Leakey Foundation
The Leakey Foundation Oral History Project includes 15 interviews conducted by Virginia Morell in 2003 and 2004 and subsequently donated to the Oral History Center.
History Department, UC Berkeley
Information about this project is coming soon.
Project resources
Video excerpts
Black Culture and Black Consciousness and the Use of Theory Part 1
Black Culture and Black Consciousness and the Use of Theory Part 2
The Genesis of Highbrow/Lowbrow
The Unpredictable Past
The Opening of the American Mind
On Being Arrested for the Last Time
“The Fireside Chats” and the Great Depression
Teaching
Suffragists
In the early 1970s the Suffragists Oral History Project, under the auspices of the Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office, collected interviews with twelve leaders and participants in the woman's suffrage movement. Tape-recorded and transcribed oral histories preserved the memories of these remarkable women, documenting formative experiences, activities to win the right to vote for women, and careers as leaders of the movements for welfare and labor reform, world peace, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
A biography of Alice Paul based upon Amelia Fry's oral history interviews with Alice Paul, her friends, and relatives is now available: Alice Paul: Claiming Power by J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry.
Seven major figures in twentieth-century suffragist history are represented here with full-length oral histories. These include Alice Paul, founder and leader of the more militant organization called the National Woman's Party, which made suffrage a mainstream issue through public demonstrations and protests; Sara Bard Field, a mother, lover, poet, and social and political reformer, whose interactions with California artists and political activists gave her a national profile; Burnita Shelton Matthews, a District of Columbia federal judge; Helen Valeska Bary, who campaigned for woman's suffrage in Los Angeles and later had a prominent career in labor and social security administration; Jeannette Rankin, a Montana suffrage campaigner and the first woman elected to Congress, who recalls Carrie Chapman Catt, the League of Women Voters, and her lifelong work for world peace; Mabel Vernon, who is credited for the advance work of gathering the throngs of people to greet Alice Paul and her entourage on their famous coast-to-coast suffrage campaign in the fall of 1915; and Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, who gives an account of working with Alice Paul in organizing the Woman's Party.
Managing Protest
Six Weeks in Spring: Managing Protest at a Public University
For six weeks during the spring of 1985 UC Berkeley saw huge protests by thousands pushing for University of California divestment of financial holdings in companies doing business with South Africa. In these interviews, Chancellor Heyman and many of his staff tell how the campus administration handled the anti-apartheid sit-ins, sleep-ins, and other forms of protest that took place during April and May of 1985.
When the University of California decided in Spring 1985 not to divest itself of investments in South Africa, a nation whose segregationist apartheid policy had long drawn criticism worldwide, significant on-campus protests at UC Berkeley were an immediate result.
Divestment of South African holdings had been advocated since the 1960s as a means of protest against apartheid, but divestment as a means of sanction did not take hold until the mid-1980s. The push for US divestment had gained critical mass following the 1983 uprising of South African blacks against the country’s new Constitution. In 1985 black South Africans rejected the policy of apartheid and mobilized to make townships ungovernable. So many black local officials left their posts that the national government was forced to declare a state of emergency. Thousands of South African troups were deployed to put down the resistance, bringing further world criticism of South Africa.
Organized divestment campaigns had already led the boards of trustees of several leading American universities to sever their ties with corporations doing business in South Africa. The UC Berkeley demonstrations of 1985 called upon the America’s premier public university to do the same. On April 10, two student groups, the UC Divestment Committee and the Campaign Against Apartheid, began mounting daily rallies on Sproul Plaza. Throughout that week, students and community members continued their sit-in. Many students camped overnight, holding discussion groups on the problem of apartheid and screening films on the subject. The campaign intensified when, at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of April 16, campus police raided the sit-in, arresting 156 of the protestors. Demonstration leaders immediately called for a campus-wide boycott of classes the next day. Some faculty members and teaching assistants voiced support, saying they would not penalize students for missing class.
On April 17, the day after the mass arrests, thousands of Berkeley students did stage a boycott, and in the following days students held a series of noon-time rallies. Hundreds continued to spend their nights on the steps of Sproul Plaza. Some protestors blocked entrances to campus buildings, actively resisting arrest. Over the weeks, hundreds of students and community members were detained by police.
In 1986 the University of California did divest itself of $3 billion in South Africa-related stock holdings. The action was a statement heard loud and clear in South Africa. During a visit to the Bay Area after his 1990 release from 27 years in prison for his activism against apartheid, Nelson Mandela pointed to the UC Berkeley protests, and the University’s subsequent divestment, as a catalyst that ultimately helped end whites-only minority rule in his country.
The interviews in this collection were conducted in the summer of 1985 at the request of UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman as part of a general review of the UC Berkeley administration’s response to disruptive episodes involving issues of freedom of speech and assembly. Sixteen interviews were conducted with campus officials, including the UC Berkeley police chief, several vice chancellors, and Chancellor Heyman himself. All interviews were conducted by ROHO's Julie Shearer and Gabrielle Morris.
Special thanks to volunteers Mary Lavender and Mark Westlye for their extensive work in helping bring this project online.
