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In a new article, “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory,” Michael Menna and Lila Bailey argue that the shift from buying physical media to licensing digital content has created a first-order political crisis. The piece builds on the groundwork laid in Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record, tracing the problem across five arenas—educational resources, journalism, civic and movement archives, religious study, and environmental science—to show how digital ephemerality is already undermining people’s ability to learn, organize, and hold power accountable.
The article’s second half revisits the four digital rights at the heart of the Our Future Memory movement: the rights to collect, preserve, provide access to, and collaborate around digital materials—the same things memory institutions have always done with physical collections. It walks through why each right matters on its own terms, from the Wiley e-book withdrawal that blindsided George Washington University to the federal government’s removal of climate data and environmental justice tools like EJScreen. The throughline is simple: none of this is inevitable. Vanishing culture is a policy choice, and it’s one we can still reverse if libraries, archives, and museums make the case together instead of absorbing these losses one at a time.
This piece is a call to action as much as an analysis. If you work at or care about a library, archive, or museum, we hope you’ll read the full article over at The Political Librarian, and consider signing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online at ourfuturememory.org. The more institutions that add their names, the harder it becomes for publishers and platforms to treat our shared cultural memory as disposable.
Queer history has often been overlooked, erased, or excluded from traditional archives. In the third episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer, artist, and archivist Brooke Palmieri about the vital role queer archives play in preserving memory, identity, and community. Drawing on his work with CAMP BOOKS and his research into LGBTQ+ history, Brooke explores why archives matter—not just as collections of records, but as tools for helping people understand where they come from and imagine new futures.
The conversation traces how queer communities have built their own archives in response to historical exclusion from mainstream institutions, creating spaces where stories of love, activism, creativity, and survival can be preserved and shared. Brooke reflects on the power of community-led archiving, the opportunities digital platforms create for expanding access to queer history, and the challenges posed by disappearing information, online misinformation, and unequal access to cultural heritage. Together, Vida and Brooke explore how preserving queer archives helps ensure that marginalized histories remain visible, accessible, and available to future generations.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
This year, as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), the Internet Archive is collaborating with two outstanding contributors to make it easier for patrons to find relevant books on Open Library.
Tanishq Sangwan, a 19-year-old from Gurugram, India, and Chisom Nnamani of Lagos, Nigeria, are two of 1,141 software developers from around the world who have been selected through GSoC to hone their engineering capabilities with open-source organizations.
“The Internet Archive’s focus for 2026 is: tools for participation. Participation must be earned by building an experience patrons want to return to.” said Mek, program lead for Open Library. “The work that both Chisom and Tanishq are doing is central to creating a more reliable Open Library experience, where readers can repeatedly discover, access, and enjoy books.”
Tanishq Sangwan
Sangwan, who just completed his second year of college studying artificial intelligence, is focusing on the journey of patrons who join Open Library and use it once, but do not return. His objective is to understand where patrons encounter barriers and identify opportunities to create a more useful, lasting experience.
Sangwan comes into the project with two years of experience from ZNotes, an educational organization that provides free notes and videos from students around the world.
“I built this passion and got this amazing feeling when my work was making an impact on people and they were receiving some value,” he said. “Now, Google Summer of Code is a wonderful opportunity to connect with open-source organizations and Open Library where its work directly impacts people’s lives.”
“This year’s collaboration is important because lots of patrons discover Open Library, but too often don’t always find the books they want,” Mek said.
The work begins when a patron lands on a book that is unavailable for reading. Soon, instead of reaching a dead end, patrons will be presented with nearby books on the same shelf that are available now.
When patrons find a relevant, available book, a simpler registration process will help them get started with fewer steps and return to the book they found. Furthermore, Sangwan is helping patrons connect with new book recommendations on an ongoing basis by introducing an activity feed to the account page.
“I like to hear about the patron psychology, how they’re interacting with the platform, and what’s going in their mind from the first moment to the very last,” he said. “We’ll be researching and conducting interviews with lost patrons so we can connect this bridge between patrons and the millions of books in our catalog.”
