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Posted by: Megan Harris
Maybe it was the eyes that you first noticed when you glanced at the portrait above: they are a vivid, piercing blue. Then, maybe you looked at the caption, and you realized that those eyes were painted more than 70 years ago, in 1944. Perhaps if you looked closely, you noticed the location of the …
Posted in: Veterans History Project, World War II
Posted by: Megan Harris
On a cool, cloudy morning about a month ago, my colleague Tamika Brown and I stood in the midst of a massive tent city in Seaside, California. The air smelled of the Pacific Ocean, and also of smoke, thanks to the enormous wildfire burning in nearby Big Sur. Row after row of khaki-colored tents stretched …
Posted in: Iraq War, Oral History, Veterans History Project, Vietnam War, World War II
Posted by: Megan Harris
I never had a childhood hero, a celebrity or historic figure or famous athlete whom I looked up to above all others. To this day, it’s my friends and family whom I admire the most and try to emulate. That’s why, when someone asked me recently about a leader I admire, at first, the question …
Posted in: Iraq War, LGBT Pride Month, LGBTQ, Oral History, Photographs, Veterans History Project, Vietnam War, World War II
Posted by: Megan Harris
The following is the second part of a two-part blog post on the George Pearcy and Robert Augur Veterans History Project (VHP) collections—you can read Part One here. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pearcy: I am a friend of your son George and am one of those who have been liberated from the hands of the …
Posted in: Acquisitions, Veterans History Project, World War II
Posted by: Megan Harris
Do you believe in fate? If not, the story of a new Veterans History Project (VHP) acquisition may change your mind… As readers of Folklife Today may recall, this past February, VHP archivist Rachel Telford wrote a blog post about the newly received George Washington Pearcy collection. At the time of the donation, the …
Posted in: Acquisitions, Veterans History Project, World War II
Posted by: Megan Harris
The following is a guest post by Christopher Pohlhaus, IT (Multi-media) Specialist for the Digital Scan Center, Library of Congress. Of the more than 100,000 collections that are part of the Veterans History Project, approximately 20% are digitized and available online. For those collections that are presented on the Veterans History Project (VHP) website, the …
Posted in: Veterans History Project, World War I
Posted by: Megan Harris
One look at Irving Greenwald’s diary is all it takes to bring to mind the old adage “good things come in small packages.” This World War I diary, written by Private Irving Greenwald from December 1917 to January 1919, was donated to the Veterans History Project (VHP) in December 2015 by his family. Original World …
Posted in: Acquisitions, World War I
Posted by: Megan Harris
The following is a guest post by Andrew Cassidy-Amstutz, archivist for the Veterans History Project. In our world of daily Facebook status updates and trending Twitter hashtags, an annotated map by Homer Bluford Clonts caught my eye as an example of how service members during World War II recorded their daily thoughts and activities in …
Posted in: Acquisitions, Veterans History Project, World War II
Posted by: Megan Harris
“I’ve been told by older veterans they had hangovers that lasted longer than that war.”—Dawn Stratton As Marine Corps Captain Dawn Stratton’s comment in her Veterans History Project (VHP) oral history makes clear, the Persian Gulf War—which took place from August 1990 to the end of February 1991—was a short one, lasting as long in …
Posted in: Oral History, Veterans History Project