Today marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a pivotal day in WWII where US troops and Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy. Pictured here is a view of the Normandy beachhead, taken one week after D-Day by LIFE photographer Frank Scherschel and published in the June 26, 1944 issue. According to LIFE, “A Week after first landings, the Normandy beachhead had changed from a battlefield to a gigantic port area. Allies had captured small ports like Ouistreham and Isigny, but the beach was still the best place to land reinforcements, equipment and supplies.” (Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #DDay #DDay75 https://www.instagram.com/p/ByX1_m-jnaN/?igshid=18376alp1bmls
Strange Lights Over Ventura County
When we think of unidentified flying objects or U. F. O.’s, we think of space and of course NASA. The Navy is not the first government agency you would think of when it came to U. F. O.’s. At The National Archives at Riverside in our Naval records there is a U. F. O. report from the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, California. This is a report in which two police officers from two different cities in Ventura county reported the same sighting to the Navy. Officer Orville Clinton of Fillmore reported to see four round silvery objects in the sky in the vicinity of the San Cayetano mountains heading north. As you can see from this report, about the same time in Santa Paula (which is just north of Fillmore) Police Sergeant D. A. Kelly saw the same four objects in the sky.
We have a subscription service to Fold3.com, which has the records of an Air Force program called Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book was created to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects between 1945 to 1969. There is a report of this sighting in Project Blue Book and here is the link to that report. What is interesting about the Project Blue Book report is the Air Force found out about this incident through the local newspaper. The Project Blue Book report is very poor and they were waiting on the Navy to provide them with more details–which did not seem to show up. It seems the Navy was unaware of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. At least the eyewitness accounts have been found at The National Archives at Riverside and if you are interested in viewing the originals or to view Project Blue Book on Fold3.com for free please come in for a visit.
Excerpted from: “D-Day to D plus 3.” Series: Moving Images Relating to Military Activities, 1947 - 1964. Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 - 1985.
Source: youtube.com
D-Day’s Top Secret Map
The night before the invasion — dubbed Operation Overlord — Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, British General Bernard Montgomery and other leaders gathered in Portsmouth, a port city on the English Channel, for a last briefing on everything from the weather to the terrain. One of the key presenters was U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Charles Lee Burwell, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate who, while being “scared to death,” nonetheless delivered a short talk on the tides and the thousands of star-shaped steel barbs called “Czech hedgehogs” that the Germans had dropped just offshore to wreck landing crafts.
The map Burwell and others were using for this top-level briefing was spectacular: a one-of-kind, three-dimensional model of Utah Beach, the code name for beaches near Pouppeville, La Madeleine, and Manche, France. The top-secret model, made of rubber on two 4×4 sections, depicted the beach and the interior pastures sectioned off by those hedgerows, a geographic feature that obstructed lines of sight and created conditions for deadly, close-quarter combat. Later that night, Burwell took the model aboard transport ships, showing the commanders and troops the same raised maps of the terrain they would see for the first time in a few hours.
Source: blogs.loc.gov
In honor of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we’re going behind-the-scenes with Billy Wade, Kelsey Noel, and Kevin Quinn of the Still Pictures Branch at the National Archives in College Park, MD. They’ll be sharing original photographs related to D-Day and Operation Overload. Tune in at noon EDT on June 6 for this special Facebook Live.
Ever wonder how old and damaged film is converted into digital files ready for restoration? For the scoop, we asked Criss Austin, a motion picture preservation specialist with the National Archives and Records Administration who transferred all 15 hours of William Wyler’s 16mm Memphis Belle film footage to 4K for the World War II documentary The Cold Blue, which premieres June 6 on HBO.
On June 6, 1944, he was in France not to kill but to rescue. As a medical technician, he was to treat the wounded as the world’s largest ever seaborne invasion unfolded.
One of 175 Native Americans who landed in Normandy that day, he ran across the beach dozens of times, dragging men out of the surf and patching up their wounds under heavy fire — actions for which he was awarded a Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, and France’s Legion d’Honneur.
The digital efforts include an interactive Story Map, “D-Day Journeys: Personal Geographies of D-Day,” and a new online website feature, “D-Day: 75th Anniversary.”
