The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#2I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records.
I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies.
Yes some of these services allow salvaging the data of relatives, but most people aren't going to be paying whatever's the future Google extra money monthly to preserve grandma's multi-gigabyte E-Mail account. What would previously be letters from the front stored in a box somewhere will be stored alongside swaths of commercial E-Mail and spam.
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#3I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records. I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies. Yes some of these services…
I keep old phones, laptops, and hard drives in a box for that reason. Eventually a robot may find it in the rubble and wave their magnetic proboscis over it and include things they find in their vlog.
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#4In a semi-related vein the university of Michigan’s Bentley library contains an amazing collection of letters from us soldiers to their families during the brief incursion of the US into Russia.
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#5I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records. I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies. Yes some of these services…
It's becoming expected that communication between two people or groups of people be fully private and encrypted, which was never the norm in the past. Not having random historical records is a side-effect of that, and IMO will only get worse.
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#6My family recently found a USO record my grandfather had recorded from somewhere in South-East China during WW2, which after digitizing myself we've donated to a WW2 historical society. Documentation from these events are critical to helping explain the context and the people who were actually involved in these events.
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#7I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records. I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies. Yes some of these services…
What is the value?
Honestly I view all of this (digging into someone's personal correspondence from the past) as extremely overly voyeuristic, rather than having actual value.
If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It does not respect the original author's intention.
(Not trying to be hostile - but I just wanted to say this.)
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#8I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records. I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies. Yes some of these services…
You want privacy. That's privacy.
Historians' heroes will be those with publicly facing personas. No one will remember anyone except the guy with a public Twitter profile.
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#9There is a similar project for Canada: https://canadianletters.ca/
I sent them all of my grandparents' correspondence from 1941 - 1945 which they meticulously organized into chronological order, and digitized. They're working on transcribing them now.
Re: The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
#10I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records. I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies. Yes some of these services…
What is the value? Honestly I view all of this (digging into someone's personal correspondence from the past) as extremely overly voyeuristic, rather than having actual value. If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It does not respect the original author's intention. (Not trying to be hostile - but I just wanted to say this.)
It's a good question. The reason we know how devastating and inhumane wars like say the Eastern front in WWII is in no small due to these sorts of records, otherwise we'd mostly just have contemporary state propaganda, statistics and the like.
Reading about what a meat grinder war is for the grunt on the ground helps future generations a lot more in not repeating those mistakes than so-and-so many millions died.
I think past a given point we shouldn't respect the author's privacy. Everybody's got records they'd like to keep private, and perhaps they'd even like to keep it private past their death to avoid some harm among their surviving immediate relatives.
But past a certain point everyone who could be harmed by such disclosures is long dead.