The Columbia Center for Oral History is the oldest and largest organized oral history program in the world
The Columbia Center for Oral History 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 17,000 hours of taped memoirs, and 1,000,000 pages of transcript. The program is also a center for teaching and research, offering opportunities for students, visiting scholars and fellows.
The Columbia University Center for Oral History (CCOH) is one of the world’s leading centers for the practice and teaching of oral history. CCOH achieves its mission from the union of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and Columbia Center for Oral History Archives (CCOHA).
CCOHR is housed at INCITE, where it administers an ambitious research agenda with the goal to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, provide public programming, and to teach and do research across the disciplines.
CCOHR's companion center, CCOHA is housed in the Columbia University Libraries and open to the public, holds more than 8,000 interviews, in audio, video and text formats, on a wide variety of subjects. CCOHA oversees the curatorial and archival functions associated with the research initiatives undertaken at CCOHR.
