On July 20, 1944, in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a briefcase bomb at Hitler’s Eastern Front military headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. Once Stauffenberg detonated the bomb, he believed Hitler to be dead. He rushed back to Berlin to initiate Valkyrie in order to take control of the government and the military with his fellow co-conspirators. The scene in Berlin quickly turned to chaos as conflicting reports about Hitler leaked to the military and Hitler’s colleagues.   Once Nazi officials were assured that Hitler was alive, Stauffenberg and his associates were immediately arrested and killed shortly after midnight that night.

Stauffenberg and his men came devastatingly close to ending the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Hitler’s reign of terror, but an early end to the war was not meant to be. Instead, these men paid the ultimate price for their disloyalty to their Führer.

Otto Remer was in charge of the home guard for Operation Valkyrie.  You can read his account of the coup attempt in the WWII Military Studies.

The WWII Foreign Military Studies, 1945-54 includes reports, interviews, questionnaires and more regarding major operations and events of World War 2.

UCHS1960 has uploaded so many great images it’s hard to choose just a few, but here are some that I particularly liked:

After the 1908 Flood

The Circus Comes To Town

Early Taxi Service

Broadway Gets Cement – 1914

The 1928 Union High Football Team

Some of the information in the collection has been on the site for a while, but this week we released two important additions, an interactive USS Arizona Memorial Wall and over 8 million Hero Pages created from U.S. Army enlistment records.

Some of the other titles in the collection include:

• Pearl Harbor Muster Rolls
• Missing Air Crew Reports
• U.S. Air Force Photos
• Submarine Patrol Reports
• Japanese Air Target Analysis
• Army JAG Case Files
• Navy JAG Case Files
• Naval Press Clippings
• Allied Military Conferences

You can read the full press release here, or begin exploring the collection here.

This morning I was looking through some photos on the site and came into a section of photos taken in England of planes that had been damaged on missions, but still returned to base.

Here are a couple of examples:

Then I came across this one:

I did a little research and found a Missing Air Crew Report for this plane (one member of the crew was killed) and then found Footnote Pages, created from the Social Security Death Index, for the pilot, Lawrence DeLancey and the navigator, Ray Ledoux. I added a few web links and some stories about this amazing event to their pages.

Here’s the first image in the section of battle damaged planes in England. You can browse through the collection using the filmstrip at the bottom to look at other images.

You can view all the World War II Airforce images for free.

When we opened our doors in January of 2007 we had fewer than 5 million images on the site. Since then we’ve added 2 million images a month and have made improvements to the site. Today you can access more than 42 million images on Footnote. Along the way, we’ve worked hard to keep our costs down and subscriptions affordable.

With challenging economic conditions, the time has come to make a modest adjustment to our subscription fees.

Starting September 1, 2008, the monthly All-Access Membership price will be $11.95 and the annual All-Access Membership will be $69.95 (an additional 83 cents per month for annual members).

To help with the transition to the new prices, we’re inviting users to upgrade to an Annual All-Access Membership at the current price of $59.95.

To purchase an Annual All-Access Membership, go to: http://www.footnote.com/account. This special upgrade offer expires August 31, 2008.

We believe that at these prices, a Footnote membership continues to be a great value and a low-cost alternative to traveling to an archive to access the same records. We hope you agree.

We appreciate your support and feedback and look forward to continuing to serve you.

Best regards,

Russ Wilding

CEO, Footnote

Today, I’ve resolved to tell you about one kind of record in the FBI Case Files. That record is an “Application for Exception from Classification of Enemy Alien.” It’s a mouthful.           

Read all about Beau’s discovery of Exceptional Records in the FBI Case Files from his blog.

One of our partners, The National Archives recently released an introduction on digitization at the National Archives. NARA states:

The strategic plan says that NARA will work to digitize selected records, including those most requested by researchers, and will put searchable descriptions of all our holdings online.

So, of all the collections held within the National Archives, which ones do you want? What time periods, historical events, or regional information interest you?

A good place to start researching what NARA has is through their ARC database.

You’ll see these images in the left hand column of the page, as in this example for the Lincoln Assassination papers. Sample images are always free.

Often we find these sample images by just poking around the title. I’ve been surprised by how easy it is to find interesting and unexpected things from any title if you just take a few minutes to browse.

Recently, I had a lot of fun looking for sample images for a couple of titles that may have slipped under the radar of most site users:

Gorrell’s History of the American Expeditionary Forces Air Service, 1917-1919 is a report of some of the first uses of aircraft in war. Edgar S. Gorrell was assigned to gather information that would “assist in establishing Army aeronautics on a sound basis for the future,” and this title is the result of his work.

Browsing this title, I found great descriptions of the kinds of things the military was learning about air warfare and some fascinating pictures, including stitched aerial photos that must be among the earliest precursors to Google Earth.

Historical Files of the American Expeditionary Force, North Russia, 1918-19 includes reports from the US involvement in a multinational task force that was sent to North Russia in 1918 following the signing of a treaty between Russia and Germany. I had no idea the US was involved in Russia at this time, and this title provides intimate details about what was going on.

I found lists of troop activities, reports of soldiers missing or killed, more early learnings about the military use of aircraft and much more.

These documents and those from individual Member’s shoe boxes, tell some of the most interesting stories of history. It’s our hope that as you and Footnote make more of these documents available, their stories we’ll give us not just a clear vision of the past but a better idea of how we got where we are.

If you find something that you think would make a good sample image for one of the titles on the site, please send us a link to the image and tell us why you think it would make a good sample.

As a comparison: According to Agence France-Presse, the Library of Congress has digitized 11 million documents in 12 years (as of April 2007).