West Coast Cocktails
West Coast Cocktails: An Oral History will trace the legacy of cocktails and spirits through a series of long-form life history interviews with key figures in the industry, including bar owners, bartenders, craft distillers, and cocktail historians. We will document:
- labor
- gender
- ethnicity
- community
- the role of geography and culinary effects
- the influence of craft and artisanal culture
- the perception of bartending as a respected profession
Our esteemed project advisors include:
Dale DeGroff
David Wondrich
Talia Baiocchi
Leslie Pariseau
Women Political Leaders
After a successful project documenting women leaders and activists in the suffrage movement, in the 1970s the Oral History Center (then the Regional Oral History Office) began documenting the experiences of California women who became active in politics during the years between the women’s suffrage movement and the feminist movement — roughly 1920 to 1965. This endeavor was called the California Women Political Leaders Oral History Project, and represented a variety of political views from elected and appointed officials at national, state, and local government levels.
Under project director Malca Chall, The California Women Political Leaders Oral History Project was financed by both an outright and a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Matching funds were provided by the Rockefeller Foundation for the Helen Gahagan Douglas component of the project, by the Columbia and Fairtree Foundations, and by individuals who were interested in supporting memoirs of their friends and colleagues. In addition, funds from the California State Legislature — sponsoring the Knight-Brown Era Governmental History Project — made it possible to increase the research and broaden the scope of the interviews in which there was a meshing of the woman’s political career with the topics being studied in the Knight-Brown Project. Professors Judith Blake Davis, Albert Lepawsky, and Walton Bean served as principal investigators when the project was active from July 1975 to December 1977.
Several years after these initial interviews, a group of scholars and volunteer interviewers worked together to conduct an oral history with longtime political actor Elizabeth Paschal. The Committee for the Oral History of Elizabeth Paschal donated the resulting interview to the Oral History Center in the 1990s as part of the Women Political Leaders Oral History Project.
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California
Chief Judge Robert Peckham created the Northern District Court Historical Society in 1977, followed by commissioning this important oral history series in 1980. In the 1981 the preface to the first oral history in the series, that of Judge Albert Wollenberg, Sr., Judge Peckham wrote:
“In addition to historical study of the District, the Society hopes to promote greater public understanding and appreciation of the role of the federal judiciary. Except for those involved in the legal process, the operation, significance and impact of federal trial courts remains largely a mystery to most Americans. By focusing on the history and activities of the Northern District, the Society hopes to bridge this gap between the legal and lay world and even encourage other District courts to initiate similar efforts. As the nation nears the 200 th anniversary of the ratification of the United States Constitution, it is an appropriate time to raise the level of public understanding by placing the contemporary role of district courts in historical perspective.”
These interviews capture the personal and professional lives of the interviewees, as well as the development of the legal profession and the law, and firsthand accounts of political and cultural aspects of the country and international events as lived by the narrators. Interviewers include Oral History Center staff, family members and colleagues of the judges. Additional oral histories with Northern District of California District Court judges can be found on the Northern District Court Historical Society and the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society websites.
Sponsored by the Historical Society of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Early Venture Capitalists
Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists: Shaping the Business and Industrial Landscape documents through videotaped interviews with the first generation of venture capitalists the origins and evolution of the venture capital industry in California during the 1960s and 1970s. The project explores and explains through the words of participants how venture capital originated in the Bay Area, its intersection with national legislation and policy, the significance of its location, and its role in creating the electronics and biotechnology industries in California.
Related resources
Community and Identity — Individual Interviews
The Oral History Center’s Community and Identity project contains a diverse range of individual oral histories, including interviews that were conducted during the first years of the OHC’s own history in the 1950s. The stories narrated in these interviews begin as far back as the late 19th century, and the project also contains a number of donated interviews and memoirs. Twentieth-century Russian and Hungarian communities are particularly well-represented in this project. Topics covered include war and military service, politics and communism, San Francisco culture, business, education, religious leadership and community life, law, and University of California history.
California Fire Departments
The California Fire Departments oral history project was originally conceived by Sarah Wheelock, an independent researcher. She wanted to explore several major thematic areas of firefighting in California, and she worked with the Oral History Center as her fiscal sponsor and institutional home. Sarah Wheelock passed away in 2014 before she could complete the project and, thus, she was unable to see the project through to completion as originally conceived. Oral History Center staff, led by historian/interviewer Shanna Farrell, assumed management of the project in 2016. Farrell honored the spirit of the original plan and covered the themes outlined by Wheelock, but rather than conduct interviews across the state, Farrell focused on one department, the San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD). The project, then, documented the ways in which a big city department handled urban fire, climate change, diversity, technological change, and changing demographics. Further, the project explored how firefighters work in a complex system that requires constant training and education, a cohesive partnership with local government, extensive procedures and protocols, managerial oversight, effective communication within departments and to the public, acute familiarity with the local and regional environment, and a whole lot of administrative work. The SFFD is an example of how people make a civil service operation run and keep people safe.
The SFFD was founded in 1849 and originally was run by volunteers. It became a paid department, officially integrated into city government, in 1866. The 150th anniversary of the paid department was in 2016, which coincided with the project's interviewing phase. Six people were interviewed for this phase of the project, who worked with the SFFD in different capacities and could offer multiple perspectives on the organizational, cultural, geographic, economic, and political systems of one of the oldest departments in the country. These interviews work in concert to illustrate day-to-day operations in the stations, administrative duties, how the city of San Francisco and the department work together, the relationship between paramedics and the department, training, equipment, fire science school, the role of unions, the challenges and triumphs of integrating the departments, the public perception of the department, the role of innovation and changing technology, cultural changes in the department, challenges in fire safety particular to the geography of San Francisco, and the hopes for the future of the SFFD.