by Kimberly Springer, Curator for Oral History Spanning seventy years of the Continental Can Company, oral histories with 226 employees illustrate the type of research and practice the Oral History Research Office (OHRO) conducted for many of its own formative years. Major companies would contract with the OHRO to conduct interviews about its history and… Continue reading Continental Group Project
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Carnegie Corporation of New York Oral Histories Collection
by Karen Wang, Columbia University Libraries Intern What does philanthropy have to do with business? Andrew Carnegie, magnate of the U.S. steel industry, built his empire from humble beginnings with business acumen and insider trading (commonplace and legal at the time). Carnegie is also known for his philanthropy and his philosophy “The Gospel of Wealth,”… Continue reading Carnegie Corporation of New York Oral Histories Collection
Black Journalists Oral History Collection
by Kae Bara Kratcha, Entrepreneurship and Social Science Librarian The Black Journalists Oral History Collection meddles with the definition of “business oral history” by presenting business practices that center community care and activism rather than profit and providing narratives that show the success of the Black press as dependent on a network rather than a… Continue reading Black Journalists Oral History Collection
Federated Department Stores Project
by Kae Bara Kratcha, Entrepreneurship and Social Science Librarian The catalog summary of the Federated Department Stores Project begins, “This project comprises a series of interviews with those who built the largest department store organization in the United States, Federated Department Stores.” Scholars interested in the history of retail business, business organizational structure, consumer taste… Continue reading Federated Department Stores Project
New event series: How We Listen
Oral histories are intense in all the ways: they’re intensive in design, listening skills, execution, telling one’s story, to archive and to process. But what about listening to them? How do we go about listening to oral histories? What does it take to construct a listenable interview? How much thought goes into oral history for… Continue reading New event series: How We Listen
Experiments in consent, oral history, and world-building
Join Oral History Curator, Kimberly Springer, for an exploration of consentful tech and how we might use oral history to talk about the past, but also how interviewers, narrators and archives use oral history to talk about the future. How can oral history be used for world-building? OHAC is happy to collaborate with Xin Xin… Continue reading Experiments in consent, oral history, and world-building
OHAC archives assistant describes new collection on addiction
Visit the OHAC news stream on the RBML news site to learn about a newly processed collection, the Addicts Who Survived oral history collection. Keri Kelly, archives assistant and a senior in Columbia College studying creative writing and ethnic studies, is part of the team that prepared transcripts, compiled interview summaries, and wrote narrator biographies for this historic collection that includes interviews with narcotic addicts and dealers, doctors specializing in addiction treatment, police officers and detectives specializing in drug-related crime, and founders of various narcotic treatment programs.
Un-hiding sexuality
Ben Duncan (1927-2016) was an American-born English writer and advertising executive. He lived for most of his life in England with his partner and eventual husband, the English advertising executive Dick Chapman (1930-2012). Duncan met Chapman at Oxford and proposed to him in 1952. More than fifty years later, on December 21, 2005, the couple… Continue reading Un-hiding sexuality
Cultural and lingustic context
Zhaohao Wu Letters, 1923 – 1929 Shuhua Li Papers, 1926 – 1972
