National Archives Quotes

A friend of mine was in a taxi in Washington, D.C., going slowly past the National Archives, when he noticed the words on the cornerstone of the building: “The past is prologue.” He read them out loud to the taxi driver and said, “What do you think that means, ‘The past is prologue’?” The taxi driver said, “I think it means, ‘Man, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

But that’s a girl’s right—isn’t it? To cry sometimes for no reason? Really, when you think about it, that ought to be in the Constitution. Maybe I’ll break into the National Archives sometime and write that in. Bex

The problem with people was that everyone saw other nations from far away. Saw them as big mountainous blobs. Foreigners. Strange. Got it. Up close, it was hard to see people that way. Each was so distinctive.

Jasnah raised an eyebrow. “You will find wise men in any religion, Shallan, and good men in every nation. Those who truly seek wisdom are those who will acknowledge the virtue in their adversaries and who will learn from those who disabuse them of error. All others—heretic, Vorin, Ysperist, or Maakian—are equally closed-minded.

Before the coast guard sent the FBI a decrypt, the coast guard clerks typed “SIS Dupe” at the bottom of the sheet, beneath the line that said “CG Translation” and “CG Decryption.” These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.

My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge.

In fact, poetry has always been like archives that peoples have continually used to serve their feelings, thoughts, national identities and cultures, and it has served as a factor uniting different historical periods. Those who had lost contact with their past for a certain period found and experienced the expression of their own selves in poetry, and the were able to see their history as a whole in it.

He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.” As this aide saw it, there has been a silent understanding within the national security community that diplomatic, military, and intelligence officers were doing the right thing, quietly risking their lives to protect the American way of life. This aide saw Trump’s move against Brennan as one of the first steps of undercutting America’s democratic system of government and the belief system upon which it was founded. According to the aide, it was the president declaring, “It’s not okay to disagree with me. I can remove you from this work and your career. “If he wanted to, how far could he push this?” this aide asked. “Look back. Did people in the 1930s in Germany know when the government started to turn on them? Most Americans are more worried about who is going to win on America’s Got Talent and what the traffic is going to be like on I-95. They aren’t watching this closely. “I like to believe [Trump] is too self-engrossed, too incompetent and disorganized to get us to 1930,” this aide added. “But he has moved the bar. And another president that comes after him can move it a little farther. The time is coming. Our nation will be tested. Every nation is. Rome fell, remember. He is opening up vulnerabilities for this to happen. That is my fear.” —

 ‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.

Looking back, the damage that had been done to American democracy by the Trump administration was almost incalculable. It was as if someone had lifted the Constitution out of its bulletproof, moisture-controlled sealed case in the Rotunda of the National Archives and edited it with a Sharpie. First

In October 2014 files released from the National Archives revealed that MI5 ‘opened personal files on the popular historian A. J. P. Taylor, the writer Iris Murdoch and the moral philosopher Mary Warnock after they and [Christopher] Hill signed a letter supporting a march against the nuclear bomb in 1959’.

The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.

We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.

Border to border, from sea to shining sea, police cars and other government vehicles had for some time been equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems that recorded the numbers of the vehicles around them, whether parked or in motion, transmitting them 24/7 to regional archives, which in turn shared the information with the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence troves in its million-square-foot Utah Data Center.

This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To

A table made in April 1918 by Robert Wilton for the G-2 Section (Military Intelligence of the U. S. Army), shows that at the time of the Russian Revolution: there were 384 commissars (running Russia), including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinese, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number 264 had come to Russia from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government." (War Records Division of the National Archives. Record Group 120: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces.) Not even Russian Jews, but New York Jews!

He’d studied its history and knew about its expansive tradition of writers, poets and composers, most dating back to the Middle Ages. But yesterday he’d painfully watched while the entire national archive had been cleared. The loss of so much knowledge was incalculable, but a United Nations protest had been swiftly rebuked by Sharma. Now Malone’s stomach turned. It was like friends were burning below. He was a confirmed bibliophile. Books meant something to him. His home back in Atlanta overflowed with them. He loved everything about them, and many times lingered a day or two after an assignment to peruse rare-book shops.

