On Monday, January 5th, 2009 New York City will host the 123rd annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The programme is extremely varied and there is a multitude of sessions that concentrate on a wide variety of historical subjects.

One session chaired by David Suisman from the University of Delaware is of particular interest to the Spoken Word. It is entitled ‘What is Sound to a Historian? - Critical Perspectives on the Use of Recordings as Historical Sources’.

We thought it would be interesting both for us and for the Chairman and Panel of this session if we contacted them in order to let them know about the spectrum of historical resources that the Spoken Word project can offer to the educational community.

We have recordings on a host of historical subjects ranging from Leonard Cheshire’s eyewitness account of the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki to recordings of various parts of the trials at Nuremberg.

The following is a list of the names and conact details of the panel that will be attending the event:

Chair

• David Suisman, University of Delaware, dsuisman@udel.edu, http://www.udel.edu/History/bio/suisman_david.html

Panel

• Charles A. Hardy III, West Chester University, chardy@wcupa.edu, http://www.talkinghistory.org/hardy.html

• Elena Razlogova, Concordia University, erazlogo@alcor.concordia.ca, http://elenarazlogova.org/index.html

• Jonathan Sterne, McGill University, jonathan.sterne@mcgill.ca, http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/faculty/sterne/

• Emily Thompson, Princeton University, emilyt@Princeton.EDU, http://www.princeton.edu/history/people/display_person.xml?netid=emilyt

• Derek Vaillant, University of Michigan, dvail@umich.edu, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dvail/

We will update the blog and let you know about any progress with the correspondence.

The Nuremberg Trials took place after the Second World War and aimed to convict various leading members of the Nazi Party for the crimes against humanity that they had committed. The most famous of these trials was the first one to take place and was given the title the ‘Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal’. This tried 24 of the most important and often nototious leaders of Nazi Germany including the commander of the Luftwaffe, Herman Goering and the Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess.

The three main allied powers and France provided one judge, an alternate and prosecutors in order to decide upon the outcome of the trial. Various sentences were handed out ranging from full acquittals to death by hanging.

The Spoken Word has various recordings from the actual trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg including the opening and closing speeches, the pleas of the defendants and the reading out of the sentences. This is another important snapshot of history from the Spoken Word repository.

• Opening Statement by Lord Chief Justice Lawrence
• Pleas of the Defendants
• Closing speech by Sir Hartley Shawcross
• The President of the Tribunal, Lord Chief Justice Lawrence, pronounces the sentences and reads the dissenting Russian opinion

Today, Tuesday 17th October 2006, thousands of people across Britain are expected to contribute to a project aiming to create an online archive of a day in the life of the country. The event is organised by the National Trust and the blogs will be stored by the British Library and at other locations.

Full story from BBC News

You can particpate in the making of social history by going to the History Matters web site, although as I write the server appears to have died under the strain of several hundred thousand eager bloggers.