New from RBML’S Archivists and Collections Managers | September 2021

Kevin Schlottmann, RBML’s head archivist, shares a selection of new and updated finding aids, as well as newly available collections. See below for newly processed, newly digitized, and/or newly described RBML collections, including some wonderful oral histories that are now fully available online.  Kudos as always to the many staff members, both in RBML and […]

Read More…

New Collection |  Sheila Michaels Civil Rights Organization Oral History Collection

  The Oral History Archives at Columbia is pleased to open for researcher use the Sheila Michael Civil Rights Organizational Oral History Collection. Here archives assistant Keri Kelly reflects on notable themes from her close work with the collection. The history of the Civil Rights Movement is often narrated through its most salient events and heroic […]

Read More…

Moonlight Inside the Library

In April 1897, the Spectator reported on the “two mysterious hemispheres” which had appeared in the entrance of the Library being built on Columbia’s soon-to-be new campus in Morningside Heights. First, the two halves were joined to form a globe. And then, this wooden sphere was hung from the ceiling and could cast a soft, […]

Read More…

Oral History | What can oral history tell us about NYC’s likely next mayor Eric Adams?

From the New York Times: ‘Keep an Eye on This Guy’: Inside Eric Adams’s Complicated Police Career” For Mr. Adams, becoming a policeman was an act of subversion. Still angry over the beating, he saw “an opportunity to go in and just aggravate people,” he told Liz H. Strong, an oral historian at Columbia University, […]

Read More…

Oral history | Congratulations to the 2021 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral Winner!

From our colleagues in the instructional arm of the Columbia Center for Oral History, the Oral History Master’s Program (OHMA)… After an incredibly challenging period in which fieldwork was disrupted, many of us suffered losses, and everyone experienced upheaval, the 2021 Brodsky Prize Committee (Peter Bearman, Amy Starecheski, and Carlin Liu Zia) was particularly impressed […]

Read More…