About the Project
The collection consists of several hundred oral history interviews conducted by Institute team members. Narrators share their stories of migration, community-building in diaspora, personal experiences of world and regional events, and their individual and collective contributions to the social and cultural fabric of California and beyond. A number of interviews also contain digitized photographs, documents, and ephemera from the narrators’ personal collections.
This ever-growing collection of Armenian stories serves as primary source material to understand nearly a century and half of Armenian-American life and contributions to California and beyond. Scholars and educators of various disciplines can use these recorded life stories to further explore the contemporary experiences of Armenians who call or have called California home.
The documentation and publication of oral histories in this collection is funded, in part, by the California State Library.
USC Digital Library
Completed oral history interviews and digitized materials are available on the USC Digital Libraries.
They wanted California, they – my grandfather left Kars, was on a train to Berlin — on a boat to New York, but he wasn’t gonna stay there, and someone told him, he should enter in Baltimore, because it was easier for immigrants to come into Baltimore.
Excerpts from Interviews
A diverse selection of Armenian community members, including first-generation immigrants, second and third-generation Armenian Americans, and individuals from various professions and age groups, were interviewed for this project. Preview a sample of some of the interviews in this collection.
