primary sources

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  3/2/2021
  

  Reading A Letter That's Been Sealed For More Than 300 Years — Without Opening It

  A new digital technique can allow researchers to virtually read letters, folded by the senders to thwart tampering, without having to open or damage the artifacts. 

• 
• SOURCE: Hyperallergic
  3/1/2021
  

  An Invaluable Black Public Broadcasting Archive Is Now Accessible Online

  The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a repository of interviews and broadcast content dealing with the spectrum of African American history and political activism. 

• 
• SOURCE: WAMC
  2/17/2021
  

  Behind The Former Slave Narratives Captured By A New Deal Program

  Writer Clint Smith: "the narratives are full of those moments that remind you of the personhood of these people who in so much of our teaching of history are sort of these silhouettes or these abstractions."

• 
• SOURCE: National Security Archive
  2/12/2021
  

  Lawsuit Saves Trump White House Records

  The lawsuit also required the preservation of WhatsApp messages from figures including Jared Kushner. 

• 
• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  1/22/2021
  

  Please Stop Calling Things Archives: An Archivist's Plea

  by B.M. Watson

  "As many historians currently use the word “archives,” they seem to imply that an archive is the natural state in which primary sources arrange themselves after being discarded or left by their creators."

• 
• SOURCE: Associated Press
  1/16/2021
  

  Will Trump’s Mishandling of Records Leave a Hole in History?

  Historians and potential prosecutors are concerned about the White House's noncompliance with the Presidential Records Act, but the truth is that the act is toothless. 

• 
• SOURCE: Vice
  1/12/2021
  

  Archivists Are Mining Parler Metadata to Pinpoint Crimes at the Capitol

  Before it was removed from Amazon Web Services, researchers archived a significant number of the posts on Parler, the network favored by many on the far right. That data could prove useful in figuring out what happened around and inside the Capitol on January 6. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Hill
  12/23/2020
  

  Democracy, History and the Presidential Records Act

  by James Grossman and Richard Immerman

  It's time to update the Presidential Records Act to clarify the kinds of materials that must be preserved and create real penalties for destroying them. 

• 
• SOURCE: Governing
  12/21/2020
  

  Has Twitter Changed How History Will See This Era?

  Carole McGranahan, a professor of history and anthropology, says that social media need to be taken seriously as sources of insight into the actions of prominent and anonymous people alike, and need to be preserved as sources.

• 
• SOURCE: Contingent
  12/9/2020
  

  How Spencer McBride Does History

  History Phd Spencer McBride describes his work on the Joseph Smith Papers project, which poses unexpected challenges to learn about the world of the LDS founder. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  12/1/2020
  

  Reckoning With Slavery: What A Revolt’s Archives Tell Us About Who Owns The Past

  by Marjoleine Kars

  Researching the history of the 1763-1764 Berbice slave rebellion demonstrated that key records for understanding slavery in the Americas are held in archives in Europe and written in the language of colonial powers, making the history of enslaved people difficult to access for their present-day descendants.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/30/2020
  

  Smithsonian Archives of American Art Gathers an Oral History of 2020

  The National Archives of American Art has been moving aggressively to document artists' responses to the concurrent social traumas of 2020, including the pandemic, police violence and protests, and a tumultuous election campaign. 

• 
• 10/4/2020
  

  The Etymology of "Jazz": A Cautionary Word About Digital Sources

  by Ken Lawrence

  Digitization projects have made historical newspapers much more readily accessible, but the process admits error and historians should be cautious making bold claims based on them. 

• 
• SOURCE: YouTube
  9/29/2020
  

  Bawdy Civil War Letters, In the Style of Ken Burns

  by Katie Hemphill

  Historian Katie Hemphill's recent crash course in video editing for Zoom teaching let her fulfill a longtime goal: set the bawdiest Civil War letters she found in her research to the stirring sounds of documentary music. Content Warning: Cuss Words.

• 
• SOURCE: National Council on Public History
  9/17/2020
  

  Inside Journal of the Plague Year's COVID-19 Curatorial Collective

  by Rebecca S. Wingo

  Creating a public digital archive of the COVID pandemic isn't a simple undertaking. A public historian leading the effort discusses how it's developed and how to be involved. 

• 
• SOURCE: Muckrock
  9/16/2020
  

  Dive Into John F. Kennedy’s Daily CIA Updates

  Muckrock invites interested historians and history enthusiasts to participate in a project to make declassified Presidential intelligence briefings more widely accessible. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/4/2020
  

  A Secret Diary Chronicled the ‘Satanic World’ That Was Dachau

  For two years, a prisoner in the German concentration camp kept a journal that would later be used to convict those who had persecuted him and killed his fellow prisoners.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/6/2020
  

  ‘It is Getting Better Now’: Family Letters from the Deadly 1918 Flu Pandemic

  Americans throughout the country are climbing attic stairs, descending into dusty basements and flipping through folders in old filing cabinets to seek words of everyday wisdom from ancestors who have suffered through something like this before.

• 
• SOURCE: Yale News
  8/18/2020
  

  Alan Trachtenberg, Pioneered New Ways of Understanding American Culture

  Trachtenberg is best known as one of the most distinguished and authoritative interpreters of what photographers have shown about history through the camera lens.

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine
  8/17/2020
  

  Read Thousands of Abraham Lincoln’s Newly Transcribed Letters Online

  The missives, preserved by the Library of Congress, include notes to and from the beloved president.