YouTube as a Primary Source Finder

Late last week I spent a lot of time with a student who was working on her senior thesis. She was searching for primary source material relating to the Pieds Noirs – the French citizens who lived in Algeria and later fled the country en masse following the Algerian War of Independence. She was hoping, ideally, to find some interviews or autobiographies. Language wasn’t an issue – the student knows French. Geography wasn’t a problem either – we were willing to order whatever she needed from wherever it was held through interlibrary loan. We just couldn’t find what she was looking for.

Then, we tried YouTube and hit pay dirt. A simple search for Pieds Noirs in that archive gave us a result set that included broadcast interviews with those who had left Algeria, news clips describing July 1962 massacre in the city of Oran, and stories showing the subsequent the exodus of the Pieds Noirs. More importantly, some of those hits led is us to ina.fr, the website for France’s National Audiovisual Institute. That site provides visitors the opportunity to view or listen to more than 30,000 hours of audiovisual material. Our search for Pieds Noirs in that resource turned up more than 80 different clips from news organizations.

The photo above depicts a boy carrying a toy rifle as he walks with his mother past French soldiers in battle gear at the Bastille Palace in Oran, Algeria, May 4, 1962. That image comes from the photo gallery featured in the US. State Department’s America.gov website

Using Google to Shed Light on the Edgewood Arsenal Experiments

Yesterday I read a troubling story about veterans suffering from long-term health problems due to the experiments they were subjected to at Maryland’s Edgewood Arsenal.

The CNN piece details how the U.S. Military tested chemical and biological agents on human subjects from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. One of those veterans interviewed for the piece said he volunteered for the Edgewood Arsenal experiment after being told that he and others would be testing equipment, such as gas masks.

A Google search yielded a host of materials related to these experiments. I searched for Edgewood Arsenal site:.gov to limit by initial search to government agencies - sites with .gov URL suffix. I turned up, among other things, a variety of documents in the National Archives that are related to the experimentation at Edgewood, the Library of Congress’s photos depicting a variety of different operation at Edgewood, and documents such as this one from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which address possible health implications from the activities at Edgewood.

Another search, this time for Edgewood Arsenal site:.mil restrict my results set to military agencies – those with a .mil suffix. That search turned up a variety of additional material including a page produced by the U.s. Army Research, Development and

Engineering Command, devoted to the history of the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and information about the field testing of hallucinogenic agents at Edgewood Arsenal .

The photo above depicts airplane spraying of U.S. Naval officers at Edgewood. The image comes from the U.S. Military’s Force Health Protection and Readiness Program.

March 1, 1692 - The Hysteria Begins

The formal proceedings in the Salem Witchcraft hysteria began 320 years ago today,  when  Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, an Indian slave from Barbados, were charged with practicing  witchcraft. The three were examined by Magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Tituba subsequently confesses and names Goode and Osborne as her co-conspirators.

There is a wealth of primary source material related to the Salem Witch trials available online including Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project from the University of Virginia. That site provides access to a wide array of digitized materials such as court records, historical maps, and record books of Salem Village churches. In addition, The Famous American Trials website from the University of Missouri Kansas City also provides access to Salem Witch Trials resources . Among the items you’ll find there are digitized copies of arrest warrants and transcriptions of petitions for mercy from convicted witches awaiting execution.

The image above is of the painting The Trial of George Jacobs of Salem for Witchcraft by artist Tompkins Harrison Matteson. The image comes from the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division.

We're Back

I apologize for the longer-than expected hiatus. Personal and professional commitments kept me away from the blog for a time. Now, I'm back and will once again regularly post about interesting primary source collections. Do you manage such a collection or know about a site that hasn't yet been featured here? Please let me know about it.

Royal Society's historical journal archive provides access to scientific pioneers' early work

Last week, The Royal Society announced that it would provide permanent, free access to its historical journal archive.

The first edition of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions appeared in 1665 and its publication continues today. According to information provided from the Society, items available in the historical archive include Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper, writings by a young Charles Darwin and a letter from Benjamin Franklin detailing his experiments with electricity.

Users can browse through individual issues or search by date, author, or keyword. The image above, a Currier & Ives print of Franklin’s kite experiment, comes from the Library of Congress.