About - Obama Presidency Oral History
01. About
Produced by Incite at Columbia University, this study is the official oral history of the Obama presidency.
Since 2019, we have conducted 470 interviews with officials, activists, artists, organizers, and extraordinary people from all walks of life. These in-depth interviews, often conducted over multiple sessions, represent roughly 1,100 hours of audio and video that together form a comprehensive record of the Obama years.
Presidential oral histories usually confine themselves to recording the memories of administration officials and those in their immediate orbits. By contrast, this study seeks to decenter the presidency and center the experiences and interactions of people both inside and outside of the administration. In doing so, the Obama Presidency Oral History captures a multitude of standpoints and reveals the relationships between those with power and those who experience and influence that power.
In May 2023, we concluded our fieldwork and began previewing the archive with a limited release of interviews related to climate change and the environment. As the Obama Presidency Oral History becomes publicly available, it will serve as a resource for policymakers, students, activists, artists, journalists, historians, and the general public.
02. Partners
Incite at Columbia University, home to the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR), led the project with support from the Obama Foundation.
Incite and CCOHR have pioneered several large, collaborative, population-based oral histories that inventively link social science research methods to historical inquiry. We have collected individual recollections on subjects ranging from the attacks and aftermath of September 11th, the military prisons at Guantanamo, the art world built by Robert Rauschenberg, and the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City. As home to the nation’s only Oral History Master of Arts program, Incite and CCOHR also have nearly 200 program alumni working at the intersections of the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The primary caretaker of our interviews is the Oral History Archives at Columbia (OHAC), which is home to over 10,000 interviews—making it one of the largest oral history collections in the United States.
Columbia has also partnered with scholars from the University of Hawai’i and the University of Chicago, who conducted interviews focused on President Obama’s early life in Hawai’i and his and First Lady Michelle Obama’s years in Chicago, respectively.
03. FAQ
04. People
The Obama Presidency Oral History was supported by a full-time research team of historians, oral historians, sociologists, and political scientists, as well as an advisory board of leading scholars in history, political science, sociology, and public health.
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