Historical Objects

Multiple digital collections at the US Library of Congress feature oral histories. These collections engage the breadth of 20th and 21st centuries focused on lived experience.

Offers full-text content, including Ellis Island oral history narratives, exclusive Black Panther party interviews, and more. Indexes English-language interviews that are either publicly available on the Web or held by repositories and archives around the world. Many have full text transcripts.

More than 2,000 interviews from across the 20th and 21st centuries focused on African American history, craft, Latin and Latino history, the New Deal, Photography, and Women.

Since 1973, the SOHP has conducted 6,000 interviews with men and women–from mill workers to civil rights leaders to future presidents of the United States.

A selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.

The Oral History Digital Collection contains a selection of interview transcripts produced by the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at The University of Southern Mississippi. Currently, a majority of the interviews in the collection document the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi.

The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. T

With hundreds of interviews, this collection includes topics such as American Indian History, African American History, Community History, and more.

Native American history initiatives at SPOHP have focused on tribal history in the Southeast, archiving hundreds of interviews with the Catawba, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Lumbee, Seminole, and Pamunkey since 1967. Grouped among the Native Peoples of the Americas Oral History Collections are interviews representing the lives and history of native Americans.

Provides access to typescripts of interviews (1967 -1972) conducted with hundreds of Indians in Oklahoma regarding the histories and cultures of their respective nations and tribes. Related are accounts of Indian ceremonies, customs, social conditions, philosophies, and standards of living. Members of every tribe resident in Oklahoma were interviewed.

On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directs the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record new interviews with people who participated in the struggle, over a five year period beginning in 2010. More than 200 video interviews are available.

Interviews with several of Florida's civil rights leaders who were active at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States and in Florida during the 1950s and 1960s.

Kent State University was placed into the international spotlight on May 4, 1970, after 13 students were shot by members of the Ohio National Guard at a student demonstration. The Kent State Shootings Oral Histories project collects and provides access to personal accounts of the May 4, 1970, shootings and their aftermath.

The ACT UP Oral History Project is a collection of interviews with surviving members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. Transcripts of interviews and streaming videos are available.

The University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center for Lowell History has coordinated dozens of Oral History Projects featuring the City of Lowell resulting in hundreds of interviews, the transcriptions for which are available here. Focuses include: ethnicity; migrants from South East Asia; labor; women; migrants from Portugal.

At over 10,000 interviews since 1948, the Oral History Archives is one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. A substantial portion have been digitized.

Encompasses over 1,500 interviews (nearly 4,500 hours) touching on all aspects of the University’s history.

Over 32,000 pages of full-text, searchable oral history are just a click away! The primary source material collected by the Rutgers Oral History Archives since 1994. Topics include the World Wars, Civil Rights Movements, Women's history and more.

Since the 1860s, the Center have conducted 4,000 interviews on almost every topic imaginable. The vast majority of these interviews have been transcribed and made available online.

The women included in this project include pioneers of early women’s journalism, champions of civil rights, and celebrities in the world of broadcast television. They represent a diversity of careers, backgrounds, and perspectives, yet all are considered important figures in the history of women in journalism, beginning in the 1920s and continuing through early 21st century.

Transcripts from dozens of interviews conducted with individuals attached to Lyndon B. Johnson's (1963-1969) presidency.

Initiated in 2008, explores the state of human and civil rights in the post-9/11 world. In its first year, the project conducted a series of interviews with attorneys in order to document legal challenges against capital punishment in the United States. Recognizing important intersections between litigation challenging the administration of capital punishment and the legal architecture of post-9/11 detention policies and practices, the Rule of Law Oral History Project expanded in 2010 to study the statutory and constitutional challenges of the use of the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.

Transcripts and audio recordings of all oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Forest Products Laboratory was comprised of four research divisions: wood preservation, timber testing, wood chemistry and wood technology. Within a short time the Laboratory developed divisions in other research areas in engineering, pathology, wood distillation, and pulp and paper. More than 50 interviews with individuals associated with the project.

Oral histories on WWI, WWII, post-1946, the "War against Terrorism," and more.

Dozens of interviews on topics ranging from WWII, to Vietnam, September 11, as well as Katrina.

Interviews with individuals from across the 20th and into the 21st centuries.

This collection contains oral histories from veterans who served in the U.S. Air Force. Topics include Korean conflict, Cold War, and more.

The project includes thirty-nine interviews with Minnesotans who speak about their Asian backgrounds. Some emigrated from Asian countries as children and spent much of the twentieth century in Minnesota; other narrators were born in the state and grew up as the children or grandchildren of immigrants; and others are newer Minnesotans, having arrived in the 1960s and 1970s.

"The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964."

The Center for Oral History (COH), in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, collects, documents, preserves and highlights the recollections of Native Hawaiians and the multi-ethnic people of Hawaiʻi. It produces oral histories and interpretive historical materials about lifeways, key historic events, social movements and Hawaiʻi’s role in the globalizing world, for the widest possible use.

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Include approximately 1900 interviews. The interviews include people from dozens of countries, former Immigration and Public Health Service employees, military personnel stationed at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty as well as people detained at Ellis Island during World War II until it closed in 1954.

Search or browse letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives (most originating from 1920-1980) by over 1900 immigrants to the United States and Canada

Collection includes transcriptions of more than 20 oral interviews, some about Angel Island.

These interviews represent the views of the interviewee and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of IEEE or ETHW partner societies. Interviews touch on the history of science and were done predominately in the 1990s and later.

Interview with people who created New York's off- and off-off- Broadway theatre

In an effort to preserve the legacy of Rauschenberg’s (1925-2008) life and work, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, in collaboration with INCITE/Columbia Center for Oral History Research, has undertaken the Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project.

In 2012, the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (IRWGS) approached the Columbia Center for Oral History Research about embarking on an oral history project that would document the growth and development of feminism at Columbia.

Is a community-driven effort to collect and share a diverse range of stories from within the transgender and gender variant communities. Draws in audio and film clips from across the 20th century.

In 1999 The Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive initiated the Oral History Project (OHP). The history of the wars in Southeast Asia is not complete without the inclusion of the voices of those who were in some way involved. To that end, the mission of the OHP is to create and preserve a more complete record of the wars in Southeast Asia by preserving, through recorded interviews, the recollections and experiences of all who were involved in those wars.

Collection of Guantanamo stories with
158 interviews from 20 countries.

Is an online presentation of selections from a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941.

More than 45 oral histories with women who lived through the dust and drought. Mostly in transcription format.

After the Day of Infamy: "Man-on-the-Street" Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor presents approximately twelve hours of opinions recorded in the days and months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor from more than two hundred individuals in cities and towns across the United States.

Access to oral interviews with multiple people--men and women--associated with the Pacific Theater of the Second World war.

Nline collection features 580 audio/visual interviews with Manhattan Project workers and their families, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie R. Groves, Glenn Seaborg, Hans and Rose Bethe, George and Vera Kistiakowsky, and many more.

Four oral histories.

Beginning in Fall 2005 under the direction of Director Dr. Lisa Pruitt, the Albert Gore, Sr, Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University, pursued an initiative to document the experiences of as many Katrina evacuees and first responders living in Middle Tennessee as possible through the medium of oral history.

More than 100 oral histories from Mississippi.