“This is an American soldier – he is your friend.”  So read the leaflet prepared by the United States for use in Vietnam.  Underneath that caption, it pictured several American infantrymen advancing into combat. The time, however, was not the 1960s; it was mid-1945 and World War II in the Pacific was drawing to a [...]

Today’s post is written by Katie Hines, a processing archivist with military records in College Park. In December 1969, six-year-old Shannon Hensley wrote to Captain William Q. Sinnott, commanding officer of the 363rd Transportation Company, 92nd Battalion, 80th General Support Group, Da Nang, requesting him to allow her daddy to return home for Christmas. Her [...]

For today’s post we are thrilled to open our blog space to NARA’s Wikipedian-in-Residence, Dominic McDevitt-Parks. Everyone knows about Wikipedia (though there is certainly a lot of room for clarification of how it works in practice and why it is valuable for public history), so for this first post, I want to spotlight Wikisource, a [...]

Today’s post is written by Joe Gillette, a processing archivist at Archives II. During the Vietnam War, American army commands maintained daily journals documenting assorted events. Most entries were relatively mundane, documenting staff meetings, personnel travel, incoming or outgoing messages, and the like. Some were more administratively significant, such as changes in command, the awarding [...]