Every vehicle with a GPS is tracked by satellite, and the history of its travels is archived in the million-square-foot Utah Data Center of the National Security Agency, in its ever-growing cloud. The NSA is a jealous guardian of the knowledge that it has acquired, and police agencies do not have routine access to it.

Works of art were trophies that glorified leaders and the nation. Art would also reflect and legitimize the National Socialist ideals and the new human being. But the actual ideology would be underpinned by books and archives. The future would be built by a control of memory and history, on the basis of the written word. The

Hundreds of political assassinations related to minority races, labor leaders and spokesmen against fascism have taken place in the U.S. since World War II. In 1963, the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas allowed our own hidden, clandestine government to maintain control. The candidate for President in 1968, Robert Kennedy, was murdered by the same people on the night of his victory in the primaries. The judiciary, including the Supreme Court, have supported secret government by lending its authority to the concealment of conspiracies to murder our leaders. They refuse to examine documents that exist, allow truth to remain locked in the National Archives to perpetuate the “national security” lie.

The Atonist nobility knew it was impossible to organize and control a worldwide empire from Britain. The British Isles were geographically too far West for effective management. In order to be closer to the “markets,” the Atonist corporate executives coveted Rome. Additionally, by way of their armed Templar branch and incessant murderous “Crusades,” they succeeded making inroads further east. Their double-headed eagle of control reigned over Eastern and Western hemispheres. The seats of Druidic learning once existed in the majority of lands, and so the Atonist or Christian system spread out in similar fashion. Its agents were sent from Britain and Rome to many a region and for many a dark purpose. To this very day, the nobility of Europe and the east are controlled from London and Rome. Nothing has changed when it comes to the dominion of Aton. As Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe have proven, the Culdean monks, of whom we write, had been hired for generations as tutors to elite families throughout Europe. In their book The Knights Templar Revealed, the authors highlight the role played by Culdean adepts tutoring the super-wealthy and influential Catholic dynasties of Burgundy, Champagne and Lorraine, France. Research into the Templars and their affiliated “Salt Line” dynasties reveals that the seven great Crusades were not instigated and participated in for the reasons mentioned in most official history books. As we show here, the Templars were the military wing of British and European Atonists. It was their job to conquer lands, slaughter rivals and rebuild the so-called “Temple of Solomon” or, more correctly, Akhenaton’s New World Order. After its creation, the story of Jesus was transplanted from Britain, where it was invented, to Galilee and Judea. This was done so Christianity would not appear to be conspicuously Druidic in complexion. To conceive Christianity in Britain was one thing; to birth it there was another. The Atonists knew their warped religion was based on ancient Amenism and Druidism. They knew their Jesus, Iesus or Yeshua, was based on Druidic Iesa or Iusa, and that a good many educated people throughout the world knew it also. Their difficulty concerned how to come up with a believable king of light sufficiently appealing to the world’s many pagan nations. Their employees, such as St. Paul (Josephus Piso), were allowed to plunder the archive of the pagans. They were instructed to draw from the canon of stellar gnosis and ancient solar theologies of Egypt, Chaldea and Ireland. The archetypal elements would, like ingredients, simply be tossed about and rearranged and, most importantly, the territory of the new godman would be resituated to suit the meta plan.

9:12 P.M.—GROUND ZERO, WASHINGTON, D.C. Without warning, the capital of the United States was obliterated. At precisely 9:12 p.m. Eastern, in a millisecond of time, in a blinding flash of light, the White House simply ceased to exist, as did everything and everyone else for miles in every direction. No sooner had the first missile detonated in Lafayette Park than temperatures soared into the millions of degrees. The firestorm and blast wave that followed consumed everything in its path. Gone was the Treasury building, and with it the headquarters of the United States Secret Service. Gone was the FBI building, and the National Archives, and the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Capitol and all of its surrounding buildings. Wiped away was every monument, every museum, every restaurant, every hotel, every hospital, every library and landmark of any kind, every sign of civilization.

Sources do not speak for themselves, graciously yielding up facts to the patient researcher, who approaches the evidence with his or her mind a tabula rasa cleared of personal views and preferences. Historians select material from archives and libraries with their minds freighted with preconceptions of various kinds, including hypotheses they wish to test, questions they want to answer, ideas about topics and issues they want to explore and understand.

