caudill Rowlett Scott) was established in College Station, Texas, shortly after World War II by William Caudill and John Rowlett, professors of architecture at Texas A&M, and Wallie Scott, Jr., a graduate student. By the 1970s, it had grown into the largest architecture/engineering/construction firm in the country." CRS: A Firm and Its Legacy, John Miles Rowlett Lecture Series, February 8, 2001, Texas A&M University. The archives consist of:

Audio

People

Oral History - With transcripts. The interview with James M. Hughes, for example, contains the following: [1962-1963]"That was the beginning of what became the community college movement in the U. S., an extraordinary thing. . .lasted probably for about fifteen years. They came back all excited about the potential of this building type, in terms of CRS marketing strategy. So immediately, I was called in and told I was going to be a community college specialist." "In a period of not very many years, we brought in a total of, I think, 35 community college projects. . .nine in Illinois, for example, which was quite a number. We had them in Kansas, Florida, California, New York, Michigan, all over the place. . .Ohio. It was a really exciting period. The first community college we got was from John's (Rowlett) real good friend, Leroy Good, President of Monroe County Community College in Rochester, New York." Others in the firm involved in junior and community college design included James Thomas, James M. Hughes, Chuck Thomsen, Charles ('Tiny') Lawrence, Bob Reed, Jack DeBartolo, Franklin D. Lawyer, C. Herbert Paseur, James M. Hughes, Tom Bullock, Wallie Scott, John Rowlett, Don Wines, Phil Williams, Ralph C. Carroll.

Dartmouth College Oral History Project - Interviews with Dartmouth College Presidents, Faculty, trustees and administrators, and the Medical Community. The War Years at Dartmouth project consists of "more than 100 interviews with members of the Dartmouth community who were on campus before, during and following World War Two. Narrators include traditional civilian undergraduates, undergraduates who enlisted and had their education interrupted by military service, recruits who arrived at Dartmouth through the Navy V-12 and V-5 training programs and returned to matriculate following their military service, and spouses of returning veterans."

Digital Library of Appalachia - Search for interview.

Eminent Scholars Archive - Interviews by Lesley Dingle, Daniel Bates & Matt Martin. "An expanding archive in which we document the careers and achievements of eminent scholars associated with the Squire Law Library and Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge." Also accessible via dSpace

Explorations in Black Leadership - University of Virginia oral history project University directed by Phyllis Leffler and Julian Bond. Interviews include:

Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) - Interviewed by Julian Bond.

Florida's Forgotten Coast: Life on the Apalachicola Bay - University of Mississippi oral history project "pays homage to the men and women who have long worked the water, tonging for oysters, casting nets for shrimp and fish, and cultivating soft-shell crabs."

Human Radiation Experiments - The U.S. Department of Energy, in order to “tell the agency's Cold War story of radiation research using human subjects” has undertaken “to identify and catalog relevant historical documents from DOE's 3.2 million cubic feet of records ...” Site has an index, an Experiments List, transcripts of Oral Histories, Historical Photographs, and sound files and video clips.

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum Oral History Collection

Military Oral History Project - Interviews, many with Virginia Military Institute graduates. In March 2004 Douglas MacDonald, a student at VMI, interviewed Lt. Gen. Lawrence E. Boese about his three tours of duty in Vietnam as an Air Force Captain from 1968 to 1972. On October 21-22, 2004, Prof. Malcolm Muir, Jr., interviewed Vice Admiral Jerome H. King, Jr., a Yale University graduate who began his service in the Pacific Theater during World War II and who retired in 1974 after serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. (Virginia Military Institute Archives).

Miller Center of Public Affairs Presidential Oral History Program - University of Virginia. Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. The Lyndon Johnson collection, for examples, consists of 787 items, among which is a 26 page transcript of an interview with Senator Clifford P. Case (R. New Jersey) conducted on March 1, 1979 by Michael L. Gillette at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. WhiteHouseTapes.org, also offered by the Miller Center, is described as the "The secret White House tapes and recordings of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower.

Notable New Yorkers - "Audio recordings and transcripts of interviews with ten influential New Yorkers, drawn from the collections of the Oral History Research Office of the Columbia University Libraries. The ten New Yorkers are Bennett Cerf, Kenneth Clark, Mamie Clark, Moe Foner, Andrew Heiskell, Edward I. Koch, Mary Lasker, John B. Oakes, Frances Perkins and Frank Stanton

Regional Oral Histories Office - Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. You can browse by subject. Collections include: Suffragists Oral History Project, Earl Warren in California Oral History Project, and Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies Oral History eLibrary

Rutgers Oral History Archives - Contains over 450 interviews (transcripts only - no audio) of participants in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cold War, the Archives is described as an "enterprise to record the personal experiences of the men and women who served on the home front and overseas. It is based on in-depth interviews of individuals who lived through these conflicts, beginning with an initial target group of Rutgers College alumni and Douglass College alumnae." You can search the archives (try a search for zeta psi). See Where War Stories Come Alive

by Winnie Hu, New York Times, December 23, 2007: an "unusual collection of more than 700 first-person accounts that document the role that generations of Rutgers graduates and New Jersey residents have played in military conflicts from World War II to the Gulf War. The contributors include Frederick J. Kroesen, a retired four-star Army general, and Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC military analyst and retired Army colonel who received the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam."

