HIST 47503: Colloquium: Chicago in United States Urban History

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The HistoryMakers, established in 1999, is a non-profit institution whose purpose is to record, preserve and disseminate the content of video oral history interviews highlighting the accomplishments of individual African Americans and African-American-led groups and movements. Its aim is to provide a unique scholarly and educational resource for exploring African American history and culture. It is unique among collections of African American heritage because of its large and varied scope, with interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present. Rather than focus on one particular part of a person’s life or a single subject, such as a career or participation in the civil rights movement, the interviews are life oral histories covering the person’s entire span of memories as well as his or her own family’s oral history.

Interviews were first conducted in 1993, and continue to the present. The archive continues to grow, so that queries saved today may have new results tomorrow based on new interviews added into the archive. Some people in the collection may be interviewed again, so that content for a particular person may grow as well. All of the appropriate metadata for the interviews is shown when you drill down to a particular person or a particular story.