The practice of transmitting history through oral storytelling is a feature of every culture and is as old as language itself. In the 20th century, institutions and individuals began to use recording devices to preserve and archive narratives in both recordings and transcriptions of interviews. In 1953, the Regional Oral History Office was established to conduct interviews with residents of the West. In 2014, we became the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. Over the decades, we have conducted 5,000 interviews on almost every topic imaginable, yielding over 30,000 hours of recordings. The vast majority of these interview transcripts have been made available online.
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Search the Oral History Center collection of interview transcripts using interviewee name, interviewer name, project title, interview title, or general subject terms.
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Contact
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Elizabeth Semler
Academic Specialist – Historian of Science, Technology, and Medicine
esemler@berkeley.edu -
Location
The Bancroft Library
University of California MS 6000
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
This location is wheelchair accessible.