American Legacy at Your Fingertips

One of the greatest promises of the Internet is its potential for making available to the American people some sense of the historical record that belongs to us. The Internet holds out hope that you don’t have to spend a lot of money, make a trip to some far-off archive or have special research skills in order to encounter this legacy.

If you want to get a sense of what this will be like, point your World Wide Web browser at https://lcweb.loc.gov/, where you’ll find the Library of Congress. Then choose Research and Collections Services and, under Digital Collections, select Historical Collections, where you’ll find something called American Memory. It’s part of the National Digital Library Program, and consists of thousands (out of more than 15 million) of the “pictorial works” the Library of Congress holds.

American Memory is a terrific site. It allows you to perform fast, easy searches of all the digitized images it contains, not to mention documents and sound files. Search results are presented as an informative menu; click on any item in the listing and you see a thumbnail of the picture along with information about it. Click on the thumbnail and you’ll get a much larger picture. It helps to have a fast modem, but I found that the images loaded quite quickly.

Although far from all of the library’s images are online, the archive is likely to impress you with its depth and breadth. For instance, I searched “Flatiron Building” and found a host of images of the New York landmark. Searching “Los Angeles,” I found a fine old photograph of the neo-Moorish mansion of Harrison Gray Otis, the early publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Typing various names and places into the search field, I also found a striking daguerreotype of Nathaniel Hawthorne. There are also many pictures taken by famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady.

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For a sampling of some of the library’s best digitized holdings, point your browser at https://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/print/guide/, where you’ll find “Library of Congress Prints and Photographs: An Illustrated Guide.” This has one of my favorite photographs in the collection, Timothy O’Sullivan’s “Ancient Ruins in the Caqon de Chelle” in New Mexico. Another nice thing about the Library of Congress image collections is that you can order prints inexpensively.

The National Archives and Records Administration is beginning to make some of its materials available on the Internet too. It’s not very far along, but you can get a glimpse of what’s coming by visiting its World Wide Web site at https://www.nara.gov/.

The University of Nebraska has the jump on the government by digitizing a number of historic images from the National Archives and is displaying them in the Gallery of the Open Frontier at https://www.unl.edu/UP/gof/home.htm. A searchable index of thumbnails is offered so you can have a preview. I tried searching “earthquake,” for instance, and found stunning pictures of the devastation caused by the 1906 San Francisco temblor. The gallery’s organizers say they plan eventually to make available on the Web more than 12,000 frontier-oriented images from the archives.

Another fascinating site along these lines is the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Library Rare Map Collection at https://scarlett.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps/maps.html, where you can access images of historical maps. Looking under Civil War, for instance, I was able to study a map of rebel fortifications around Richmond, Va., in 1864. You can order reproductions of these maps.

Also worthwhile is a visit is Movietone News Online at https://www.iguide.com/movies/movitone/, where Fox News makes available some of its 10,000 hours of Movietone newsreel footage. Try out the “This Week in History” feature, where I downloaded a 22-second clip of the Hindenburg disaster. (This was the German zeppelin that burst into flames in Lakehurst, N.J., 59 years ago today.) You can also use the Movietone site to send e-mail picture postcards containing any message you wish in a friendly-looking typeface. They arrive in the form of relatively small .gif files, complete with a stamp of your choice from “Freedonia,” an evident reference to the nation unfortunate enough to have Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) as president in “Duck Soup.” (I checked the name of Freedonia’s president in the Internet Movie Database, at https://us.imdb.com/.)

By the way, you can view .gif files with Netscape Navigator, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, CompuServe’s WinCIM or America Online’s software, as well as with any of various viewing utilities. Just pull down the File menu item and choose Open. You can view Movietone’s videos, such as the Hindenburg clip, using Apple’s Quicktime movie player, which comes in a Windows version and can be had on the Internet and various online services.

The Internet is a great way to disseminate images, but I’m not one of those people who believe that one picture is worth a thousand words. If you’re of the same view, you’ll be happy to hear that the Internet is even better at historical words than at pictures. For instance, the University of Oklahoma Law Center runs a remarkable Web site at https://www.law.uoknor.edu/ushist.html that brings together a host of crucial documents from American history.

A few mouse clicks and I was reading President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address, when he told a quaking nation, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Oddly, there was no link to the president’s Pearl Harbor speech, so I used Alta Vista (https://www.altavista.digital.com/) to search “infamy Roosevelt” and turned up a couple of copies.

And for a hypertext outline of American history--not a bad one, either, given that the text is from the U.S. Information Agency--visit “From Revolution to Reconstruction” at https://grid.let.rug.nl/~welling/usa/

* Daniel Akst welcomes messages at dan.akst@latimes.com.