Though our research rooms remain closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, National Archives staff have been diligently working from home to make records more accessible to the public. In this vein, Still Picture staff have been converting finding aids into online catalog descriptions. Making descriptions searchable via the catalog will ultimately help researchers locate and … Continue reading An Update on Still Picture Catalog Additions

75 years ago, in August 1945, the United States dropped the first and last atomic bombs used in warfare. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15 AM on August 6th, and the second bomb was dropped over Nagasaki on August 9th at 11:02 AM. Whether or not the atomic bombs should have been … Continue reading Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Friday, August 14th, marks the 75th anniversary of the surrender of the Empire of Japan, ending the Second World War. To commemorate this event, the National Archives Moving Image and Sound Branch would like to present films from our holdings documenting the tremendous moment in world history. After the surrender of German forces on the … Continue reading VJ-Day 75th Anniversary

The RG 241: Restored Patents (NAID 305885) are finally here and available for viewing and download via the National Archives catalog! In addition to containing some very detailed and colorful images, this series is particularly interesting because of its unique background. In 1836, the Patent Office was being housed in the Blodget Hotel in Washington, … Continue reading RG 241: Restored Patents Now Fully Digitized and Available Online!

When America entered World War I in 1917, the American Library Association decided to take part in the war effort by establishing the Library War Service. Its purpose was to provide library services to American soldiers in training camps and overseas. The Association raised more than seven million dollars from donations, built 36 library camps, … Continue reading Wartime Reading: The Library War Service

Though the United States Coast Guard officially took on that name in 1915, its origin dates back over 230 years ago. In August 1790, what became known as the United States Revenue Cutter Service was established under the Treasury Department to assist with customs enforcement. The Revenue Cutter Service merged with the U.S. Life-Saving Service … Continue reading Lantern Slides of the Revenue Cutter Service, 1900-1915

Why We Fight stands among the most ambitious and successful film projects ever undertaken by the United States government. Over the course of seven films, released from 1942 to 1945, director Frank Capra and his team argued forcefully for American service-people and civilians to unite in the massive labor of defeating the Axis Powers and … Continue reading Why We Fight: Prelude to War, America’s Crash History Lesson

In the Still Picture Branch, we aim to cultivate a habitat that promotes access to the unique images in our custody. Today, I’m highlighting series 22-DP: Photographs from the National Digital Library, ca. 1998 – 2011, a collection of born-digital images and digital reproductions of analog photographs, brought to us by the U.S. Fish and … Continue reading Into the Wild

Pulitzer Prize winning photo journalist John H. White is well-known for his photographs of life in the city of Chicago, IL, particularly African American life, during the early 1970s. At the time, White was with the Chicago Daily News working for the federal government, photographing for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) DOCUMERICA project. DOCUMERICA was … Continue reading Spotlight Photographer – John H. White

While we frequently share interesting early maps from the Cartographic Branch holdings, today we wanted to focus on some of Cartographic's more recent maps. The RG 263 CIA Published Maps (also called the CIA Numbered Maps or Numerical Series) is made up of over 22,000 declassified maps. These maps date primarily from the 1940s to … Continue reading RG 263 CIA Published Maps: A Digitization Project In Progress

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