Background

The Columbia University Oral History Research Office is the oldest and largest organized oral history program in the world. Founded in 1948 by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Allan Nevins, the oral history collection now contains nearly 8,000 taped memoirs, and nearly 1,000,000 pages of transcript. These memoirs include interviews with a wide variety of historical figures. Some interviews, conducted in the late 1940s, contain recollections dating back to the second administration of Grover Cleveland. An interview with Charles C. Burlingham conducted in 1949 opens with a discussion of the drafts riots during the Civil War.

Over 2,000 scholars a year consult the interviews from the oral history collection archived at Columbia University. These researchers have written over 1,000 books using interviews from the collection, including: Cary Reich's Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908 - 1958; Doris Kearn Goodwin's No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in WWII; and Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize winning portrait of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, just to name a few. In addition, hundreds of dissertations and articles draw upon the oral histories in our collection. Notable biographical memoirs often cited include interviews with Judge Constance Baker Motley, New Deal leaders such as Frances Perkins, James Farley and Henry A. Wallace, and civil rights activists Clifford J. and Virginia Durr.

While a large part of our collection consists of biographical memoirs, historians and researchers also have at their disposal a rich range of  projects focusing on specific topics and experiences. These include a series of project based interviews with people who witnessed and responded to the crises of September 11, 2001, scheduled to open in the fall of 2007. To honor its long-standing mission of public dissemination, OHRO has recently developed an online oral history program, which features a visual history of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and a series of interviews with “Notable New Yorkers.” OHRO has also undertaken an extensive audio history of The Atlantic Philanthropies, founded by Charles F. Feeney, which will amount to 560 hours of recorded interview. The Office is also conducting a visual history of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Advisory Committee

Current members of the Oral History Research Office Advisory Committee are:

• Eric Foner DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Chair
• Peter Bearman Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy
• Elizabeth Blackmar Professor of 19th and 20th Century History
• Rita Charon Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine, Medical School; Faculty, College of Physicians and Surgeons
• Lewis Cole Professor of Film Studies, School of the Arts
• Margaret Crocco Associate Professor of Arts and the Humanities, Teachers College
• Marianne Hirsch Professor of Comparative Literature
• Kenneth Jackson Barzun Professor of History and Social Science
• Manning Marable Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies
• Leo Spitzer Visiting Professor of African History and Oral History
• Marcia Wright Professor of African History
• James Neal University Librarian and Vice-President for Information Services
• Patricia Renfro Deputy University Librarian
• Michael Ryan Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library