Between 2019 and 2024, Incite Institute at Columbia University completed the Obama Presidency Oral History project, the official oral history of the Obama Presidency and its times. Taking a novel approach to presidential oral history, the more than 400 interviews recorded for the project include the testimonies of key decisionmakers alongside those of people outside the Oval Office—civil society leaders, legislators, farmers, educators, and people from all walks of life. In this discussion, Evan McCormick will share findings from the first two preview releases of material now available on the project website: 47 interviews that deal with Obama's climate and environmental policies, and healthcare reform centered on the 2010 Affordable Care Act. In conversation with Brent Cebul, McCormick will discuss the project's design, how it was informed by new approaches to political history, and the challenge of creating a digital oral history archive that illuminates American democracy during the Obama years.

Evan D. McCormick is an associate research scholar at Incite Institute at Columbia University. A historian of the presidency and U.S. foreign relations, he directed the global dimensions of the Obama Presidency Oral History project. 

Brent Cebul is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century (Penn Press, 2023). With Lily Geismer, he is co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Mastery and Drift: Professional Class Liberals since the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, January 2025)