Today’s post is by National Archives Volunteer Bill Nigh. This is the sequel to his earlier post. _____   In my first post, I briefly described the volunteer project based on the records of the U.S. Secret Service  (Record Group 87).  I stated that this organization began its presidential security mission following a presidential assassination, but its [...]

Our guest blogger today is DeAnne Blanton, reference archivist at Archives I. The Archives I Reference Section is pleased to announce our in-house digitization project in honor of the Civil War sesquicentennial.  During the course of the next five years or so, the 2,750 volumes comprising the Collected Record Books of Various Executive, Legislative, and [...]

Today’s post is written by Stephanie Stegman, the special media projects volunteer at the National Archives at Fort Worth. This is the third post in a three-part series. (If you missed them,  follow these links to the first and second  posts.) Cargo – it was the main business of the New Orleans Custom House.  After the [...]

Today’s post is written by Stephanie Stegman, the special media projects volunteer at the National Archives at Fort Worth. This is the first post in a three-part series. Electoral projections are a popular topic these days, and everyone has an opinion.  In July 1860, two engineers in Louisiana exchanged their predictions on the upcoming presidential [...]

Many of our NARA colleagues are historians and researchers themselves. In this post, written by Lopez Matthews, we have the opportunity to learn about a few current research projects our staff members are undertaking. If you’d like more information on any of these projects, leave a note in the comments and we’ll make sure the [...]

Today’s post was written by Katy Berube, who spent her summer interning in textual processing. A U.S. President’s signature, Civil War veterans, and a 19th Century labor strike…oh my!  Box 273 of the Appointment Files for Judicial Districts 1853-1905 (National Archives Identifier 734590) was the last box I examined for possible records of interest to digitize [...]

Our guest blogger today is Dennis Edelin, Chief, Forms Section at Archives I. On September 26, 2011, the National Archives began a preservation re-boxing project.  The purpose of the project is to re-box the nearly 900,000 Solider Certificate (“SC”) Civil War and Later pension application files in our custody.  Please note, these records are not leaving [...]

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 [...]