Archival Research Catalog (ARC)

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ARC offers more than 78,000 digital government resources. Materials include textual records, photographs, maps, architectural drawings, artifacts, sound recordings, and motion pictures dating from the colonial period to the recent past. ARC includes items on presidents, the military, war, immigration, Japanese-American internment, slavery, science, prisons, federal programs, the environment, the National Park Service, foreign affairs, civil rights, African Americans, and American Indians.

To begin a search, click on the yellow "search" button near the top left of the ARC webpage. The search engine is clearly organized and invites queries on specific historical materials or general themes. To access digitized materials only, check the box marked "Descriptions of Archival Materials linked to digital copies." The site continues to expand, though, as it stands, it provides an exceptional collection of government material.

Nazi Technology

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Gwen Wright of PBS's History Detectives introduces Operation Paperclip, which, at the end of World War II, brought Nazi scientists to work for the U.S. Many of the CIA documents related to this project remain classified, despite demands for their release.

Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920

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These published works, manuscripts, images, and motion picture footage address the formation of the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage. Materials include 62 books and pamphlets, 140 Federal statutes and Congressional resolutions, 34 additional legislative documents, and excerpts from the Congressional Globe and the Congressional Record. An additional 360 presidential proclamations, 170 prints and photographs, two historic manuscripts, and two motion pictures are available.

Materials include Alfred Bierstadt paintings, period travel literature, a photographic record of Yosemite, and Congressional acts regarding conservation and the establishment of national parks. An annotated chronology discusses events in the development of the conservation movement with links to pertinent documents and images.

Historic Government Publications from World War II: A Digital Library

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Image, A Pocket Guide to Hawaii, R. Bach, 1945, Historic Government Publications
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More than 300 U.S. government publications from World War II have been digitized for this site, an ongoing project that plans to add another 200 documents.

Materials include pamphlets and books emphasizing home front issues, such as air raids, preservation, child labor, and victory farms. All materials are searchable by title, author, subject, and keyword. Browsing is also available.

A companion collection of photographs, the "Melvin C. Shaffer Collection," depicts the home front situation in Germany, North Africa, Italy, and Southern France from 1943 to 1945. Shaffer was a U.S. Army medical photographer assigned to document the medical history of the war through major campaigns. Shafer took the photographs on this site—totaling approximately 340—unofficially with the goal of recording the war's impact on civilians.

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture

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Currently this website presents full-text, searchable facsimiles of 1,850 monographs and 288 journal volumes related to agriculture in the U.S. All were published between 1806 and 1989. Evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences. Fields of study covered include agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, forestry, nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.

Types of materials include memoirs and transactions of early agricultural societies, newspapers, almanacs, agricultural periodicals, governmental publications, and archives of families, communities, and corporations. Users can search by author, title, subject, or keyword, then access the title page, table of contents, index, or pages of the text. These resources are valuable for studying the profound social, cultural, and economic effects of shifts in the history of American farming.

Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security

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These more than 350 recently declassified documents from archives of former Warsaw Pact countries and the U.S. reveal previously hidden aspects of Cold War military strategy. The project offers documents and accompanying analyses in six categories: Warsaw Pact records; Warsaw Pact war plans; NATO records (U.S. and British); national perspectives (Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, China, and Poland); crises (Berlin and Libya); and intelligence.

The website also provides 13 oral history interviews with former officials, including two Eisenhower administration officers involved with NATO planning and nuclear weapons policies. Documents reveal a 1964 Warsaw Pact war plan for using nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike against NATO forces and a 1965 Hungarian Army exercise detailing the targeted destruction of Western cities, including Vienna, Munich, Verona, and Vicenza. A 30-page survey article assesses the new history written since the release of recent documents.