Types of primary material used for historical reconstruction.
Drawing on contemporary newspapers, eyewitness accounts, and archival records, this article reconstructs how African American newspapers in the 1940s reported the struggle for civil rights — from the Double V campaign to the fight for military integration — and how their own success eventually led to their decline.
Drawing on the personal diaries and memoirs of Vietnamese refugees, this article reconstructs the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the chaotic exodus that followed, revealing the fear, hope, and trauma of those who lived through it.
During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project put unemployed writers like Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston to work collecting the life stories of ordinary Americans. Drawing on Library of Congress archives and period accounts, this article reconstructs how the project captured a nation in crisis.
In August 1959, mainland newspapers chronicled Hawaii’s admission as the 50th state, focusing on the new 50-star flag and the islands’ multiracial identity. This article examines the San Francisco Chronicle’s front-page coverage, the long political struggle, and the public’s reaction as captured in primary sources.
Drawing on contemporary New York Times reports from September and November 1973, this article examines how the paper covered the Chilean coup that ousted Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power. It reveals what readers knew, what the Times got wrong, and how the coverage evolved.
Before television, Americans watched the world unfold in the flickering light of newsreel theaters. Drawing on a 1932 Time magazine report and modern scholarship, this article reconstructs the experience of these small, continuous-showing theaters that made global events immediate and public.
Drawing on the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl, the letters of a UN official, and the memoir of a British diplomat, this article reconstructs the Iranian Revolution as it was lived, feared, and recorded in Tehran during the winter of 1979.
During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, ordinary people—students, writers, and even children—turned to diaries to record the chaos, fear, and hope of those days. This article draws on those personal accounts, including a student’s diary, a writer’s hidden journal, and the collaborative diaries of two boys, to reveal how contemporaries experienced the uprising and its brutal suppression.
From attic boxes to digital archives, personal diaries offer a uniquely intimate window into the past. Drawing on the insights of historians and the diaries themselves, this article explores how these homely, partial, and fiercely personal records reconstruct the texture of everyday life across centuries.
Drawing on the eyewitness accounts of Clare Hollingworth, Martha Gellhorn, and Chester Wilmot, this article reconstructs the perilous work of war correspondents during World War II, from the first scoop of the war to the D-Day landings.