Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Important On-Line Collections from the FDR Library

As a guy who spends a lot of time thinking about the New Deal, I was excited to learn that the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library’s collection of digitized material, FRANKLIN, has just gone online.  The following collections have been digitized:

    FDR’s Map Room Papers
    FDR’s President’s Secretary’s File (PSF)
    Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations
    Presidential Press Conferences
    Eleanor Roosevelt Selected Correspondence: 1933-45
    Eleanor Roosevelt Selected Correspondence: 1945-47
    Selected Documents on the Holocaust and Refugees
    The FDR Library Significant Documents Collection
    The Grace Tully Collection

As it happens, just last month I was in Hyde Park in part to work with the PSF file for the New Deal lawyer Thomas G. Corcoran, so I was very familiar with its contents.  They are all online.  Also, I hadn’t thought to check the Grace Tully collection while in Hyde Park, but I can now see that it contains a very poignant letter from Corcoran on the occasion of his daughter Margaret’s debutante party.  And if you want to see Rexford Tugwell's telegram protesting the firing of Jerome Frank from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1935, it is in this PSF folder.  The first of three PSF files on the Supreme Court is here.  The first of several PSF files for Felix Frankfurter is here.

The FDR Library explains:
Digital copies of significant documents and photographs from the archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum. FRANKLIN launched with 350,000 pages of archival documents and 2,000 historical photographs, along with many detailed descriptions of archival collections not yet digitized. Users can search the digital collections by keyword or directly browse the full lists of digitized archival folders in a virtual research room environment. Documents include Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's New Deal and wartime correspondence with world leaders, government administrators, and regular Americans. Photographs include public domain images of the Roosevelts throughout their respective lifetimes, as well as subject areas like the Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II.