Historical Objects

From the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Narratives, correspondence, and recorded interviews from American war veterans.

Transcripts of interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War. A unique source for study of Soviet society between 1917 and the mid-1940s, compiled in English.

Transcribed and translated first-hand accounts written by hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), from the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. This collection contains more than 1,500 interviews from two oral history projects, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community (C410) and the Holocaust Survivors' Centre Interviews (C830).

The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies comprising 12,000 recorded hours of videotape. A substantial subset has been digitized. Users must create an individual account to view interviews.

Collections contain over one hundred testimonies from survivors, rescuers, elders and perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Please be aware some testimonies contain sensitive content.

Provides access to more than 1,500 full life histories, testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides (e.g., Rwanda, Guatemala, etc.) for guided exploration.
Must register with USC (free).

The Visual History Archive is an online portal from USC Shoah Foundation that allows users to search through and view 55,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides that have been catalogued and indexed at the Institute. These testimonies were conducted in 65 countries and in 43 languages.
Free registration required

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive is one of the largest and most diverse collections of Holocaust testimonies in the world. The Museum conducts its own interviews, and also actively collects testimonies produced by individuals and institutions such as libraries, archives, and local Holocaust research centers.

The library has been collecting material related to the Holocaust and other genocides since 1933. Our holdings contain approximately 70,000 books and pamphlets, 2,000 physical document collections, 45,000 photographs and 3,000 periodical titles (including 110 current subscriptions), 1 million press cuttings, as well as posters, objects, artworks, digital collections, and audiovisual materials.

More than seventy sound recordings of interviews by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray are available for immediate access at the Hoover Archives. Included are the interviews of Rigoberta Menchú that formed the basis of her autobiographical book, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London: Verso, 1983), compiled by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Other interviewees had participated in guerrilla warfare in Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Peru, as well as several who were survivors of Che Guevara's rebel army in Bolivia.

The K'iche' Maya Oral History Project involves the digitization and online dissemination of over one hundred oral histories which were collected in western Guatemala during the 1960s and 1970s.

Personal accounts of 134 individuals who played major roles in or were eyewitnesses to important political events in Iran from the 1920s to the 1980s

The Palestinian Oral History Archive is an archival collection that contains more than 1,000 hours of testimonies with first generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon. The project will digitize, index, catalog, preserve, and provide access to the digitized interviews.

Includes multiple collections of photographs, postcards, newspapers, oral histories, architectural blueprints, as well as books. Focused on 19th and 20th century history from Napoleon through the 21st Century Revolution.

YouTube for the UK's first national Black heritage centre. Particularly good for the 1981 Brixton uprisings.

The BDOHP interviews former diplomats or other officials who have played a significant role in events bearing on international relations. The tendency towards greater openness in government has strengthened in recent years.

The oral history collections at the British Library cover a wide range of subject areas spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.

Diaries and letters of 500 women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.