Chisom Nnamani
Nnamani, who already has certifications in Data Analytics and Data Engineering, just completed her sophomore year pursuing a second degree in Computer Science. At Open Library, Nnamani is leading a major cleanup effort to add structured tag data to books so they can be searched by genre and subgenre. Her work is paving the way for the addition of a wide variety of new searchable tags, including: moods, fiction and non-fiction, content warnings, and literary formats, such as memoirs, biographies, and more. By cleaning up messy data and enabling better genre and subject browsing, Chisom is helping remove barriers preventing patrons from discovering books they love.
“Today, many of our subject pages feel computer generated and can’t compare to the beautiful, curated experiences you find at small book stores,” says Mek. “The work Chisom is leading to map the messy subject tags we have to clear genres and subgenres will help us offer patrons a more useful and satisfying browsing experience.”
“I really care about books being accessible to people,” Nnamani said. “In Nigeria, we have limited access to physical libraries, so Open Library is something that matters. It gives everyone the opportunity to come and read any kind of book and gain insights.”
“This project is inspiring to me,” Nnamani said. “I like to work on projects where I can connect the data and infrastructure in ways that contribute to the organization’s goals. I enjoy helping to solve complex problems at the intersection of systems and data.”
Open Library Fellows work remotely, but meet regularly online with Internet Archive staff and mentors. At the end of the summer, each contributor will publish a blog post explaining their technical journey and experience gained.
Since 2005, Google’s Summer of Code has supported more than 23,000 students from 123 countries with stipends to receive mentorship and contribute 48 million lines of code to over 1,000 open source organizations worldwide.
Food is having a cultural moment. As America marks its 250th anniversary, new cookbooks celebrate endangered culinary traditions, UNESCO calls recipes “living heritage,” and chefs are rediscovering centuries-old techniques. But preserving food culture takes more than cooking—it takes preserving the books, handwritten recipes, community cookbooks, and stories that carry this knowledge from one generation to the next. That’s the focus of this week’s Future Knowledge episode with Katie Livingston.
Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.
From church cookbooks and handwritten recipe notes to the rise of food blogs, Katie explains how recipes capture regional traditions, social values, and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by traditional preservation efforts. The conversation examines how domestic culture—particularly culture created and maintained by women—has historically been undervalued despite its importance as a record of lived experience. As cooking increasingly moves online, Katie also considers the risks of digital ephemerality and what may be lost when personal archives give way to disappearing websites and search-engine-driven recipes. Together, Vida and Katie explore how preserving food culture helps us preserve the stories, communities, and histories embedded within it.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
Since December last year, when we decided DWeb Camp would take place in Europe, we’ve been hard at work to evolve the spirit of our unique event and adapt it to a new context. It took a major leap of faith for us as organizers. We knew it would be an ambitious endeavor, but we felt strongly that it would be worth it. In the 6 months since that decision, we’ve navigated countless challenges behind the scenes.
And at many of those junctures, we would have been lost and out of our depth if it were not for the invaluable support of our local partners; namely, the Department of Decentralization. The DoD is a non-profit active in the advocacy for decentralization and open-source software. They’re deeply rooted in the Berlin community, but also connected with many other networks worldwide.
It all started from a spontaneous reply to one of our posts on the ATmosphere. Afri from DoD proposed that we collaborate in case we chose Berlin as the location of DWeb Camp 2026. When we did, we reached out. As we started collaborating remotely, over video calls and emails, we realized DoD and DWeb’s close values alignment. A few months later, we found ourselves co-organizing what turned out to be a phenomenal in-person meetup at c-base at the end of February.
Looking back, DWeb Camp 2026 would have been impossible without the help we got from the incredible humans of DoD. They welcomed us with open arms, and now, we want to introduce them to you before you can meet them all at Camp. Below are excerpts from interviews we did with DoD’s Raul, Afri, Peter and Franzi. We have made slight edits for reading clarity.
Both as an organisation and as a community of practitioners, DoD profoundly cares about digital rights and Software Freedom. Despite its long history, the open source ecosystem continues to face multiple challenges in this ever-changing world. While we will be diving deeper in these topics at DWeb Camp, we asked the interviewees to share their thoughts.