Five years ago the Library of Congress began a project that collects every utterance on Twitter, in the name of preserving the nation’s digital heritage. That is billions weekly, sucked up for storage in secure tape archives, and the Library has yet to figure out how to make any of it available to researchers. Divorced from a human curator, the unfiltered mass of Twitter may as well be a garbage heap ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

This basic asymmetry with respect to archives is a reflection of the asymmetry between the two sides. While one side, operating through a modern nation-state, has used its documentary and other resources to produce a version of its history that has subtly shaped the way the world sees the conflict, a version that is now ironically being undermined from within via use of these same resources, the production of a standard “official” Palestinian narrative was never really possible on the other side.

I know a lot of other reporters who are dedicated to this cause. They’ve covered numerous stories on satanism, missing children, corrupt judges, and CIA cocaine operations only to have them censored before they could be aired. We have archives of pertinent information to which these tapes we made today will undoubtedly be added. At least until censorship is overcome these videos will be educating other reporters.” He gestured toward the annoying helicopters still circling. “And we’re all tired of this nonsense!

All so different. He figured, sure, that people must be like mountains. See, when you were far away from mountains, they all basically looked the same. Fly up high, soar over them in a hurry, and there was no time for detail. Pointed. Covered in snow. Mountain. Got it. Fly up close, and they each had their own distinctive jagged bits and places where the rock showed through. He’d even found flowers growing on a few, near vents that let out warm air. The problem with people was that everyone saw other nations from far away. Saw them as big mountainous blobs. Foreigners. Strange. Got it.

God save us from an Earth in which all men are the same. God save us from a colony where that is the goal, or a culture which assumes that for its norm. Give me a thousand people speaking different tongues, worshiping different gods, and dreaming different dreams, and I will make of them a greater nation than you can make with ten thousand of your gengineered duplicates. For mine will have the spark of greatness in them, while yours will live for conformity, worship mediocrity, and take their carefully modulated delight in predigested dreams. Reigning in Chaos: the founding of Guera Colony (Historical Archives, Hellsgate Station)

The missile crisis "was the most dangerous moment in human history," Arthur Schlesinger commented in October 2002 at a conference in Havana on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis, attended by a number of those who witnessed it from within as it unfolded. Desision-makers at the time undoubtedly understood that the fate of the world was in their hands. Nevertheless, attendees at the conference may have been shocked by some of the revelations. They were informed that in October 1962 the world was "one word away" from nuclear war. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," said Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive in Washington, which helped organize the event. He was referring to Vasil Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer blocked an order to fire nuclear-armed toredoes in October 27, at the tensest moment of the crisis, when te submarines were under attack bu US destroyers, A devastating response would have been a near certainty, leading a major war.

There has been much controversy about the numbers of those imprisoned and killed at various times in the Stalin years, but the opening of the archives has led to some convergence towards a middle (but still horrific) figure, some millions fewer than the earlier highest estimates and some millions more than the estimates of those who downplayed the scale of Stalin’s terror. Ronald Suny, the editor of a recent major volume on twentieth-century Russian history, suggests that the ‘total number of lives destroyed by the Stalinist regime in the 1930s is closer to 10–11 million than the 20–30 million estimated earlier’.68 Anne Applebaum, the author of a detailed study of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, arrives at a figure of 28.7 million forced labourers over the whole Soviet period. She includes in that number the ‘special exiles’, such as ‘kulaks’ and particular nationalities, among them the Tatars and Volga Germans, who were deported during World War Two. Applebaum notes that a figure of around 786,000 political executions between 1934 and 1953 is now quite widely accepted, although her own view is that the true figure is probably significantly higher than that number.69 The Russian non-governmental organization Memorial, dedicated to investigating the cases of repression in the Soviet period, more recently came up with the figure of 1.7 million people arrested in 1937–38 alone, of whom, they say, at least 818,000 were shot.70

Surveillance, Monitoring, and Archiving of Personal Information Consumerism Economy Media Control Neuro-Behavioral Control Technologies Failed Economic Policies Hegemonic Globalization Controls and Domination Demonization of Nations (e.g., Iran, China, Russia) and Populations (e.g.,

You will find wise men in any religion, Shallan, and good men in every nation. Those who truly seek wisdom are those who will acknowledge the virtue in their adversaries and who will learn from those who disabuse them of error.

