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I posted about this in the US Politics Thread, and figured why the heck not? Maybe something cool will happen.

So the United States National Holocaust Museum and Memorial (right off the National Mall in DC) is running a crowdsourcing history program called History Unfolded; US Newspapers and the Holocaust. I did this for a school project, but there's no reason anyone with access to a local library, archive, or historical society can't participate and submit a newspaper article for publication on the site (my own contribution is right here).

To contribution, all you need to do is find an archive, library, or repository near you and look through local historic news papers (most colleges and university libraries will have large collections of newspapers). The main page of the website lists events related to the Holocaust and the US response, as well as the dates to make your search easier. You may have to figure out how to use a microfilm machine (lots of old newspapers now only exist on microfilm), but they're not that hard to work with once you've gotten it. There's also digital collections of newspapers you can subscribe to, but many larger libraries and universities will hold those subscriptions so there may be a way to access them.

Once you find an article, scan the whole page so that the newspapers name, location, and the date are visible and save it as a JPEG file*. Then you can go online to the History Unfolded website, make an account, and submit it for verification after which it will be accepted and published or rejected. This page will greatly help you in going about all this

The terms can be pretty broad. Note that I submitted an article on Lend-Lease, but it's from 1944. Part of this project is exploratory, as the Museum is trying to assess how much exists on these subjects and where they are. They might use this for future research, an exhibition, or to build in the future a comprehensive online database of American newspapers who reported on these events.

*Please do not submit a scan as a PDF file. Licenses for PDFs cost money cause you have to pay Adobe, and the Holocaust Museum has chosen to save money by not paying the licensing fee. Any PDF files will get rejected (if you can submit them at all).

EDIT: And to grant this a little more immediate significance, the following quote is one of the first things visitors to the National Holocaust Museum will see in the exhibits;

“Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” ~ General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, August 19, 1945

I'm posting the article on Dakka rather than linking it (because the LATimes website is why people use AdBlocker in the first place and the LATimes won't let you read anything until you disable it so I'm saving all of you the plague of annoying pop ups and slow as hell loading)

The Rialto school district, after assigning eighth-grade students to read a few sources on the Holocaust and write about whether it really happened, never did get back to the public on how many students concluded that there had not been such a Nazi atrocity. As it turns out, several dozen of them did manage to conclude that what is incontrovertible historical fact was untrue.

We know this only because the Sun newspaper in San Bernardino County didn’t let just let the matter rest with whatever latest press release came from the school district. It requested all of the papers written by the students, which were provided with the names redacted. The paper’s reporters then combed through them all, finding that more than 50 concluded that either the Holocaust had not happened or that they at least doubted it. And among those who said it existed, there were many who said claims had been exaggerated or documents falsified.

You can find the paper's here; The Sun. Just a reminder for people, because Presidents of Iran are not the only ones in the world who like to say the Holocaust never happened, and that it was all fake, which is just a simple reason why a project like this is important.

Interesting.I've been getting the Irish Revolution papers every week for the past year. Regret it now since the bloody negotiations get twice as many issues as the hugely important civil war