Prologue: Pieces of History

Once upon a time, space was quiet. This was before satellites had cluttered the orbit of the earth, beaming TV shows and text messages and GPS coordinates. Before 1958, space was very quiet. On December 18, 1958, the Air Force placed the first communications satellite, a Project SCORE relay vehicle, into orbit. And then, on [...]

When Harry S. Truman Library Director Mike Devine flew to Seoul, South Korea, the last thing he expected to see was an enormous outdoor exhibit featuring photos from the holdings of the National Archives. “In the last decade or so, we’ve had quite a number of researchers from Korea to the Truman Library to copy [...]

This Sunday is the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. To commemorate the event, the National Archives is displaying a program from the march in the East Rotunda Gallery and screening The March on August 27 and 28. But if you are not in Washington, DC, you can still watch the entire film on our YouTube [...]

Americans often associate the month of August with family vacations and the summer heat, but that was not the case in 1961. Fifty years ago this month, a Cold War chill filled the air as construction began on the Berlin Wall. After the end of World War II, the United States, Great Britain, France, and the [...]

Sometimes sharing a good meal is the best way to resolve the differences you may have with another. For the United States and China, this strategy helped normalize relations during the peak of the Cold War. Today, the U.S. and China share a public relationship, but after Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist Party founded the People’s [...]