Glorification of war, militarism, and warrior mentalities Hegemonic globalization Infiltrate peace and anti-war groups Mass surveillance, monitoring, and archiving of data Massive government/private intelligence security agencies/organizations Media influence and control Military intervention Mind control technologies (e.g., drugs, EMR) Negotiation/conflict resolution Non-Prosecution of connected military, government, and civilian law violators/abusers Occupation Promotion of nationalism/pseudo-patriotism Propaganda and promotion of USA exceptionalism Purchase and installation of pro-American

Federal and state agencies are another possible candidate for this long-term preservation role when it comes to published materials. In the United States, the Library of Congress and the National Archives play major preservation roles, but neither institution can reasonably claim to hold a complete record of our cultural and scientific legacy—especially in an era when much of the publishing takes place on the web.

It was eventually named “the sub-commission on the historical dimension to implement a dialogue with the aim to restore mutual confidence between the two nations, including an impartial scientific examination of the historical records and archives to define existing problems and formulate recommendations.

The largest network of national digital libraries, Europeana, brings together cultural objects in digital format from many of the countries in Europe. Instead of building a single global digital library, these national initiatives can be linked together in a way that helps people find information across geographic boundaries. Europeana provides anyone with access to over 23 million digitized cultural objects in Europe, including books, manuscripts, maps, paintings, films, museum objects, archival records, and other digitized materials. Thanks to funding from the European Commission, Europeana draws its content from a network of more than 1,500 cultural heritage institutions that provide metadata either directly or via aggregators in order to facilitate access to locally stored objects.

. Recommendation: One avenue for ensuring that all civilian CCTV equipment is SCORPION STARE compatible by 2006 is to exploit an initiative of the US National Security Agency for our own ends. In a bill ostensibly sponsored by Hollywood and music industry associations (MPAA and RIAA: see also CDBTPA), the NSA is ostensibly attempting to legislate support for Digital Rights Management in all electronic equipment sold to the public. The implementation details are not currently accessible to us, but we believe this is a stalking-horse for requiring chip manufacturers to incorporate on-die FPGAs in the one million gate range, re-configurable in software, initially laid out as DRM circuitry but reprogrammable in support of their nascent War on Un-Americanism. If such integrated FPGAs are mandated, commercial pressures will force Far Eastern vendors to comply with regulation and we will be able to mandate incorporation of SCORPION STARE Level Two into all digital consumer electronic cameras and commercial CCTV equipment under cover of complying with our copyright protection obligations in accordance with the WIPO treaty. A suitable pretext for the rapid phased obsolescence of all Level Zero and Level One cameras can then be engineered by, for example, discrediting witness evidence from older installations in an ongoing criminal investigation. If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals—or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link—will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

In the form in which it issued from the Jewish academies of Babylonia and Palestine, it is a great national work, a scientific document of first importance, the archives of ten centuries, in which are preserved the thoughts and opinions, the views and verdicts, the errors, transgressions, hopes, disappointments, customs, ideals, convictions, and sorrows of Israel--a work produced by the zeal and patience of thirty generations, laboring with a self-denial unparalleled in the history of literature.

suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers.

Ten long years passed. The Berlin Wall came down. The Baltic republics became free nations. And finally, Mike MacQueen found the canvas-bound notebook in the long-hidden archives. During those ten years, Lileikis lived quietly in Boston, hearing nothing from the Justice Department.

These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.

Well, they could name it what they wanted, but Nu Ralik knew that the boundaries of nature were far more important than the boundaries of nations. Ishikk was a Purelaker. First and foremost. By tide and sun he was.

The problem with people was that everyone saw other nations from far away. Saw them as big mountainous blobs. Foreigners. Strange. Got it.

Oh, who shall know the might Of the words he utter’d there? The fate of nations there was turned By the fervor of his prayer. “But wouldst thou know his name Who wandered there alone? Go, read enroll’d in Heaven’s archives, The prayer of Washington.

the boundaries of nature were far more important than the boundaries of nations.