Raul’s point perfectly summarizes the multi-faceted hurdles around the key problem of sustainable funding:
The FLOSS world has demonstrated remarkable results in development, security, and community building, [and] open source software is the foundation beneath virtually every critical piece of technology in use today. We have proven that a collaborative, collective approach to solving problems is a model that works. Yet the movement’s most pressing challenge, and I acknowledge my bias having worked on this issue for many years, remains its failure to secure stable, non-discretionary funding for the developers and maintainers who underpin our everyday technology stack. This is not a new problem, but it is one we have consistently failed to resolve. Grants and donations, however well-intentioned, are inherently unpredictable and cannot serve as the financial foundation for critical infrastructure. What we need is a path toward sustainability that doesn’t depend on goodwill alone.
What makes this harder is that the challenge is as much internal as it is external. The FLOSS community itself is divided over how to solve it, and those competing visions create real friction within ecosystems that should, ideally, be pulling in the same direction.
Since DoD began as a collective focused on event organising, the issue of funding applies in this scenario, too. How to make events open and accessible, while still remaining independent and autonomously financed? Afri is proud of DoD’s stance on sponsorships:
The most important lesson I learned by organising events with DoD is to refuse sponsor money. Grants, memberships, donations, anything but a logo on the wall. It is harder to fund and easier to run. The atmosphere is unobstructed, the discussions are honest, and people show up in their free time because they want to, not because their employer paid for the booth.
If the environment feels light, welcoming, and free from corporate interest, Peter points out that it becomes even more enticing for volunteers to contribute:
People are happy to participate as volunteers and organisers in events without being paid when they believe in the cause and see that you are not sacrificing it for the sake of convenience.
People who are treated with respect for their views and reasons are extremely nice, proactive, helpful, and very easy to work with.
Raul adds:
Nothing matches the energy that voluntarism brings to spaces like this: not just in getting things done, but in the sense of belonging it creates. For anyone building a new community, the FLOSS world offers the clearest possible model: organic, gradual, rooted in shared interests and shared concerns. A community that grows from genuine common ground is one that is very difficult to break.
It is precisely because of this spirit that we realised DoD was a perfect partner for DWeb. Beyond sharing our values and restlessly pursuing the DWeb Principles, we decided to collaborate with the Department of Decentralisation because of a virtually endless set of skills, competence, and networking—both literally and metaphorically. In a timespan of a few months, DoD truly became the backbone of DWeb Camp 2026.
The volunteers of the DoD will be in charge of fundamental infrastructure and teams at DWeb Camp. Raul’s expertise has been instrumental to help us figure out administrative matters. Afri planned electricity distribution against German VDE norms and will set up the LoRa mesh across the campground. Franzi is involved in the overall content curation alongside the DWeb Core Team and is co-producing the Opening Ceremony. Peter is focusing on the communication infrastructure, closely collaborating with the Freifunk folks, who are some real megaminds behind the network setup.
DoD and their members are responsible for a tea tent and the Roots Music stage. And they’ve been hosting the digital camp infrastructure for ticketing, the Call For Proposals, schedule, and the internal document suite.
Despite the great amount of work we are all facing, we are in the middle of BUILD, impatient for DWeb Camp to start. Here is why Franzi is excited about it.
Conferences are usually short on time, conversations only happen in hallways compressed between talks or in awkward networking events. I’m looking forward to making organic connections, and getting to know new communities!
Afri is looking forward to…
Five days where the people who actually build the decentralized Web are physically in the same forest. Builders, researchers, organisers, kids running between tents. I want the collaborations that form face-to-face in a week tend to outlast the ones that begin on a video call.
If you don’t have a ticket for DWeb Camp yet, here is why Franzi thinks you should get it:
DWeb Camp brings together bright minds from different communities that still exchange too little in their regular day-to-day lives. I believe that many technology puzzle pieces will need to come together to enable human freedom in an increasingly dystopian world—DWeb camp presents a unique opportunity to sync across domains and build stuff that really matters.
