UA Teams with UVA on Clinton Project

The University of Arkansas will work with the University of Virginia to conduct the Clinton History Project, chronicling the life of the nation’s 42nd President, the UA announced on Oct. 5.

The UA’s Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History will conduct more than 400 interviews in a project that is expected to take at least five years to complete. The center was established in 1999 with a donation of $220,000 in unspent campaign funds from former U.S. Senator David Pryor.

“I am pleased that these two great universities will be handling the project and look forward to the end product, which should generate a wealth of information and insight to serve both the scholarly and public interests,” Clinton said.

The Arkansas Center’s project will focus on Clinton’s life before and after his presidency, while the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs will cover the presidential years through its Presidential Oral History Program.

The interviewers for the Arkansas Center are faculty members from the history, political science and journalism departments at the UA and four other Arkansas colleges and universities: the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Southern Arkansas University, Arkansas State University and Lyon College.

By the end of the project, many of the interviews will be available on the Internet via the Clinton Presidential Library Web site and the Arkansas Center’s Web site.

The project’s 12-member advisory committee includes two UA representatives: Randall B. Woods, dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and Jeannie Whayne, a professor who is chair of the history department and director of the Arkansas Center.