Above all, I wish for a world in which men and women of every nation archive a measure of dignity and opportunity in their individual lives that allows each of them to serve others, and stand up to the forces of injustice and inequality wherever they exist.

What’s past is prologue. Written by William Shakespeare in The Tempest, it is also inscribed on a monument outside of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. How true that is.

I’m glad you have a brand. It says you’re dangerous, and we have narrow confines up here on the wall. We can’t simply press every eligible man; I need real soldiers, men who know what they’re doing.” “So that’s why I’m here?” Kaladin asked. “To see that?” “I want you to think,” Azure said. “I tell the men—this Wall Guard, this is redemption. If you fight here, nobody will care what you did before. Because they know if we fall, this city and this nation will be no more.

Archived service records, defined as records for veterans sixty-two years or more post-separation, were stored and open to the public at the new National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri

Simultaneously, an Auburn banker named Charles P. Wood prepared a narrative of Tubman’s war service, with an appendix of available documentation. Copies are still on file at the National Archives.

And suddenly it struck me that walking the length of Nevsky Prospekt was like walking the length of Russian literature. Right there at the beginning—just off the avenue on the Moika embankment—is the house where Pushkin ended his years. A few paces on are the rooms where Gogol began Dead Souls. Then the National Library, where Tolstoy scoured the archives. And here, behind the cemetery walls, lies brother Fyodor, our restless witness of the human soul entombed beneath the cherry trees.

What did not happen in Florida, in either the Second or Third Seminole War, was the provision of enough forces and transportation to affect the object of these wars, the final removal of all Native Americans from the peninsula. Prior to the war’s end, rewards were offered by the United States government for the capture of Seminoles. This policy failed to bring in any significant number of Native Americans; however, by early 1858, the war was winding down. White flags and other signs were hung out on known paths used by the Seminoles, and military operations were ordered stopped by Colonel Loomis. Elias Rector, the superintendent for Indian Affairs in the southern superintendency, came to Florida in January 1858 to assist in the negotiations for peace. After a conference was held 35 miles from Fort Myers with Assinwah’s band and others, the terms were offered and monetary inducements guaranteed. On May 4, 1858, Billy Bowlegs and most of his band boarded the Grey Cloud and sailed to Egmont Key, at the mouth of Tampa Bay. Here this group was joined by 41 prisoners and made ready for the trip west. By May 8, the war was declared officially over. The army believed that there were only about 100 Seminoles and Miccosukees left in Florida. This number included the aged leader Sam Jones. There is a debate on just when this ancient and respected leader died; however, it is known that he was gone before the end of Civil War. Where his remains were deposited is a secret to this day. It is from this small number of Seminoles and Miccosukees that today’s recognized tribes have descended as a continuing tribute to the tenacity of their ancestors’ will to survive. As historian Patsy West has aptly called them, they are “The Enduring Seminoles.” BIBLIOGRAPHY DOCUMENTS A number of collections of documents exist from which the above was drawn, including the Letters Received by the Secretary of War, Registered Series, 1801–1860; Letters Sent by the Secretary of War Relating to Military Affairs, 1800–1889; Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series) 1822–1860; and Letters Sent, Registers of Letters Received, and Letters Received by Headquarters, Troops in Florida, and Headquarters Department of Florida, 1850–1858. The collections are all on microfilm from the National Archives. Numerous Congressional documents were also consulted

Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)

Above the doors it reads, ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN, PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING. These things happened for two reasons: because women went looking for Elizebeth’s ghost, and because her ghost was making noise in the archives. She was there inside the Marshall Library, rattling the doors of the vault, and she was in the “government tombs,” the National Archives, where her records from the Invisible War were finally declassified. The ghost also cried out from unexpected places. Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth—William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge.