Samuel Proctor Oral History Program - University of Florida. The Native Americans Oral History Collections has transcripts of "more than 900 interviews with Native Americans --including Seminoles, Cherokees, and Creeks."

Southern Oral History Program - University of North Carolina. You can Browse by Interviewer. Has a Finding Aid. Look for the interviews by James Eddie McCoy. (For more about McCoy see A Man Tapes His Town: The Unrelenting Oral Histories of Eddie McCoy, Lost & Found Sounds, National Public Radio, October 5, 2000. “A self-made historian, Eddie has done some 140 interviews since 1979, and knows just about every detail of the life and lore of Oxford: his neighbors, his friends, and total strangers. Eddie records the who, what, when, where, and why of slavery times, of sharecropping, of the civil rights era, of who poured the first concrete in Oxford.") Here are are few of his 160 interviews:

Interview with Serena Henderson Parker - April 13, 1995. With Document Menu. “Parker remembers her schoolhouse in Fairport, North Carolina. The school did not have electricity; instead, students used "lamplights." She remembers other aspects of her community's social life, including "box parties," when students and parents wrapped gifts to be bid on to add to the school's coffers, and school plays.”

Interview with Annie Bell Williams Cheatham - March 21, 1995. “Annie Bell Cheatham, an eighty-four-year-old black woman and a longtime resident of Oxford, North Carolina, talks about her childhood as the daughter of a sharecropper, the limited educational opportunities open to her, and the many, many stories of slavery that were passed down to her by older relatives. She gives short answers through much of the interview and her informal conversational style is reflective of her familiarity with her interviewer, James Eddie McCoy, a fellow Oxford resident. The most detailed parts of this interview have to do with the second- and third-hand slavery stories on which she was reared and how these served as life lessons for navigating North Carolina's racial geography.”

Interview with Louise Pointer Morton - December 12, 1994. “Louise Pointer Morton was born in Granville County, North Carolina, in 1910. Morton begins the interview by describing her grandmother's role in the founding of the Jonathon Creek Church (intermittently called the Johnson Creek Church in the interview). Although she does not recall the specific date of the church's construction, Morton explains that her grandmother acquired land for the church from the Pittard family, to whom she was enslaved and seems to have continued to work for following her emancipation. With the gift of land, Morton and other African Americans in the community built a log church. The church was eventually replaced and a school for local African American children was also built on the land. Morton's grandmother had purchased five acres by the church and the school, where she raised her nine children and where many of her grandchildren also lived. Morton describes growing up in this community, relating her school and church experience and life without electricity or running water. Despite the lack of luxuries, Morton recalls with fondness how the community gathered to socialize and to work together during corn shuckings, and she expresses pride in her family's self-sufficiency. Additionally, in her recollections of the Jonathon (Johnson) Creek Church, Morton throws into relief the centrality of religion as a preeminent social institution within southern African American communities.”

University of Aberdeen Oral History Archive

University of South Florida Libraries Citrus Oral History Project - Florida Studies Center. Audio files and transcripts relating to the Florida Citrus industry. "In a collaborative project supported by the USF Libraries Oral History Program and the USF Patel Center for Global Solutions, independent oral historian William Mansfield conducted a series of interviews on the impact of globalization on the Florida citrus industry."

Veterans History Project

Veterans History Project - Grand Valley State University

Vintage Fiddlers Oral History Project - 29 digitized audio tapes of vintage fiddlers in Kentucky. (Kentuckiana Digital Library.)

VOAHA: Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive - California State University, Long Beach. Subjects include American Indian Studies, Asian American History, Labor History, Long Beach Area History, Mexican American/Chicano, Musical Developments in Southern California, Southeast Asian Communities, and Women's History (Asian American Women's Movement; Chicana Feminists; Feminist Health Movement; Los Angeles Feminists; Suffragists; Reformers and Radicals; Professionals and Entrepreneurs; Rosie the Riveter Revisited; Welfare Mothers, Welfare Rights, Women's Lives, Women's Work 1900-1960). Some interviews were conducted under the auspices of the Feminist History Research Project. There are online audio files of interviews with the following women:

Elizabeth Anderson (1892- ) - Interviewed by Allison Knoth.

