As Black History Month draws to a close, nothing illustrates the great progress of the civil rights movement more than a glimpse at a bleaker era. The work we do every day at the National Archives is for the express purpose of preserving historical context, even the disturbing parts, as exemplified in today’s post, written by [...]

Today’s post is by Alan Walker, a processing archivist at Archives II. As a kid I was captivated by the sinking of the RMS Titanic. The drama of such a man-made behemoth falling victim to an iceberg and the scope of the human tragedy conspired to trigger the imaginations of this impressionable youth. I read [...]

  Today’s post is written by Liz Caringola, who works on our ancestry.com digitization project.   February 22, 2012, marks the 25th anniversary of the death of American pop artist Andy Warhol.  The Pittsburgh native rose to fame in the 1960s as one of the most prominent members of the American pop art movement.  He [...]

Today’s post is written by  Aaron Mannes, a citizen researcher from the University of Maryland’s Laboratory of Computational Cultural Dynamics. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy who is writing a dissertation on the national security role of the vice president.  If you have a lot of time [...]

Presidents Day is celebrated in honor of the birthday of our first president, George Washington, who was born February 22nd.  But what if he was not actually the first President of the nation? What if we celebrated this holiday in April instead?  When all of the states ratified the Articles of Confederation in 1781, they [...]

Given the recent appearance of the development company Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) in the news regarding the case of Alan Gross, the development worker who was jailed in Cuba in 2009 accused of working for U.S. intelligence services, I thought it would be worthwhile to mention that records relating to development projects of DAI can [...]

As 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, the Reference staff at Archives 1 want to provide a glimpse of some of the series that we have in our custody relating to this conflict.  The following list may assist researchers who want to locate records pertaining to the War of 1812.  Please note that this list [...]

In June 1954, Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was overthrown in a coup that was orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and carried out by the Guatemalan exile Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Arbenz was targeted in large part because of his land reform policies that affected U.S. companies, namely the United Fruit Company. There [...]

Last time I wrote here on the Text Message blog, I had written about the Old Georgetown Act Numbered Case Files (ARC 559486), found in Record Group 66, Records of the Commission of Fine Arts, and highlighted some photographs from the 1950s. The Case Files, show what the area of Georgetown, a neighborhood in Washington, [...]

Today’s post is written by Alan Walker, a processing archivist in Research Services. Earlier I described to you the Overseas Mission records of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and our project to transform them from the unfortunate and inaccessible state in which they arrived at Archives II. These records have proven a time-consuming challenge for [...]