Peter boils it down to a perfect metaphor:
[…] this is a really great place for cross-pollination. Like a huge meadow of wildflowers as participants, with ideas as the bees in between!
DWeb Camp is just three days away. Join us in our journey towards a distributed tech ecosystem, and come meet all the members of the Department of Decentralization!
As more of our cultural heritage moves online, a troubling question is emerging: what happens when the things we create, share, and cherish simply disappear? In the first episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with researcher, book historian, and literary sociologist Luca Messarra, author of the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture report, about the growing threat of cultural loss in the digital age.
From disappearing websites and deleted social media archives to lost films, books, music, and video games, Luca explores why culture vanishes and why it matters. He explains how copyright law, corporate control of digital platforms, and the shift from ownership to licensing are making it harder for libraries, archives, and communities to preserve cultural memory. Along the way, he shares stories that illustrate both the fragility of our digital heritage and the importance of preserving it: from a favorite YouTube recipe rescued by the Wayback Machine to the role cultural artifacts play in memory and identity. The conversation wraps on a positive note, with a look toward solutions and what creators, libraries, and everyday citizens can do to help ensure culture remains accessible for generations to come.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it.
Hosted by musician Vida Vojić, the series features conversations with researchers, archivists, librarians, and creators working to safeguard everything from cookbooks and queer archives to African folktales and endangered languages. Together, they examine how copyright, digital platforms, and changing technologies are reshaping our collective memory, while highlighting the communities finding new ways to keep culture alive. Through personal stories and global perspectives, Vanishing Culture reveals that preservation isn’t just about protecting the past, it’s about ensuring that future generations can access, understand, and build upon our shared cultural record.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
Vanishing Culture #1: What We Stand to Lose with Luca Messarra
As more of our cultural heritage moves online, a troubling question is emerging: what happens when the things we create, share, and cherish simply disappear? In the first episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with researcher, book historian, and literary sociologist Luca Messarra, author of the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture report, about the growing threat of cultural loss in the digital age.
From disappearing websites and deleted social media archives to lost films, books, music, and video games, Luca explores why culture vanishes and why it matters. He explains how copyright law, corporate control of digital platforms, and the shift from ownership to licensing are making it harder for libraries, archives, and communities to preserve cultural memory. Along the way, he shares stories that illustrate both the fragility of our digital heritage and the importance of preserving it—from a favorite YouTube recipe rescued by the Wayback Machine to the role cultural artifacts play in memory, identity, and human dignity. The conversation concludes with a look toward solutions and what creators, libraries, and everyday citizens can do to help ensure culture remains accessible for generations to come.
Vanishing Culture #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie Livingston
Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.
From church cookbooks and handwritten recipe notes to the rise of food blogs, Katie explains how recipes capture regional traditions, social values, and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by traditional preservation efforts. The conversation examines how domestic culture—particularly culture created and maintained by women—has historically been undervalued despite its importance as a record of lived experience. As cooking increasingly moves online, Katie also considers the risks of digital ephemerality and what may be lost when personal archives give way to disappearing websites and search-engine-driven recipes. Together, Vida and Katie explore how preserving food culture helps us preserve the stories, communities, and histories embedded within it.
Vanishing Culture #3: Saving Queer Memory with Brooke Palmieri
RELEASE DATE: JULY 15, 2026
Queer history has often been overlooked, erased, or excluded from traditional archives. In the third episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer, artist, and archivist Brooke Palmieri about the vital role queer archives play in preserving memory, identity, and community. Drawing on his work with CAMP BOOKS and his research into LGBTQ+ history, Brooke explores why archives matter—not just as collections of records, but as tools for helping people understand where they come from and imagine new futures.
The conversation traces how queer communities have built their own archives in response to historical exclusion from mainstream institutions, creating spaces where stories of love, activism, creativity, and survival can be preserved and shared. Brooke reflects on the power of community-led archiving, the opportunities digital platforms create for expanding access to queer history, and the challenges posed by disappearing information, online misinformation, and unequal access to cultural heritage. Together, Vida and Brooke explore how preserving queer archives helps ensure that marginalized histories remain visible, accessible, and available to future generations.