EARLY IN 1986, I learned of a rumor that Kurt Waldheim, a former United Nations secretary-general and a candidate for Austria’s presidency, had a file as a Nazi war criminal—in the United Nations no less! There were always whispers about Waldheim’s past but a UN file was something new. “Do you have such a file?” I asked the United Nations Secretariat. “We don’t know,” came the answer. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’re not allowed to open the archives.” During World War II, Churchill had established a tribunal of the sixteen Allied governments (some in exile) to document Nazi war crimes for future prosecution. The tribunal’s findings were handed over to the United Nations when it was established. The files were stored in one of the UN buildings in New York. I asked once more to see them. “You can’t,” a UN official explained. “When the archives were deposited in the United Nations, it was agreed they will be opened only with the unanimous consent of all sixteen countries.” “What the…” I muttered, outraged. In the face of such obstinacy I set out on a yearlong public and diplomatic campaign to convince these sixteen governments to give their consent. In this I was greatly helped by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress. It was like peeling a diplomatic onion. One layer led to another, and then to another, until at last all the countries had agreed. We had opened the padlock. When I walked into the unlocked storeroom, I saw rows and rows of cardboard boxes containing yellowing files. Picking up a box marked with the letter W, I started going file by file. Sure enough, there was a file marked WALDHEIM KURT. It detailed acts of wanton murder that this Austrian Nazi officer’s unit carried out in the war. Declassified documents later showed that the CIA had been aware of some details of Waldheim’s wartime past since 1945. They didn’t publish the information and Waldheim was able to assume the august post of United Nations secretary-general, in which he was warmly welcomed around the world.

Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the heroes of this story, put it this way: “It must be splendid to command millions of people in great national ventures, to lead a hundred thousand to victory in battle. But it seems to me greater still to discover fundamental truths in a very modest room with very modest means—truths that will still be foundations of human knowledge when the memory of these battles is painstakingly preserved only in the archives of the historian.

Despite such claims, the record is clear. There was, indeed, a long-term transformation in the two parties—first at the national level and then subsequently at the state and local levels—a process that stands at the core of twentieth-century political history. Over several decades, Democrats abandoned their role as the party of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy to champion civil rights; in response, Republicans retreated from their original racial liberalism and courted white resentment. The southern strategy—well documented in manuscript archives, public speeches, party platforms, contemporary reporting, polling data, oral interviews, memoirs, and elsewhere—has long been accepted as a wholly uncontroversial fact.

During the Vietnam War, a new generation of scholars such as William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko challenged long-standing legends about the workings of US foreign policy. Social and cultural historians in the 1970s and 1980s wrote new histories of the nation from the bottom up, expanding our view to include long-overlooked perspectives on gender, race, and ethnic identities and, in the process, showing that narrow narratives focused solely on political leaders at the top obscured more than they revealed. Despite the fact that the term revisionist history is often thrown around by nonhistorians as an insult, in truth all good historical work is at heart “revisionist” in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect—and, yes, to revise—our understanding of the past. Today, yet another generation of historians is working once again to bring historical scholarship out of academic circles, this time to push back against misinformation in the public sphere. Writing op-eds and essays for general audiences; engaging the public through appearances on television, radio, and podcasts; and being active on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Substack, hundreds if not thousands of historians have been working to provide a counterbalance and corrections to the misinformation distorting our national dialogue. Such work has incredible value, yet historians still do their best work in the longer written forms of books, articles, and edited collections that allow us both to express our thoughts with precision in the text and provide ample evidence in the endnotes. This volume has brought together historians who have been actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media and has provided them a platform where they might expand those engagements into fuller essays that reflect the best scholarly traditions of the profession.

So I went deeper into an archive of historical memory, hoping to sort it out

In her mind, her actions were treason to the false federation, but loyalty to the real United States of America, the one created by a document she had memorized. The real document was set on fire by what the news called "petty arsons" when the National Archives burned down. Bev knew better—she knew who was behind the destruction of the country's most important document. It was more than a document, it was a symbol—a symbol of freedom from tyranny, and one the Federal Government could no longer afford to abide by.

The editor of the journal, Crab Riley, found her story hard to believe, especially because she could not provide evidence of the children disappearing, and he was inclined to dismiss it as fantasy until he researched archives, where mention of the disappearances was indeed found in National Geographic Magazine.   ‘Teachers and school children descended and did not return. Search parties and excavations found no trace. After weeks, they were given up as dead,’ it said.   The article, by archaeologist William Griffith, also made mention of the skeletons found when the caves were first discovered too, although the number was far higher than had been realised by most.   ‘There were human bones to account for thirty thousand people. It was a “restaurant” I rather think, for Atlantean descendants.’   Could underground races of carnivorous species really dwell in the deep substrata below ground, coming up momentarily to snatch and feed off humans?   Interestingly, in some excellent research, Dustin Naef says there are over 700 caves and tunnels in Lava Beds National Park alone, and over 150 in the Marble Mountain area near Mount Shasta, with over thirty miles of tunnels mapped so far.

