The Oral History Collection spans the years 1959 to 1979 and consists of nineteen volumes containing transcripts of approximately eighty interviews conducted by the Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office at the University of California at Berkeley. The transcripts are accompanied by introductions, tables of content, indexes, and supplementary material including photographs and copies of correspondence, reports, and clippings. The interviews are arranged alphabetically by name of the oral history project.

The bulk of the interviews relate to California state government and politics. They include twenty-seven interviews from the Earl Warren Oral History Project concerning health insurance, labor, Japanese-American relocation during World War II, Warren's early years in Bakersfield, and his relations as governor with the public, press, and state legislature. An extensive interview with Merrell Farnham Small, administrative secretary in the governor's office from 1945 to 1953, is also included. Other oral history projects pertaining to California are the Governmental History Documentation Project which is represented in this collection by an interview with Roger Kent, vice chairman and chairman of the California Democratic State Central Committee from 1954 to 1965, and an oral history project documenting the career of Walter Gordon, lawyer, civil rights leader, governor of the Virgin Islands, and chairman of the California Adult Authority, a state agency responsible for setting terms and granting paroles for adult prison inmates.

The collection also contains thirteen interviews from the Suffragists Oral History Project. Included are interviews with Helen Valeska Bary, Sara Bard Field, Burnita Shelton Matthews, Alice Paul, Jeannette Rankin, Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, and Mabel Vernon, among others. The interviews explore their subject's early formative years and their subsequent efforts on behalf of woman's suffrage, welfare and labor reform, world peace, and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. An interview with Caroline Service, wife of diplomat John S. Service, forms part of the China Series. Her interview covers her years in China from 1933 to 1940 as the wife of a foreign service officer and her husband's arrest in 1945 for allegedly passing secret documents to magazine, his testimony before the Loyalty Review Board in 1951, and his subsequent firing by the State Department.