Vanishing Culture #4: Keeping African Folktales Alive with Helen Nde & Laura Gibbs
RELEASE DATE: JULY 22, 2026
Folktales are more than stories—they are living records of culture, identity, and collective memory. In the fourth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer and researcher Helen Nde, founder of Mythological Africans, and folklorist Laura Gibbs about the importance of preserving African folklore in the digital age. Together, they explore how stories help communities understand themselves, pass down knowledge across generations, and make sense of a changing world.
The conversation examines the challenges of preserving oral traditions, from the distortions introduced by colonial collectors to the loss of context when dynamic storytelling practices are reduced to written records. Helen and Laura discuss how digitization can help make folklore more accessible and discoverable, while also opening new possibilities for communities to share and reinterpret their stories online. They also reflect on the importance of trustworthy archives in an era when myths and historical narratives are increasingly used to shape political and cultural identities. Ultimately, the episode asks what it will take to ensure that these rich storytelling traditions remain available—not as relics of the past, but as living resources for future generations.
Vanishing Culture #5: A Language Worth Saving with Peter Scholing
RELEASE DATE: JULY 29, 2026
Languages can vanish just as easily as books, websites, or archives—and when they do, entire ways of understanding the world can disappear with them. In the fifth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Peter Scholing of Biblioteca Nacional Aruba and the Coleccion Aruba digital heritage platform about the importance of preserving Papiamento, Aruba’s creole language, and the cultural heritage it carries.
Peter shares the story of how Aruba’s libraries, archives, and cultural institutions came together to build a digital collection that now preserves hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, newspapers, recordings, and books. The conversation explores the unique preservation challenges facing island communities, from geographic isolation and climate risks to the legacy of colonialism, which has scattered much of Aruba’s historical record across multiple countries and languages. Peter explains why expanding access to materials in Papiamento is essential for education, cultural identity, and historical understanding, and how digitization is helping unlock previously inaccessible collections. Looking ahead, he discusses the opportunities new technologies offer for smaller languages and why ensuring a vibrant digital future for Papiamento is a crucial part of preserving Aruba’s culture for generations to come.
Vanishing Culture #6: What We’ve Learned with Vida Vojić & Alice Bridgwood
RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 6, 2026
What does it mean to preserve culture in an age of disappearing websites, platform-controlled media, and fragile digital memories? In the final episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, Future Knowledge hosts Dave Hansen and Chris Freeland sit down with musician and series host Vida Vojić and producer Alice Bridgwood to reflect on the conversations, ideas, and lessons that emerged throughout the series.
Looking back on discussions about cookbooks, queer archives, African folklore, Papiamento, and more, Vida and Alice explore the common threads connecting seemingly disparate forms of cultural preservation. They reflect on how culture is shaped not only by institutions, but by communities and individuals who choose what to remember, share, and pass on. The conversation examines the challenges of living in an “age of platforms,” the risks of relying on technology and corporations to steward cultural memory, and the growing movement toward community-driven preservation efforts. Along the way, the group discusses what surprised them most, how the series changed their own habits and perspectives, and why they remain hopeful that people everywhere can play an active role in keeping culture alive. Rather than ending on a note of loss, the episode offers a hopeful reminder that culture survives when people care enough to preserve, share, and reimagine it together.
About the Future Knowledge podcast
Future Knowledge explores the intersection of technology, culture, and information policy with leading authors, scholars, and experts. From copyright and open access to AI and digital preservation, we discuss the big issues shaping knowledge and creativity in the digital age. Future Knowledge is brought to you by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance.
As America celebrates its Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) this year, explore a curated list of materials preserved at the Internet Archive documenting the nation’s founding, the Declaration of Independence, past ephemera created for the nation’s anniversaries, and new efforts to capture and preserve the materials published by democracies.
Democracy’s Library
The Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project helps preserve critical information and publications produced by federal, state, provincial, and municipal governments, and makes them available for users to access and to anyone wanting to build new services on these public documents. Learn more about Democracy’s Library.
