Research Guides: Ben Franklin's Believe It Or Not!: Interesting History

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The United States

Documents as History
Military Publications

Documents reflect the time in which they were published, and the position of the government during that time. Whether they meant to or not, they contribute to the historical record

Annual report / Smithsonian Institution, Center for Short-lived phenomena.
"The Center for Short-Lived Phenomena (CSLP) was created in January 1968 to assist Smithsonian scientists in studying short-lived phenomena and to provide a reporting and information service for use by the scientific community. Its focus was on meteoritics, vulcanism, earthquakes, and sudden changes in biological and ecological systems" (from the Smithsonian Archives website - https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_217169 )
Planning Educational Change (4 volume series)
The first three items in this series (Technical Aspects of School Desegregation, Human Resources in School Desegregation, and Integrating the Desegregated School) are mostly research- and theory-based documents which offer recommendations for the school desegregation process. The fourth item, "How Five School Systems Desegregated," are sketches illustrating how successful the application of the prior principles was in the work of five geographically dispersed school systems.
The state of the American record : a report on how well Americans are documenting their history
"[E]very assertion in the history textbooks our children study is at least theoretically traceable to some scholar's footnote identifying the evidence that he or she thinks substantiates it." (from the first chapter)

Medical Aspects of Harsh Environments
The first volume in a series of three, Medical Aspects of Harsh Environments, "provides historical information, proper prevention and clinical treatment of the various environmental illnesses and injuries, and the performance consequences our warfighters face when exposed to environmental extremes of heat, cold, altitude, pressure, and acceleration" (per the introduction by then-Surgeon General James B. Peake).
Military review poetry reader : global war on terrorism, 2001-2021.
"Since the dawn of human history, soldiers have turned to poetry to express their experience of war. Poetry is an outlet to extract meaning from the exhilaration, suffering, injustice, and destruction of war, allowing the soldier to record personal experiences wrought by intense emotions, passions, visceral fear, anxiety, loss, pain, even despair."
(from the introduction by Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt)

Around the World!

Cold War

Soviet Life (AKA Russian Life)
"Published by reciprocal agreement between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union," this English-language publication offered a close-up look at special events and everyday life in the Soviet Union (from a very particular perspective).
Soviet Woman
An English-language publication distributed by the Soviet Union, and described as, "A magazine devoted to social and political problems, literature and art."