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Edward Koch Edward Koch
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Introduction

The Oral History Research Office's interview with Edward I. Koch was undertaken by Ed Edwin in 1976 while Koch was still a congressman. Ed Edwin, also the interviewer for the Kenneth and Mamie Clark interviews, had an extensive history as a journalist and radio reporter who covered the New York political landscape. The interview is intriguing because it catches a liberal congressman who had committed himself to the civil-rights and anti–Vietnam War movements at the moment in time when that liberalism was being redefined as more cultural than economic. This departure from purely labor-based activism was to emerge into what some commentators called neo-liberalism. The interview was complemented in the eighties and nineties by a full-scale oral history of Koch's mayoral administration. The Edward I. Koch Administration Oral History Project includes interviews with almost eighty individuals, and most of these interviews were opened to the public in 2005. At the conclusion of the interviewing that took place during the 1990s, a symposium on memories of the Edward I. Koch administration was held at the New-York Historical Society.


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