Declaration of Independence
The National Archives of the United States lists three documents as the “Founding Documents”: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Preamble to the Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence was ratified on July 4, 1776, creating a historical date that Americans observe every year as “Independence Day.” Internet Archive preserves many materials related to the Declaration including a souvenir copy, a full reading of the text from LibriVox, and more educational and informative items.
The Declaration of Independence on the Wayback Machine
Internet Archive has been archiving the National Archives and Records Administration website since 1997. Compare the earliest capture (June 6, 1997) of the page displaying the Declaration of Independence via the Wayback Machine to a more recent capture (June 16, 2026). These preserved web pages allow Americans and other observers to trace the ways that presentation of the document has changed online over nearly 30 years.
How has America celebrated past ‘-Ennial’ anniversaries
Since its founding America has always told stories about itself. These stories see hotspots every 50 years during the various ‘-ennial’ anniversaries dating back to 1826. Below is a selection of materials highlighting each past anniversary. To explore more, check out the broader collections linked within the relevant sections.
Semi-centennial (1826)
On its first 50-year anniversary, America still was in living memory of the American Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Almost symbolically, two titans of that moment would pass on that very day: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was instrumental in drafting the original Declaration while Adams was one of the 56 signatories. Each man served as President during the earliest years of the United States’ history.
The Semi-Centennial was commonly referred to as the American Jubilee at the time. The document below is a printed version of a speech given by Reverend William B. Johnson in 1826:
The speech traces a providential history of America from European settlement through the Revolution and into the nation’s first fifty years, reflecting the patriotic and deeply religious tone common to many Jubilee observances. It offers a snapshot of how Americans in 1826 understood their country’s past and envisioned its future.
Centennial (1876)
Following the American Civil War, the late 1860s and 1870s saw the passage of the Civil War Amendments (XIII, XIV, XV) that altered the civic order of the nation. As the 100th anniversary came about, the United States hosted the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Explore more from this moment in our collections.
1872 Map from Caldwell’s Illustrated Combination Centennial Atlas Of Beaver County, Pennsylvania. by J.A. Caldwell (1876).
This map of the United States, published by cartographer J.A. Caldwell around the time of the nation’s Centennial celebrations in 1876, reflects how Americans visualized their country at its 100th anniversary. As a Centennial-era artifact, it captures both the geographic reach of the United States and the national growth, infrastructure, and westward development in the decades following the Civil War.
This 1876 recipe booklet from the collections of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives illustrates how Centennial-era businesses tied themselves to the celebration of American progress and industry. The booklet offers a glimpse into everyday domestic life during the Centennial year, while also demonstrating how companies used cookbooks as an early form of marketing to reach households across the country.
Sesquicentennial (1926)
Part of the Roaring Twenties, the 150th Anniversary of the United States was informed by the cultural and technological expansion of American society. Once again coinciding with an Exposition, this celebration saw a greater focus on the contentious topic of immigration and technological modernity. Explore more from this moment in our collections.
One of the official musical works of Philadelphia’s 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition, John Philip Sousa’s Sesquicentennial Exposition March transformed the anniversary of American independence into sound. Written by the nation’s most famous bandleader, the march reflects the exposition’s blend of historical commemoration, civic pride, and large-scale public celebration. This recording comes from the United States Marine Band.
Created for the 1926 National Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, this booklet explained the United States Public Health Service’s responsibilities through photographs and descriptions of medical practices. The booklet reflects a period of heightened concern over immigration and public health in the United States, coming just two years after the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, when medical screening and exclusion of immigrants were central features of federal immigration policy.
Created for visitors to the Bell Telephone System exhibit at Philadelphia’s 1926 Sesquicentennial International Exposition, this booklet celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the telephone through a first-person narrative spoken by the technology itself.
Bicentennial (1976)
The 200th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing coincided with an all-out blitz of media and governmental efforts to commemorate the occasion. From Congressional Committees, to civic engagement, and the leveraging of Hollywood Stars, the 200th anniversary was everywhere. Explore more from this moment in our collections.
