Nine Historical Archives That Will Spill New Secrets

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Nine Historical Archives That Will Spill New Secrets

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:07 am

Nine Historical Archives That Will Spill New Secrets
Declassified records and journals to be released in coming decades will shed new light on pivotal 20th-century figures and events
By Mark Strauss
Smithsonian magazine, August 2010


The past looks quite promising. Over the next several decades, governments and universities will shed new light on historic figures and events by opening long-sealed archives.

Take the Harvard University Archives, which, in 30 years, will unseal John F. Kennedy’s responses to questionnaires and psychological tests he was first given as an undergraduate. Robert Dallek, a historian and author of the JFK biography An Unfinished Life, speculates that the papers could reveal fresh insights into the 35th president’s character. “Did he have any focus on social issues as a young man?” Dallek wonders. “Or maybe there will be a picture of a very vacuous young man, preoccupied with his self-indulgences, because that was another side of him.”

Keeping in mind that history never ceases to be rewritten, here is a collection of must-know archives scheduled to open in coming decades:

2011: The State Department’s Office of the Historian expects to begin releasing volumes on Nixon and Ford administration foreign policy initiatives, including potentially new details on the energy crisis, NATO and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

2019: The papers of the poet T. S. Eliot, who died in 1965, include 1,200 personal letters that have remained off-limits: his correspondence with Emily Hale, a girlfriend whom biographer Lyndall Gordon described as Eliot’s “muse.” In 1959, Hale bequeathed the letters to Princeton University.

2026: As chief justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986, Warren Burger presided over cases concerning abortion, capital punishment and the Watergate scandal. In 1996, the year after Burger died, his son, Wade, donated the justice’s personal papers—some two million documents—to the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, with the understanding they would be sealed for 30 years.

2027: The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveillance tapes for 50 years.

2037: A decade ago, Oxford University’s Bodleian Library released ten boxes of documents pertaining to the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII so that he could marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson. But one collection of “sensitive documents” (Box 24) was to be withheld for 37 years. British news media speculate the documents include embarrassing revelations about the Queen Mother’s alleged support for negotiating peace with Nazi Germany prior to the outbreak of World War II.

2040: Psychiatrists initiated the Harvard Study of Adult Development in 1937 to track the lives of 268 men who’d recently entered college. The ongoing study uses questionnaires, interviews, psychological tests and medical exams to better understand what contributes to mental and physical well-being. The identity of most of the men is unknown, but reportedly they include a best-selling novelist and four candidates for the Senate. (Former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee admitted to being a participant in his 1995 autobiography, A Good Life.) John F. Kennedy’s file—containing questionnaires and reports from 1940 until his death in 1963—was withdrawn from the study’s office, not to be unsealed for 30 years.

2041: Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess flew from Germany to Scotland on May 10, 1941, claiming that he wanted to discuss peace terms with Britain and that their common enemy was the Soviet Union. Hess was imprisoned and interrogated. After the war, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to life at Spandau Prison. A British intelligence file said to contain an interrogation transcript and Hess’ correspondence with King George VI is scheduled to be unsealed 100 years after his arrest. Historians say the papers might show whether British intelligence tricked Hess into undertaking his fateful mission.

2045: In May 1945, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) attacked two German ships in the Baltic Sea carrying 7,000 survivors of the Neuengamme concentration camp. Only 350 survived. RAF intelligence had mistakenly believed the vessels held Nazi officials escaping to Norway or Sweden. Because the RAF ordered the records to remain classified for 100 years, scholars have been unable to offer a complete account of one of the worst “friendly-fire” incidents in history.

2045: During World War II, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) lent Britain highly skilled radar technicians—“the Secret 5,000”—who flew on patrols over the Atlantic Ocean to detect German submarines and aircraft. The RCAF deemed its work so classified it sealed all pertinent records about the operation for a century. Even today, the Secret 5,000 are not mentioned in official RCAF histories.

Mark Strauss is a senior editor at Smithsonian.

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Nine Historical Archives That Will Spill New Secrets

Postby Simulist » Sat Jul 03, 2010 1:38 pm

Smithsonian Magazine wrote:The past looks quite promising.

I'm not sure even the great minds at the Smithsonian grasp the real irony in those words.
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
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Re: Nine Historical Archives That Will Spill New Secrets

Postby 82_28 » Sat Jul 03, 2010 2:01 pm

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There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Nine Historical Archives That Will Spill New Secrets

Postby elfismiles » Sun Jul 04, 2010 7:17 pm


SYFY Unveils Potential Major Development In The Roswell Case Involving Physical Evidence And A Skeletal Relic
Network Premieres Documentary 'Inside Secret Government Warehouses: Shocking Revelations'
For Immediate Release


Alien body parts, powerful religious artifacts, UFO wreckage - what exactly is hidden behind heavily guarded doors?

Inspired by Syfy's Smash Hit Series Warehouse 13, NBC News award-winning journalist Lester Holt goes on a global expedition to uncover the truth behind the world's top secret, mysterious warehouses where super-classified objects are kept.

In Inside Secret Government Warehouses: Shocking Revelations, (premiering on the Syfy network Sunday, July 11, at 9PM (ET/PT)) Holt capitalizes on exclusive access to restricted sites, traveling from Area 51 in Nevada to deep inside the Vatican secret archives - the centerpiece of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons - interviewing informants, Washington decision-makers, former top military personnel and leading experts.

Among the explosive findings:

A mandible thought to be not of this world - potential evidence that alien life was hidden by the United States government at
Wright-Patterson Air Force base.

High level informant who describes huge underground tunnels beneath military installations.

Victims (including former U.S. military personnel) of unauthorized government experimentation.

A former US Air Force pilot ordered to shoot down a UFO in England.

Experts interviewed for the show include:

John Podesta, Former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton and CEO, Center for American Progress

Michio Kaku, world renowned theoretical physicist.

Paul Levinson, author of 15 books and professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.

Hank Albarelli Jr., author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the C.I.A.'s Secret Cold War Experiments.

Katherine Olmsted, Professor of History at UC Davis.

Rep. Michael Turner, Ohio 3rd District (covers Wright-Patterson)

Luca Carboni, General Secretary, Vatican Secret Archives

Shara Bailey, Dental Anthropologist, New York University

Eleanor Herman, Author, Mistress of the Vatican

Robert Collins, Ret. U.S Air Force Captain

Jonathan Turley, Law Professor, George Washington University

Donald Schmitt, Author, Roswell Expert

Glenn Campbell, Area 51 Expert

Inside Secret Government Warehouses: Shocking Revelations is a co-production of Syfy and Peacock Productions. Executive Producer: Gretchen Eisele. Producer: Kimberly Ferdinando. For Peacock Productions: Executive in Charge of Production: Sharon Scott. Co-Executive Producers: Knute Walker, Benjamin Ringe. For Syfy: Thomas Vitale.

Returning for its second season Tuesday, July 6, at 9PM (ET/PT), Warehouse 13, the most successful series in Syfy's history, follows two Secret Service agents (Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly) who find themselves transferred to a massive, top-secret storage facility in South Dakota which houses every strange artifact, mysterious relic, fantastical object and supernatural souvenir ever collected by the U.S. government.

The Warehouse's caretaker Artie (Saul Rubinek) charges the agents with chasing down reports of supernatural and paranormal
activity in search of new objects to cache at the Warehouse, as well as helping him to control the Warehouse itself. The series
also features Allison Scagliotti as Claudia, Artie's apprentice in the Warehouse.

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