New Millennium Oral History Archives

Mission Statement for the New Millennium Oral History Archives We have seen the dusking of the twentieth century and there is about this age in which we live a cultural amnesia, a knowledge deficit of what came before - whether in politics, culture, religion, the arts. The New Millennium Oral History Archives endeavors to serve as a corrective and as a reference for truth and knowledge - consequently rooting out misinformation and hearsay about events, historical or otherwise, and informing people through the testimony of living witnesses.

Following in the tradition of great oral histories, the archive will record the cross-generational, cross-racial, trans-national testimonies of people from a wide spectrum of life: factory workers; captains of industry; the renowned; the infamous; the reviled; clergy; revolutionaries; social activists; academics; teachers; physicians; scientists; shamans; prisoners; the money-changers; and the moneyed, throughout the universe.

The New Millennium Oral History Archives will record (not unlike oral histories such as Columbia University Oral History Project and others) the honest and direct testimonies of those who bore witness to events, struggles, and triumphs from the nineteen hundreds to the present time and offer them at no cost to cultural organizations, grammar and secondary schools, universities, and libraries (specifically, the Schomburg Library, the Smithsonian, and the New York Public Library) the world over. The New Millennium Oral History Archives will serve as a very important audio / visual reference library.

We are embarking on a project of major historical significance. We will be speaking with people who can bear witness to:

The Great Immigration (via Ellis Island and San Francisco)

The Second World War Participants

The Japanese-American Internment during WWII

Civil Rights Movement

The Black Panther; Young Lords Parties; La Raza Unidad Party; American Indian Movement; I Wor Kuen; and League of Revolutionary Workers

Administrators of South Africa apartheid policies and their anti-apartheid victims

Administrators of Jim Crow policies in the southern portion of America (as well as up South) and their victims

United Kingdom WWII Veterans

Eastern European Dissidents

Survivors of Shoah

KGB, Staasi and other policing organizations and their victims

North American (Canada, USA and Mexico) indigenous people and their struggles

Islamic and Arabic religious and nationalist movements

Caribbean Independence Movement leaders and activists

African Independence Movement leaders and fighters

Antipodean indigenous peoples

South and Central American grassroots political and labor movements

Fighters for freedom and equality throughout Asia

Christian honorable Witness (and periodic, unfortunate collaboration) during Fascist, Communist and other totalitarian regimes

Descendants of Armenian Genocide 1915-1923

Living legends of jazz, reggae, blues, gospel, white Southern roots music and world music

Major figures in the rise of the environmental, consumer and feminist movements

Figures involved in the prison reform movement

Late 20 century victims of ethnic cleansing in Africa and Eastern Europe

The rise of hi-tech and financial companies

20th century industries that have transformed life: automotive, aviation, telecommunications, banking, finance, moving pictures, broadcasting (radio, t.v.)

Fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the election of Nelson Mandela as president

Impact of the construction of the Panama Canal

Bicentenary of the 1804 Haitian Revolution its seismic effect throughout the world

Survivors of World Trade Center destruction

We will be speaking to farmers, poets, inventors, strike breakers, political prisoners, Pan-Africans, members of patriotic societies and organizations, military veterans, indigenous peoples...and countless more who have their own stories to tell.