Produced during the 1976 United States Bicentennial celebrations, this television advertisement features John Wayne promoting U.S. Savings Bonds as a way for Americans to participate in the nation’s future while commemorating its 200th anniversary.
This Amtrak brochure promoted a special Bicentennial-era excursion ticket that allowed travelers to visit cities closely associated with the American Revolution and the nation’s founding. By combining discounted rail travel with visits to historic landmarks, the brochure demonstrates how the 1976 Bicentennial transformed heritage tourism into a national pastime.
Produced as part of the Bicentennial celebration, New Spirit for ’76 demonstrates how organizers and promoters sought to frame the nation’s 200th anniversary as a moment of reflection, optimism, and shared identity.
Local news is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers. 213 counties have no local news outlet at all and another 1,524 have just one. Newsrooms continue to shrink, close, and merge, often with no plan in place for the long term preservation and access of their archives. Online content that continues to be published by newsrooms is also at risk. According to the Pew Research Center, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are already gone and nearly a quarter of news webpages contain at least one broken link. The local record of our communities is vanishing in real time.
This urgent challenge is what brought two very different professions together on June 17 in National Harbor, Maryland. Hosted by the Internet Archive with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the National Summit on Local News Preservation gathered journalists, editors, archivists, librarians, and researchers to start a conversation between the newsrooms producing local journalism and the memory institutions preserving it. This event was a part of the Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program, an Internet Archive initiative supported by a grant from Press Forward. The program provides training, tools, and support directly to up to 300 newsrooms nationwide and helps develop collaborative partnerships between archives and news organizations.
Librarians and archivists understand what’s at stake and have been working to address these challenges for a long time. Local news supports a range of information needs for the historians, scholars, students, and citizens they serve. Frequent updates, complex multimedia content, and paywalls are just some of the obstacles they face when working to capture online news while still stewarding decades of journalism produced on physical formats. Journalists also understand how valuable their work is as a record of the communities they cover. Faced with reduced staffing and shrinking budgets, they are forced to focus on tomorrow’s deadline, not who will need access to this story fifty years from now. While the challenges and urgency are well understood by both sectors, there are few models for working together to address this crisis. Taking steps towards developing an actionable plan was the purpose of the Summit.
Panelists Randa Cardwell (Photojournalism Archive Project), Becca Bender (Rhode Island News Media Archive), Stephanie Jenkins (Archival Producers Alliance), Cassidy Meurer (University of Louisville), and Frank LoMonte (CNN) discuss the particular challenges of preserving TV news and photojournalism.
The day mixed expert panels with structured discussion. Panelists tackled hard questions: conflicts over rights and revenue, how to connect communities to archived news, and how libraries and newsrooms can realistically partner together. One panel focused on the particular difficulty of preserving local TV news and photojournalism. Case studies were shared from the professionals doing this work right now in newsrooms, public libraries, state libraries, non-profits, and research groups.
An attendee reports out on their group’s discussion
Then attendees worked together in breakout discussion groups built around five topics: Access and Discovery; Infrastructure and Technology; Organizational Culture and Partnerships; Rights, Revenue, and the Public Good; and Sustainability and Advocacy. Each group named the obstacles in their area and drafted short and long term recommendations aimed at addressing them. Common themes emerged from across all of the groups. Several groups advocated for immediate action across both types of organizations stating that holding out for perfect standards or reliable national infrastructure would result in more information loss. Groups also kept returning to a point that publishers may find counterintuitive: making an archive discoverable and freely accessible tends to directly benefit newsrooms. And more than one group, working separately, proposed the same ambitious idea: a Report for America style fellowship that places archivists inside newsrooms to develop preservation plans and workflows that can be embedded into core operations. Those are just a few of the ideas that came out of the event. Later this summer, a full report will be published and shared widely.
A group of attendees discuss organizational culture and partnerships
As some publishers block the preservation of their websites and local newsrooms continue to shrink, this work has never been more urgent. But the stakeholders who can do something about ensuring that local news persists, that it continues being produced and preserved, are thinking big and taking action. Many of them spent June 17 in National Harbor, working together towards a future where local news isn’t at risk of vanishing.
