Los Angeles history can be explored through the experiences of people who helped shape its communities. UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research preserves those accounts through in-depth interviews conducted over multiple sessions.
According to the library’s United States history research guide, the center’s collection contains more than 2,000 interviews covering a wide range of Southern California history. Its subjects include Black, Indigenous, other communities of color and immigrant communities, alongside the arts, political activism, government and UCLA’s own history.
The format gives individual experiences room to develop across several conversations. Rather than organizing the collection around one event or institution, the center documents people connected to many aspects of Los Angeles life.
The guide directs researchers to interview transcripts held in Library Special Collections at the Young Research Library. It also points readers toward broader oral history resources, including an index covering more than 2,700 English-language collections from around the world. That resource offers full-text transcript searching where available, with links to audio and video materials.
For anyone investigating Southern California’s past, the UCLA collection offers a starting point grounded in personal testimony. Its range brings community histories, artistic work and political participation into the same research landscape, preserving accounts of the city through people who experienced it.