Around a hundred Texans faced 3,000 Mexican Government troops. According to the account that long filled patriotic Americans’ schoolbooks, Crockett died a hero defiantly swinging the butt of his rifle, Old Betsy, at oncoming Mexicans after running out of ammunition. A Different Story Surfaces In 1975, a previously untranslated diary written by José Enrique de la Peña, senior Mexican officer at the battle, revealed that Crockett and six other survivors had actually surrendered. According to this account, they were executed shortly afterwards. The revelation did not come without controversy. Historians still dispute whether the diary is genuine, pointing to the unclear circumstances of its emergence in the mid-1950s in Mexico, just at the height of Disney’s fictionalisation of Crockett’s story across the border in the United States. Advocates cite a supporting pamphlet that was lodged in the archives of Yale University long before the Crockett fad began, which they suggest point to the diary being genuine. A crude Mexican attempt at Party pooping? Or bursting the bubble of a fabled tale? The truth may never be known, but the episode once more demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s observation of the truth being rarely pure and never simple.

On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. “When I see those columns,” he said, “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome.” “They lost their will to live,” he said. “They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period.

Addiction is a human problem that resides in people, not in the drug or in the drug’s capacity to produce physical effects,” writes Lance Dodes, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions. It is true that some people will become hooked on substances after only a few times of using, with potentially tragic consequences, but to understand why, we have to know what about those individuals makes them vulnerable to addiction. Mere exposure to a stimulant or narcotic or to any other mood-altering chemical does not make a person susceptible. If she becomes an addict, it’s because she’s already at risk. Heroin is considered to be a highly addictive drug — and it is, but only for a small minority of people, as the following example illustrates. It’s well known that many American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s were regular users. Along with heroin, most of these soldier addicts also used barbiturates or amphetamines or both. According to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1975, 20 per cent of the returning enlisted men met the criteria for the diagnosis of addiction while they were in Southeast Asia, whereas before they were shipped overseas fewer than 1 per cent had been opiate addicts. The researchers were astonished to find that “after Vietnam, use of particular drugs and combinations of drugs decreased to near or even below preservice levels.” The remission rate was 95 per cent, “unheard of among narcotics addicts treated in the U.S.” “The high rates of narcotic use and addiction there were truly unlike anything prior in the American experience,” the researchers concluded. “Equally dramatic was the surprisingly high remission rate after return to the United States.” These results suggested that the addiction did not arise from the heroin itself but from the needs of the men who used the drug. Otherwise, most of them would have remained addicts. As with opiates so, too, with the other commonly abused drugs. Most people who try them, even repeatedly, will not become addicted. According to a U.S. national survey, the highest rate of dependence after any use is for tobacco: 32 per cent of people who used nicotine even once went on to long-term habitual use. For alcohol, marijuana and cocaine the rate is about 15 per cent and for heroin the rate is 23 per cent. Taken together, American and Canadian population surveys indicate that merely having used cocaine a number of times is associated with an addiction risk of less than 10 per cent. This doesn’t prove, of course, that nicotine is “more” addictive than, say, cocaine. We cannot know, since tobacco — unlike cocaine — is legally available, commercially promoted and remains, more or less, a socially tolerated object of addiction. What such statistics do show is that whatever a drug’s physical effects and powers, they cannot be the sole cause of addiction.

contrary to repeated claims from President Obama and the NSA, it is already clear that a substantial number of the agency’s activities have nothing to do with antiterrorism efforts or even with national security. Much of the Snowden archive revealed what can only be called economic espionage: eavesdropping and email interception aimed at the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, economic conferences in Latin America, energy companies in Venezuela and Mexico, and spying by the NSA’s allies—including Canada, Norway, and Sweden—on the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy and energy companies in several other countries.

New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time.

