As we make our brunch reservations, choose the perfect greeting card, and make the rest of our preparations for Mother’s Day this Sunday, let’s not forget the women, the mothers of our nation, who took a stand for women’s rights and blazed the trail for future movements. Men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas [...]

Today is Henry Dunant’s birthday, which is also celebrated as World Red Cross Red Crescent Day. In honor of that holiday, I thought I would mention some Red Cross records of historical interest that can be found at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland (Archives II) in Collection ANRC, Records of the American National [...]

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 second post in a three-part series. (If you missed it, the first post can be found here.) Today’s topic is paperwork.  Paperwork was a vital part of daily life at the New Orleans Custom [...]

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 [...]

This week in 1775, the battles of Lexington and Concord were fought in Massachusetts.  The Massachusetts militia and Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith’s group of British troops suffered casualties, but it is still unclear which side fired the first shot that began the American Revolution. RG 360, The Papers of the Continental Congress, compiled 1774 – [...]

Photograph caption: Albert Johnson, member of the Milk Wagon Drivers Union, at work, Duluth. From RG 69, General Records of the Workers’ Service Program, Service Division, Work Projects Administration. Not directly related to the information below; just a beautiful image. In June 1941, W. G. Campbell launched a sweeping investigation. As the Commissioner of Food [...]

In her 2005 study Drawing The Line: Nature, Hybridity and Politics in Transboundary Spaces, geographer Juliet Fall recounts a parable from a tumultuous corner of Europe: “A local tale told of a man who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, christened in Czechoslovakia, married in Hungary, had his first child in the USSR, and died [...]

In February 1963, the United Nations (UN) held the UN Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of the Less Developed Areas (UNCAST) in Geneva, Switzerland. This conference, held at the peak of the Cold War, brought together about 1,600 delegates from 96 countries, including delegations from both the West and [...]

Tomorrow we are all Irish.  So, to celebrate St. Patirck’s Day I had a look around our holdings to see how The Text Message could celebrate Eire.  As always I used our Online Public Access (OPA) system and found some expected things: Consular records in RG 84 (Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department [...]