48 years ago today at 12:30 PM Central Standard Time, President John F. Kennedy was shot while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas.   Half an hour later, the President was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital. The National Archives has custody of records  and artifacts relating to President Kennedy’s assassination and the investigation conducted by [...]

Today is America Recycles Day, a day dedicated to encouraging Americans to recycle and buy recycled products.  To show that recycling isn’t a load of rubbish, today’s Tag It Tuesday challenge is to tag our records related to recycling. Tag our digitized recycling records here.  Here are a few of our favorites – If disco wasn’t [...]

Friday marks the annual observance of Veterans Day, a day on which we honor the millions of brave men and women who have served in the Armed Forces.  This Tag It Tuesday, in tribute to our military veterans, we’re asking you to tag records in the Online Public Access (OPA) that relate to veterans and the military.   [...]

Students, do you ever look at the environment around you, and wonder about what it used to look like or what it will look like in the next few decades?  Are you interested in doing something constructive to help raise awareness for environmental issues?  Then we have the perfect contest for you!  The National Archives [...]

On this day 141 years ago, the forerunner of today’s National Weather Service – the Signal Service Corps’ Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce – made its first meteorological observations and reports and the weather hasn’t been the same since. “Weather” you like singing in the rain, chasing storms, or checking the daily [...]

We’re excited to kick off Tag It Tuesday! In this new weekly feature we’ll be highlighting content from our online catalog that we invite you to tag. Curious about what tagging means and how you can get involved? Check out our previous blog post, in which we introduced the Online Public Access catalog’s new feature [...]

As part of our open government initiatives, the National Archives has begun to share applications developed in-house on GitHub, a social coding platform.  GitHub is a service used by software developers to share and collaborate on software development projects and many open source development projects. Over the last year and a half, our Digitization Services [...]

The National Archives just joined iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store giving users public access to thousands of free lectures, videos, books and podcasts from learning institutions all over the world.  If you already have iTunes on your iPhone, iPad, iPod, or computer, you can search for “National Archives” on iTunes U to [...]

This Sunday will mark the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  As we remember the events of that day, the George W. Bush Presidential Library has posted more than 150 photos from their collection on Flickr.  The photos from September and October 2001 offer a glimpse into the world of President Bush [...]

A few weeks ago on The Text Message, I introduced Wikimedia’s Wikisource project to you. A sister project of Wikipedia, Wikisource is a free repository of primary-source texts which are transcribed, proofread, and arranged—like Wikipedia—collaboratively by a community of online volunteers. It is my pleasure to announce that, since August 15, Wikimedia’s presence now extends [...]