[NJARC] Two new history resources for radio history fans

[Alex Magoun]

1. At the New Jersey History Forum at the Trenton Marriott on Saturday, the Library's exhibition table was put next to Fort Monmouth History Office, monmouth.army.mil/historian.  The big news there, and just in time for Christmas, is that their new hardcover book, "A History of Army Communications and Electronics at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, 1917-2007," is now on sale through the Government Printing Office.  You can google <fort monmouth history book> or visit bookstore.gpo.gov/collections/fort-monmouth.jsp if the server doesn't strip the address.

The office historian explained to me that they put more emphasis on the recent past since the base will be closing shortly, but there is still a fair amount on the 1930s-1950s.  Fifty years from now, we'll need that synthesis of the 1990s-2000s. . .

2. Dave Sica and I both heard over the weekend about Google's debut of the LIFE magazine photo archives in Google Images: images.google.com/hosted/life.  Google invested quite a few resources to put this together in a very short time, and it includes photos going back before LIFE (1936) to the Civil War as well as photos and transparencies taken by staff photographers that were never published.  Each photo has a short caption related to the article it was commissioned for, plus a number of subject terms that you can also search.  I didn't sign in to find out, but they could use some corrections and additional information, say, about the type of TV or radio antenna, street names, etc.

There are 17 hits for <New Jersey Radio>, which reveals a number of Garden State-based Rockettes, and lots of hits for <color television>, where you can look at all the 1950-51 color shots of RCA TV demos.

Naturally you can order a professional framed print of any of them, but short of that you can also use a reasonably high-pixel count, watermarked image for your or your students' slide shows or websites under Fair Use law.  Don't forget to credit the URL and date visited!

Cheers,

Alex

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/private/njarc/attachments/20081124/f823671f/attachment-0001.htm