The Story Map draws from VHP collections, and chronicles the individual journeys of four veterans who took part in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944: Preston Earl Bagent, Robert Harlan Horr, John William Boehne III and Edward Duncan Cameron.
It combines text, images and multimedia content in an online application for an immersive user experience that allows map-based discovery through geographic information system technology, commonly referred to as GIS. This Story Map includes archival source materials ranging from ticket stubs to sketches, military orders, diaries, memoirs and photographs.
An “initial development of a satisfactory classification scheme,” writes Battle, was first undertaken by four women on the staff of the Howard University Library: Lula V. Allen, Edith Brown, Lula E. Conner and Rosa C. Hershaw. The idea was to prioritize the scholarly and intellectual significance and coherence of materials that had been marginalized by Eurocentric conceptions of knowledge and knowledge production. These women paved the way for Dorothy Porter’s new system, which departed from the prevailing catalog classifications in important ways.
All of the libraries that Porter consulted for guidance relied on the Dewey Decimal Classification. “Now in [that] system, they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization,” she explained in her oral history. In many “white libraries,” she continued, “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”
We’re traveling to New York City this #TransitTuesday to share an early 20th century photograph from the Warren Street express station, located at the intersection of Warren and Greenwich in Lower Manhattan. The station, which was built on February 14, 1870 and closed on June 11, 1940, served the now demolished IRT Ninth Avenue Line in the New York City Subway System.
This photograph was captured in 1910 for the New York City advertising agency Ward and Gow, in order to document their work. Ward and Gow is credited as one of the first firms to systematize advertising in the New York subway and elevated marketplace. Founded in 1899 by William Gow and Artemas Ward, a former ad manager for Enoch Morgan’s Sons Sapolio soap, the company worked as a syndicate of contractors in ten cities, selling streetcar advertising space at a standardized rate and terms. Ward & Gow attracted clients with the promise that they could place advertisements for national brands in thousands of streetcars and transit stations in cities nationwide with just a single contract. Ward & Gow’s business also grew to encompass monopoly control over vending machines and newsstands on elevated railway and subway platforms in New York City, as well as booking agent services for performers in the tourist destinations of Brighton Beach and Coney Island, where they also operated concession stands. The partnership was later dissolved in 1907 under poor terms, and Ward & Gow became Artemas Ward, Incorporated.
To view more photographs from the Hagley Library’s Ward and Gow elevated railway and subway advertising album (Acc.1995.243), click here to visit its page in our Digital Archive.
The 378,082 images in the collection fill 375 volumes and cover World War I, women’s suffrage, the Roaring ’20s, the Jazz Age and the stock market crashes of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression. Written in the news agency’s terse style, the dispatches show the immediacy of news as it broke, in the era in which it was lived.
Here Grows New York visually animates the development of this city’s street grid and infrastructure systems from 1609 to the present day, using geo-referenced road network data, historic maps, and geological surveys. The resulting short film presents a series of “cartographic snapshots” of the built-up area at intervals of every 20-30 years in the city’s history. This process highlights the organic spurts of growth and movement that typify New York’s and most cities’ development through time. The result is an abstract representation of urbanism.
It’s World Book and Copyright Day; may all your reading chairs be comfy, and all your rooms delightfully air cooled.
This 1933 photograph taken in Washington, D.C. is part of the Hagley Library’s collection of G. C. Murphy Company store windows and interior photographs (Accession 1995.247). You can view more items from this collection now by visiting its page in our Digital Archives.
We love the sign that reads “BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS” and that’s our new motto.
Thanos
Thanos is definitely not our favorite. With his enhanced strength and unyielding desire for his idea of balance, Thanos keeps his eyes set on keeping things organized. Thanos, instead of wiping out half of the population, might we suggest cleaning out your garage instead? The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up will be able to help you with that.
Superheroes - and our love for stories about them - are “culturally valuable because they help us better understand our society."
So, uh. Who else has tickets to see Endgame multiple times in the first week?
The National Archives hired Wolfe in 1961 on a temporary basis to review and describe Berlin Document Center microfilm. The following year the Archives hired him permanently, this time as a subject matter expert on the Captured German Records.
Thus began his long and industrious career at the National Archives as the go-to guy on Holocaust, Nazi-era, and postwar military government records for a generation of historians.