According to Lerone Bennett Jr., the author of the book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, Lincoln even made many racist jokes and used racist language. Many Lincoln admirers have claimed that he no longer concerned himself with repatriating Blacks out of America after the Civil War. However, Phillip Maggess and Sebastian Page, the authors of the book Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement For Black Resettlement, have used documents from the British and U.S. National archives to prove that until the last moments of his life,

At its outset in the mid-1960s, the historic preservation movement contributed to the racial splintering of the nation's urban fabric. It denied the freeway's entry into communities deemed historic while granting its passage through communities judged differently. It empowered some communities in their fight against the freeway while putting others at a disadvantage. In the disproportionate number of black communities that bore the brunt of urban highway construction, the preservation strategy had no chance, leaving displaced residents with a meager set of resources to recuperate their connection to the past. This is why we need to pay attention to murals, festivals, autobiographies, oral histories, and archival efforts. In the high-stakes struggles over the fate of the American city, these were the "weapons of the weak," the tools invented by displaced communities to fight the forced erasures of their past.

Henry J. Wolfinger, a historian associated with the National Archives and Records Service and author of a pathbreaking, in-depth essay chronicling the life of black Mormon pioneer Jane Manning James, called the book “well-written and carefully organized.” It provides “the fullest discussion to date” of the “origins and development” Mormonism’s “racial doctrines . . . based on a command of the secondary literature and extensive research in primary sources.” But he also opined that the volume overstated “the importance of antislavery sentiment within the church after the death of Joseph Smith, given the legalization of slavery in Utah Territory in 1852 and Brigham Young’s view that the institution was divinely ordained.” He further asserted that the volume’s discussion of the “development of the church’s racial policies focuses

But I suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers. Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad. Not amused, actually, but a little bit frightened. None of this is new, though I guess I am simply accustomed to dealing with more edulcorated versions of xenophobia. I don’t know which is worse.

There is no doubt that what Blakey produced looks impressive. In its final published reports, a compilation of the Committee’s legal memoranda alone took a separate hefty volume of 925 pages. And the Committee turned over to the National Archives more than 800 boxes of files—many times more than the Warren Commission produced. That, of course, looks impressive. That was one of Blakey’s priorities. Yet Blakey moved to make sure that the information in those files would be kept from public scrutiny for 50 years.

The first “Zigzag files” were released to the UK National Archives in 2001. These declassified archives contain more than seventeen hundred pages of documents relating to Chapman’s case: transcripts of interrogations, detailed wireless intercepts, reports, descriptions, diagrams, internal memos, minutes, letters, and photographs. The files are extraordinarily detailed, describing not only events and people but also the minutiae of a spy’s life, his changing moods and feelings, his hopes, fears, and contradictions

Declassified documents from the Israel State Archives in 2021 revealed that attitudes toward the Palestinians have not changed much since the 1940s. It has been official policy, at least among some of the nation’s senior military and political elites, to forcibly expel Arabs to neighboring countries for the entire period of the country’s existence. Reuven Aloni, deputy director general of the Israel Lands Administration, said during a 1965 meeting that the ideal goal was “population exchange.” He was optimistic “that a day will come, in another ten, fifteen or twenty years, when there will be a situation of a certain kind, with a war or something resembling a war, when the basic solution will be a matter of transferring the Arabs. I think that we should think about this as a final goal.”3

It was clear that Mitrokhin had had access to even the most highly classified KGB files – among them those which gave the real identities and “legends” of the Soviet “illegals” living under deep cover abroad disguised as foreign nationals.1

to find stones touched by the Heralds themselves. She brought them to Nadris on his deathbed and harvested his seed to bring life to the stones. They hatched forth ten children, which she used to found a new nation. Marnah, I believe it was called.

The reason behind Israel’s engagement with Lebanon was justified at the time as based on national security grounds, with other nations admiring the Jewish state’s actions and wanting to learn from them, but there was something more existential at work. In his 1998 book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman gave an anecdote from 1982 about the real, less acknowledged mission of Israeli forces: Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)56 It is not hard to see why this attitude was and remains so appealing to some governments. It is a desire to militarily destroy an opponent but also erase its history and ability to remember what has been lost. When surveillance technology is added to the mix, tested on unwilling subjects, it’s even harder to successfully resist.