GBH Archives Open Vault

Collection Summary

The GBH Archives Open Vault collection includes programing and ancillary materials preserved by GBH Archives, public media’s oldest professional archive. The collection includes television episodes, raw interviews, radio broadcasts, news reports, and curated clips from thirty special collections and seventeen scholar exhibits featured on the GBH Archives website Open Vault.

Included in the collection are GBH news and public affairs series, such as The Press and the People (1958–1959), exploring press coverage of key events of the 1950s; Say Brother (1968–1997), GBH’s longest-running Black public affairs program, subsequently renamed Basic Black (1998–2024) and reimagined in 2025 as GBH News Rooted; the landmark debate series The Advocates (1969–1974; 1978-1979; 1984); and the documentary series FRONTLINE (1983–present). The collection also includes groundbreaking arts and cultural programming, such as New Television Workshop (1974–1993), which supported the creation and broadcast of contemporary dance, performance, and video art. Alistair Cooke’s introductory and closing remarks for episodes filmed during his tenure as host of Masterpiece Theatre are also showcased in the collection.

The GBH Open Vault collection features full interviews from documentaries, such as The Murder of Emmett Till (2003), Stonewall Uprising (2010), and 1964 (2014), all of which aired on the GBH documentary series American Experience (1988–present). Also included are interviews and footage from multi-part documentary series, such as Vietnam: A Television History (1983), War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (1989), and Africans in America (1998). The To the Moon Interviews collection comprises interviews conducted for the two-hour NOVA (1974–present) documentary To the Moon (1999) about NASA’s Apollo space program.

The collection brings together GBH radio programs, audio recordings, and materials used in the production of GBH radio series and podcasts. Open Vault’s March on Washington collection includes fifteen hours of uninterrupted radio coverage of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Select episodes of the radio series Folk Heritage (1978–2003) showcasing folk music and bluegrass are available in the Folk Heritage with Dick Pleasants collection. And the exhibit Eric Jackson’s Radio Legacy highlights Jackson’s interviews with some of the most celebrated jazz musicians of our time. Additionally, the Scratch & Win and The Big Dig collections feature programming used in two GBH podcasts, The Big Dig: A Study in American Infrastructure (2023), about the notorious Boston highway project, and Scratch & Win (2025), about the changing politics of gambling in Massachusetts in the 1970s and ‘80s.

The GBH Open Vault collection also features programming and materials from curated collections on specific topics, such as cooking and animal conservation. The From the Vault collection highlights an eclectic mix of episodes from classic GBH series, such as Invitation to Art (1958–?) and Dancing Disco (1978–1979), as well as clips from some of GBH’s most historic broadcasts. These include the Boston Symphony Orchestra announcement of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the James Brown concert that aired following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The following is a complete list of GBH Archives Open Vault special collections:

Open Vault Special Collections

1. 1964 Interviews
2. The Abolitionists Interviews
3. The Advocates
4. Africans in America Interviews
5. The AIDS Quarterly/The Health Quarterly
6. Alistair Cooke Masterpiece Theatre Collection
7. The Big Dig
8. Boston TV News Digital Library
9. Folk Heritage with Dick Pleasants
10. Freedom Riders Interviews
11. From the Vault
12. FRONTLINE: The First 15 Years
13. The GBH Animals Collection
14. The GBH Cooking Collection
15. John Brown’s Holy War Interviews
16. Jubilee Singers Interviews
17. March on Washington
18. The Murder of Emmett Till Interviews
19. New Television Workshop
20. The Press and the People
21. Reconstruction Interviews
22. Rock and Roll
23. Say Brother
    
24. Scratch & Win
25. Stonewall Uprising Interviews
    
26. Stories of East and Southeast Asia
    
27. To the Moon Interviews
28. Victory Garden
29. The Vietnam Collection
30. War and Peace in the Nuclear Age