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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Oral History Links

More Oral History Collections

Museums and organizations around the country feature collections of World War II and Manhattan Project veterans and their families as well as leading scientists and innovators. If your organization would like us to link to your collection, please contact us

The Caltech Archives Oral History Project began in 1978 for the purpose of recording the personal memoirs of the distinguished scientists, teachers, and administrators of the Institute.

The Oak Ridge Public Library has a collection of oral histories of Oak Ridge, Manhattan Project-era residents. To view the collection on their website, go to Departments & Services – COROH – View Oral Histories.

The Oral History Program at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which is administered by CHF’s Center for Contemporary History and Policy, aims to create a collection of comprehensive, professionally edited interviews with leading figures in chemistry and related fields.

The Hanford History Partnership is a collaborative effort of Washington State University Tri-Cities and regional organizations that currently house Hanford oral histories. 

The Hanford History Project is a physical and online archive documenting the history of the Hanford nuclear production facilities and the surrounding community. The Project is hosted by Washington State University – Tri Cities.

The Home Front Project depicts a national portrait of World War II, preserving recollections of adults and children who experienced wartime across the United States. This project offers a multimedia website and community partnership initiative created by the StoryQuest Oral History Program at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

IEEE has been conducting, recording, and transcribing oral histories with significant individuals in its fields of interest since the late 1960s. To date, IEEE has completed over 490 oral histories. The IEEE History Center is determined to preserve as source material for the future historians of technology the personal memories of pioneers in the electrical, electronics, and computer fields, the technologists who transformed the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Stanley Goldberg, consulting historian for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), recorded eighteen video sessions with fifty-five participants involved in the engineering, physics, and culmination of the Manhattan Project. 

The National Security Archive is a non-governmental, non-profit organization founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who sought a centralized home for formerly secret U.S. government documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. 

The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is a comprehensive program dedicated to documenting, preserving and disseminating the remembered past of persons affiliated with and affected by the Nevada Test Site during the era of Cold War nuclear testing.

The Niels Bohr Library and Archives of the American Institute of Physics holds more than a thousand tape-recorded interviews. The collection includes over 3,000 hours of interviews with some 1,500 physicists, astronomers and others.

Web of Stories has video interviews with prominent scientists from around the world.

Oral histories from former K-25, Y-12, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory workers and local residents.

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