Mildred Baer

Marie Baker

Rose Bell

Carmella Messina Billone

Betty Jeanne Boggs

Clella Juanita Bowman

Rose Priola Falk Agnes Budilovsky

Jesse Haver Butler (1886-1984)

Toni Carabillo

Freda Campbell

Bernadette Carmier

Victoria Casilles

Rosalind Cassidy (1895-1980)

Sylvia Castillo (tape damaged?)

Katherine Tolls Chamberlain

Flora Chavez

Marisela Chavez

May Ying Chen

Beatrice Morales Clifton

Amalia Conray

Victoria Cook

Jeanne Cordova

Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) - Interviewed on 10 October 1972 by Sherna Berger Gluck

Elizabeth Cuddeback

Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975)

Genora (Johnson) Dollinger

Alma Dotson

Carol Downer

Videll Drake

Louise Emery (1897-1985)

Ethel Erickson (1897-1985)

Mildred Eusebio

Rose Priola Falk

Maria Fierro

Bertha Foler

Lilyan Frank

Mern Freige

Nellie Gibson (1897-1989)

May Goldman

Sherna Berger Gluck

Anna Nieto Gomez

Emma Goodman

Eliza Harrison

Rosemary Hays

Fanny Christina Hill

Margarite Hoffman

Mary Holloway (1882-1985)

Edith Holton

Josephine Houston

Vera Hunter

Mildred Hutchinson (1894-2000)

Miya Iwataki

Barbara Kalish

Sadie Kastleman (1887-1978)

Ernestine Hara Kettler (1896-1978)

Dora Stoller Keyser (1899-1983)

Florence Kushner

Yetta Land (1887-1986)

Susan Laughlin

Bessie Letwin

Mildred Lightfoot

Juanita Loveless

Eva Lowe

Mary Luna

Grace McDonald

Glad McLeod

Kathleen MacNeil

Margarita Salazar McSweyn

Lillian March

Crystal Marshall

Belen Martinez Mason,

Adele Hernandez Milligan

Gertrude Millikan

Ruth Mills

Virginia Reid Moore

Rose Echeverria Mulligan

Bette Murphy

Yolanda Nava

Barbara Nestor (1884-1979)

Charlcia Neuman

Beatrice NeView (1894-1995)

Consuelo Nieto

Olive Nordquist

Priscilla Oaks

Kathleen O'Hare

Isabell Orwin

Mildred Owen (1903-1988)

Della Pack (1897-1981)

Zuma Palmer (1897-1991)

Harriet Perry

Wanda Phillips (1889-1978)

Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon (1890-1979)

Mary Polliard

Lupe Purdy

Zita Donegan Remley (1904-1985)

Anita Veale Robbins (1897-1979)

Joan Robins

Marilyn Robinson

Nancy (Dara) Robinson

Genevieve Roesch

Lorraine Rothman

Dora Rosenzweig (1885-1984)

Sarah Rozner

Corinne Sanchez

Mamie Santora

Barbara Sargent (1887-1989)

Laura Ellsworth Seiler (1891-1982)

Ethel Bertolini (Shapiro)

Alicia Shelit

Lillian Sherman (1894-1983)

Etta Simmons

Rose Singleton

Lottie Lee Spharler

Lottie (Kaplan) Spitzer

Addie Stangeland

Olive Stone (1897-1977)

Helen Studer

Marye Stumph (1909-1994)

Minnie Roth Tenebaum

Sylvie Thygeson (1868-1975)

Johnnie Tillmon

Charlotte Stern (Todes) (1897-1996)

Eva Marshall Totah (1895-1990)

Bessie Udin

Vi (Violet) Verreaux

Margaret White

Evelyn Widdicombe

Evelyn Yoshimura

Sofia Zamora

Voices of Feminism Oral History Project - Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

Washington University School of Medicine Oral History Project

Browse the Interviews

Index of Names

Youngstown State University Oral History Collection - Transcripts of over eleven hundred interviews.

Labor and management in the steel strike of 1937 - Charles Hogg, Sr.; interviewed by William Jenkins. Transcript of interview taped on November 7, 1974.

1952 Youngstorn Sheet & Tube steel strike - Robert McColloh; interviewed by Andrew Russ. Transcript of interview taped on November 11, 1988.

1952 Youngstown Sheet & Tube steel strike - Russell L. Thomas; interviewed by Andrew Russ. Transcript of interview taped on October 28, 1988.

Shutdown of Youngstown Sheet and Tube - Clingan Jackson; interviewed by Philip Bracy. Transcript of interview taped on November 6, 1981. Clingan Jackson was the political editor of the Youngstown Vindicator in September 1977 when the news of the closure broke.

Last updated 15 August 2011
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