Library of Congress Gets African-American Oral History Archive

The Library of Congress is now the home of The HistoryMakers collection, which details the black experience in America, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced on Tuesday. Suggested Reading The Best, Black TV Shows, Movies to Stream on AppleTV+ Why NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Tried To Play The Black Card…Literally Have You Heard…

The Library of Congress is now the home of The HistoryMakers collection, which details the black experience in America, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced on Tuesday.

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โ€œThe HistoryMakers archive provides invaluable first-person accounts of both well-known and unsung African-Americans, detailing their hopes, dreams and accomplishmentsโ€”often in the face of adversity,โ€ Billington said in a press release. โ€œThis culturally important collection is a rich and diverse resource for scholars, teachers, students and documentarians seeking a more complete record of our nationโ€™s history and its people.โ€

Consisting of thousands of hours of content and including 14,000 analog tapes, 3,000 DVDs, 6,000 โ€œborn-digitalโ€ files, 70,000 paper documents and digital files, and more than 3,000 digital photographs, The HistoryMakers is just about the largest project of its type, founder and Executive Director Julieanna Richardson noted.

โ€œThe HistoryMakers represents the single largest archival project of its kind since the Works Progress Administrationโ€™s initiative to document the experiences of former slaves in the 1930s,โ€ Richardson explained. โ€œThis relationship with the Library of Congress represents a momentous occasion for our organization. With the Library of Congress serving as our permanent repository, we are assured of its preservation and safekeeping for generations to come.โ€

The library was given the digital files with all of the analog tapes, consisting of approximately 2,600 videotaped interviews with black Americans in 39 states.

โ€œThe collection is one of the most well-documented and organized audiovisual collections that the Library of Congress has ever acquired,โ€ Mike Mashon, head of the libraryโ€™s Moving Image Section, said in the release. โ€œIt is also one of the first born-digital collections accepted into our nationโ€™s repository.โ€

The HistoryMakers was launched in the summer of 1999 as a nonprofit research and educational institution, set on creating an archival collection of oral histories. Richardson and her team have been to almost 300 U.S. cities and towns and have traveled as far as Norway in hopes of capturing the missing stories of American history.

Read more at the Library of Congress.

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