NHPRC News
October 2024
1943 image of Trackwomen on the B&O is from the National Archives, Record Group 86: Records of the Women’s Bureau, 1892 - 1995
Inside the Commission
Commission to Meet on November 21
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission will meet on Thursday, November 21, 2024 at the National Archives in Washington, DC to consider grant applications and review policy. The public is welcome to attend the policy discussion, but attendees must register by email to nhprc@nara.gov by November 15, 2024.
Remembering Al Goldberg
Alfred Goldberg, the U.S. Air Force and Pentagon historian, who wrote the Warren Report, has passed away.
Supreme Court Justice David Souter chats with Dr. Alfred Goldberg at his retirement from the Commission.
Dr. Goldberg joined the National Historical Publications and Records Commission in 1973 and served for 34 years. He is the longest tenured Commissioner since its inception and was engaged in some of the most important events in our nation’s history.
During World War II, Al Goldberg served as historian of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces at their London headquarters. He was the historian of the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and co-wrote the report. He led a team of investigators to publish the report Pentagon 9/11 following the terrorist attack in 2001. The author of histories of the United States Air Force 1907-1957, the Department of Defense, 1947-1987, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the first fifty years of the Pentagon, he chaired the Department of Defense Advisory Committee on Declassification, assisted scores of historians and researchers on every subject from early aviation to the Cold War, and in 2003, he received the David O. Cooke Federal Leadership Award, named after his long-time friend and colleague.
His role on the Commission was distinguished, and he frequently served as acting chairman during the absence of the Archivist. Known for his quick wit and penetrating questions, he was a tireless advocate of intellectual rigor and forthright colloquies with his fellow Members and with the staff. Al Goldberg is sorely missed by all.
Grant Deadlines
The following funding opportunities all have an application deadline of November 7, 2024.
Archival Projects
For projects that ensure online public discovery and use of historical records collections.
Publishing Historical Records in Collaborative Digital Editions
For projects to publish online editions of historical records.
Discovery and Access to Congressional Records Collections
For projects that ensure online public discovery and use of Congressional records collections
Capacity Building for Historically Black Colleges and Universities Archives
For projects that build capacity at HBCU Archives.
News from the Field
On the B&O Railroad
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum has completed the first two-year project to process and preserve the B&O Railroad Relief Department Collection documenting 15,000 employee relief case files dating back to the early 1900s. You can visit the museum at https://www.borail.org/
The B&O Railroad Relief Department, established in 1880, was created in response to the dangerous conditions faced by workers and the widespread railroad strikes of the 1870s, including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It became the first employer-managed worker’s compensation and health insurance program in the railroading industry. The remaining records from the relief department are among the earliest examples of medical records for railroad workers, documenting potentially hundreds of thousands of B&O employees.
Originally awarded in 2022, the NHPRC recently announced the awarding of a second two-year grant to the B&O Railroad Museum to continue work on this project. Over the next two years is to process and document an additional 25,000 employee case files in preparation for use by researchers and employee descendants.
Since April 2024, the B&O Railroad Relief Department Collection has also been used to test the capabilities of an artificial intelligence system through a partnership with Dr. Louis Hyman at Johns Hopkins University. In just two months, over 25,000 unique scans of documents have been inputted to test how AI can read historical records, analyze their contents, and compile information and statistics in response to prompts. This work is expected to revolutionize the way researchers interact with immense amounts of historical data. The efforts funded by the NHPRC are essential to preparing the relief records for use in this groundbreaking new method for conducting research.
For more information on this important collection, and to learn how to access the records, please send an email to research@borail.org
Keywords Launches Beta Site
The stories of African and African descended people—family, culture, labor, resistance, survival, and day to day life—in 18th-century Louisiana appear in the colonial archive, sometimes where we least expect them. Keywords for Black Louisiana, a digital project supported by NHPRC and the Mellon Foundation, uses the scholarship of Black feminist scholars, historians, and public intellectuals to center Black and Black-Native life in French and Spanish colonial archives dating from 1714 to 1803.
Keywords has launched its first of documents, identifying important threads in the text, and providing pathways to guide users through the project and highlight other work in, around, and about Black Louisiana.
Go to https://docs.k4bl.org/collection/
Adams for President!
In December 1777 during the fight for the cause of independence, John Adams included an anecdote in a letter to Abigail:
John Adams (c. 1815), Unidentified Artist, copy after Gilbert Stuart. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery Collection.
"One Morning, I asked my Landlady what I had to pay? Nothing she said–‘I was welcome, and she hoped I would always make her House my Home, and she should be happy to entertain all those Gentlemen who had been raised up by Providence to be the Saviours of their Country.’ This was flattering enough to my vain Heart. But it made a greater Impression on me, as a Proof, how deeply this Cause had sunk into the Minds and Hearts of the People."
Perhaps he could not have foreseen how crucial he was to the success of the cause. The Massachusetts Historical Society has been working on creating a documentary edition of the Adams Family Papers. Their most recent publication, Volume 22 of the Papers of John Adams, documents his first year as President of the United States twenty years later.
The NHPRC is proud to support the project, and you can read more about it at Massachusetts Historical Society.
Community Web Programs
The Internet Archive’s Community Web Programs received an NHPRC Archives Collaborative grant to fund projects at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts; the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Ohio; the San Francisco Public Library; the New Brunswick Free Public Library in New Jersey; and the Brooklyn Public Library in New York to digitize local history manuscripts, publications, and municipal records documenting the day-to-day life of immigrant, indigenous, and African American communities.
In their latest blog post, the Internet Archive focuses on the work being done at the Brooklyn Public Library's Center for Brooklyn history, such as this city directory from 1822.
Read more about their work at https://blog.archive.org/.../illuminating-the-stories-of.../
Rohr Aircraft Collection
Through a grant from the NHPRC, the San Diego Air & Space Museum is taking on the project of cataloging, digitizing, and rehousing 170,000 images from the Rohr/Goodrich Corporation. 
The Rohr Corporation’s San Diego roots go back to 1940 and to its namesake, Fred Rohr, who helped build Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis in 1927. The Rohr/Goodrich Collection is approximately 70 linear feet and consists primarily of historical photographs, negatives, and slides from the early 1940s to the late 1990s, documenting the rich history of the company, with many never-before-seen images showing how vital Fred Rohr and his company were to the growth of the South Bay region. Images show the construction and development of the main and various manufacturing plants, production lines for aircraft engine parts fabrication and assembly, commercial and military aircraft, aerials, special events, and employees.
Fly off for more information at https://sandiegoairandspace.org/blog/article/rohr-goodrich-corporation-75-years-of-aerospace-history.
Dear Ghosts,
As we near Halloween, we begin to imagine ghosts in the air.
In her collection “Dear Ghosts,” the poet Tess Gallagher talks on Minnesota Public Radio about how her life is filled with ghosts. She's not afraid of them. She believes in embracing them and learning from them. In one of those poems she remembers her late husband, the writer Raymond Carver. She recalls the moment at his gravesite: “Silence then. And while we were in the middle of it, wind rushed like a hand over the chimes above the stone. I thought, he's here.”
An NHPRC grant to MPR helped digitize programs like Gallagher’s interview in October 2006 for their archives. You can hear the whole story at https://archive.mpr.org/stories/2006/10/11/poet-tess-gallaghers-book-about-a-life-filled-with-ghosts
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