Individual interviews oral history collection, 1948-2017

Scope and Contents

This collection is an administrative designation for interviews that came to the Oral History Archives at Columbia independently, without a parent collection. This includes the very first interviews taken by the the Columbia University's Oral History Research Office in 1948, decades worth of interviews taken by Columbia, and single interviews collected from third-party sources. Individual interviews were called "Biographical interviews" for many decades, as they were taken to record the biographical aspects of narrator's life as opposed to their involvement with the theme of an oral history project. Subject matter of individual interviews is extremely broad and includes figures from government, business, the arts, the sciences, activism, and countless other topics. As of January of 2021, nearly 2000 interviews were cataloged as Individual Interviews, and approximately 400 uncataloged interviews were identified as having this designation

Subjects

• History, Modern--20th century.
• Interviews.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• United States--History--20th century.