We love being sent or just stumbling upon, projects on the web that utilize materials digitized through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. We thought since they have done such a great job highlighting us, it’d only be fair to turn around and highlight a few we’ve found recently.
The museum has selected various events from 1933-1945 for people to focus their research on finding articles about.
The History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust Project from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is a project in which DigitalNC materials are just a small portion of a much bigger effort. According to the project’s website “asks students, teachers, and history buffs throughout the United States what was possible for Americans to have known about the Holocaust as it was happening and how Americans responded. Participants look in local newspapers for news and opinion about 37 different Holocaust-era events that took place in the United States and Europe, and submit articles they find to a national database, as well as information about newspapers that did not cover events.” The goal of the project is to build a crowd-sourced repository that scholars can use to better understand what those in the United States knew as the Holocaust was happening. Digitized newspapers are a key component of the project and many of the papers we have digitized through DigitalNC have been used by participants of the project to track knowledge of Holocaust related events in local NC newspapers. You can view everything that is from an NC newspaper here. The earliest articles come from 1933, including an article from the Journal Patriot out of North Wilkesboro, NC that has the headline “A Dangerous Policy” regarding the Nazis’ growing policies against the Jewish people in Germany.
Article page on the History Unfolded project site showing an article from The Journal Patriot in 1933
The latest articles date to 1945 and focus on the evolving information being uncovered about the full extent of the Holocaust once the Nazis had been beaten in World War II. As History Unfolded is a crowdsourced project you can get involved and help the museum continue to track this information in US newspapers. To get involved yourself, visit here.
If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it! Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out. To see past highlighted projects, visit past posts here.
