Obama Presidency Oral History - Incite at Columbia University

In 2019, Incite Institute and the Columbia Center for Oral History Research were selected by the Obama Foundation to conduct the official oral history of the Obama presidency.

Since then, we have conducted over 450 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.

This study is further distinguished by its attention to the First Lady and her policy agenda, as well as its focus on the President’s early life and work prior to entering the White House. In addition, the Obama Presidency Oral History was conducted in relatively recent memory. Starting in 2019, fieldwork began just under three years after President Obama’s final term.

Public release

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. To accompany the release, we held a panel and preview event in New York City.

Along with the event, we also launched an innovative digital archive that has been described by MSNBC as the greatest presidential oral history of all time. This archive has made several breakthroughs in digital oral history archiving. A core innovation is the development of stories—moments in interviews that are identified from instances where narrators discuss a common topic, person, policy, place, or organization at length. Using a combination of close reading and statistical methods, our team has identified thousands of stories and their overlaps, allowing users to easily explore and compare different perspectives. More than 1,700 of these stories are now available to explore on the study's website.

In March 2024, we continued our release with a special tranche on healthcare reform. To date, ten percent of the collection has been made available to the public. When the study is fully released, interviews will be made available through the Columbia University Libraries, the Obama Foundation, as well as our digital archive. 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.

To explore the study and learn about future releases, visit the Obama Presidency Oral History digital archive.