In honor of the holiday season, the Unwritten Record presents Navy, Army, Marine, and Air Force (AAF) photographs that highlight the various ways in which service members spent Christmas between the years 1941 and 1944. Record Group 80: General Records of the Department of the Navy Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the … Continue reading Spotlight: Christmas During WWII
Co-Authored by Beth Fortson and Corbin Apkin. You wake up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and realize that you have forgotten to get a gift for your sister's brand new "He's Totally The One" boyfriend. You get a text from your old college roommate two days before your New Years Party … Continue reading Spotlight: Last Minute Holiday Gifts!
December 15th marks the anniversary of the first of several major fires to impact the United States Patent Office. In 1836, the Patent Office was being housed in the Blodget Hotel in Washington, D.C. Employees of the patent office stored firewood in the basement near where they also disposed of hot ashes and, during the … Continue reading Recalling the Devastating Patent Office Fire of 1836
Is Nitrate Film Really Dangerous? Nitrate film is a material we don’t often encounter at the National Archives for obvious reasons. After the devastating 1978 nitrate vault fire, the agency quickly copied any remaining nitrate to acetate or polyester safety film and disposed of the original reels. When we do come across a reel in … Continue reading Film Preservation 101: Is Nitrate Film Really Dangerous?
This post was written by Andrew Smith and first posted to the National Archives Internal Collaboration Network. Andrew was a records analyst at NARA before departing for another agency. Explosions at the Federal Center Around noon on December 7, 1978, staff of the National Archives and Records Service (NARS) were eating lunch inside the offices … Continue reading Disaster Strikes the National Archives: The 1978 Nitrate Vault Fire
Former President George Herbert Walker Bush passed away on November 30, 2018 at the age of 94. At the time of his passing, President Bush had lived longer than any previous president. George H.W. Bush served as the 41st President of the United States from 1989 to 1993 and also held the position of Vice … Continue reading Remembering President George Herbert Walker Bush
Five days before Thanksgiving 1943, American forces bombarded a tiny, Japanese-held island in the Tarawa Atoll. Eighteen thousand Marines would land on the shores of Betio, and over 1,000 would lose their lives there. On November 23rd, the United States claimed victory. Recording the Battle Three men of the 2nd Marine Division landed on Betio … Continue reading “The Camera Tells the Truth”: Camera Rolls from the Battle of Tarawa
You may have heard of World War II Coast Guard hero, Sinbad the sailor dog. Sinbad (c.1937 – 1951) is famous for being the mascot of the USCGC Campbell, and was classified as a non-commissioned officer – “Chief Dog”. “Sinbad is a fighting dog from a fighting ship. Sinbad is the mascot of the … Continue reading The Further Adventures of Sinbad
The hard-working canine mascots of the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II tried their best to be Good Boys….but sometimes a dog’s just got to be bad. As the Still Picture Branch prepares the digitized images from the U.S. Coast Guard Series “Activities, Facilities and Personalities” for upload into the catalog, we noticed that … Continue reading Bad Boys
The NASA Science and Engineering Series (255-SE) consists of footage of experiments and events associated with various programs including Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. NARA staff have processed 5,848 film reels so far. Fortuitously, most of the films came to us labeled with excellent metadata including title, date, and location, or even with paper scene lists. … Continue reading Big Shot 2: A Shiny Space Balloon
