Prologue: Pieces of History

The John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is located in Boston. The staff collect, preserve, and make publicly available over 48 million items related to the 35th President. These records include not only JFK’s writings and belongings, but also records of some of his family members, his administration officials, and other individuals and organizations.

The permanent exhibits include materials from his 1960 Presidential campaign against then-Vice President Richard Nixon; the “Space Race” exhibit, featuring the Freedom 7 space capsule; a collection of Kennedy’s personal effects from the Oval Office; and video samples of the President’s televised press conferences—Kennedy used television extensively  to communicate with his constituents.

If you love Jackie Kennedy’s iconic style, check out the permanent exhibit “First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy” on her involvement in American arts and culture. The library also holds many of Jackie Kennedy’s clothes, photos of which are online.

Genealogists might enjoy the fascinating history of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families, which is on permanent display with a collection of family heirlooms, artifacts, and photographs.

The library holds the world’s largest collection of Ernest Hemingway archival materials. President Kennedy was … [ Read all ]

It’s always exciting to uncover a new piece of history, and even more exciting to discover a whole new treasure trove of thousands of pieces of history. Today the John F. Kennedy Library is launching a new Digital Archives that contains over 200,000 digitized documents; 300 reels of audiotape containing over 1,200 individual recordings of telephone conversations, speeches, and meetings; 300 museum artifacts; 72 reels of moving images; and 1,500 photos.

You can peruse the drafts of every speech delivered by the President, thousands of official White House photographs, audio of all of President Kennedy’s speeches, and video of press conferences during his years in office. And tags and categories help you find related records among all types of media.

For example, I browsed photographs of President Kennedy to find an illustration for this post, and the above picture caught my eye. After calling up the full record, I selected “Related Records” and was led to links to audio and video recordings of the September 12, 1962, speech at Rice University and to marked drafts and the reading copy of the speech.

Further clicks on the subject categories takes you to even more—you can read the memos between President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson about the space race with the Soviet Union, listen to JFK’s secretly taped conversations with the head of NASA, and … [ Read all ]