Must-see historical videos now online

Exciting step in digitization of news footage

You’ve probably read about events like, say, the bombing of Pearl Harbor. You probably studied them in high-school history class.

But until this week, you couldn’t see news footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor as it was shown at the time — because that’s when, for the very first time, The Associated Press put footage of that incident and half a million others online.

There’s footage of the Titanic pulling out of an Irish port. A vintage newscast about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Video of Martin Luther King, Jr. under arrest in Selma.

All told, The Associated Press and a partner, the newsreel archive British Movietone, published 550,000 video stories spanning more than one million minutes and 120 years to its new YouTube channel.

It’s the biggest dump of historical news the site has ever seen. It’s also a huge and exciting step in a push to digitize and democratize information that typically has been locked up in archives and museums. In the past year, for instance, huge troves of photographs, artworks and other historical artifacts have been digitized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian.

We asked Jenny Hammerton, an AP archivist, to point us toward the historical highlights no browser should miss. (Because, as she notes, “half a million videos is indeed a daunting amount to get to grips with!”) Here’s what we, with Hammerton’s help, came up with:

1. The Titanic leaving Belfast Lough for Southampton, 1912

2. First World War, 1914-18 (compilation video)

3. Stock market crash, 1929

4. The Lindbergh baby kidnapping, 1932

5. The Hindenburg disaster, 1937

6. Bombing of Pearl Harbor, 1941

7. Bombing of London, 1941

8. Victory in Europe Day, 1945

9. Bombing of Hiroshima, 1945

10. Vietnam War, early 1960s (compilation video)

11. Eyewitness footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 1963

12. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, 1965

13. Assassination of Martin Lu- ther King, Jr., 1968

14. Apollo 11 and 12 moon landings, 1969

15. Tiananmen Square protests, 1989

16. The fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989

17. Nelson Mandela released from prison, 1990

18. Amateur video of 9/11 attacks, 2001

19. Tahrir Square protests, 2011

Hammerton is also organizing the newly uploaded videos into playlists of her own: the AP currently has collections for crime, celebrity and “iconic” history videos, among others. We recommend the fashion playlist, if only to see these “futuristic and outlandish” wedding dresses from 1966.