Friends Oral Histories

This collection is no longer planned for ingest into ACDC as part of the Bicentennial Project. 

In January 2019, roughly half-way through the Bicentennial Project, we assessed what we had done so far and what more we could do within our timeline. On account of this assessment, we removed 7 collections/portions of collections from our list of those we planned to complete by the end of the project (August 2020). This collection is one of those removed. We chose to remove this collection and prioritize others instead only due to the fact that our system is not quite capable of handling A/V content. We hope to soon have this enhancement and plan to ingest this collection into ACDC once we are able.

The individual oral histories in this collection are available on DVD in the library’s circulating collection. A complete list of the titles can be found in the library catalog.


Collection Overview page completed before removing this portion of a collection from the Bicentennial Project:

An African-American woman with grey hair smiles as she looks off-camera towards her interviewer. She is wearing a green sweater and sits in an armchair. Bookshelves fill the wall behind her.
Janice Denton, retired library staff member

In 1994, several Friends of the Library began a project to preserve and make available the oral histories of individuals prominent in the history of Amherst College. Copies of the interviews on DVD are available for viewing in Archives and Special Collections, and will be made available through ACDC for the Bicentennial Project. You can read about the interviews on the Library website, and view excerpts as well.

Interviewees include Amherst College staff and faculty members, alumni, and trustees of the College. Notable names are Janice Denton, a African-American library staff member who helped develop the Black Cultural Center Library; Richard Wilbur (Class of 1942), a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet; and Dr. Rose Olver, who was the first woman appointed as a full-time faculty member (1962), and the first to receive tenure (1969). The thirty interviews will be made available in full. The in-depth conversations cover interviewees’ experiences at Amherst and their reflections on the College and its future.

For more information
Related Bicentennial collections