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I paid a visit to the National Archives today, since I read they were putting on an "Eyewitness to History" exhibit. Documents and recordings from some of the more memorable events in US history. Three that stood out:

The giant photo of the standoff in the road between John Lewis's student protest group and Georgia police. The police are advancing from the left in gas masks and riot gear, carrying clubs. Lewis and his group are standing on the right, waiting and defiant. They're about to get the crap beat out of them. In the space between the two groups, about 40 or 50 feet away, you can see 15 or 20 white men in overcoats and fedora-type hats, waiting, watching and some taking pictures. It's a really amazing and moving photograph. The bystanders reminded me of some of the photos I've seen of lynchings from the 50's and 60's. You see the lower half of the victim hanging from a tree, and a bunch of high school age kids there just milling around. Boys in slacks and clean shirts, girls in poodle skirts. Like it's the most natural thing in the world to be where they are, doing what they're doing. It's the casualness of the whole thing that gives me chills.

The next thing was the audio recording of the Hindenburg disaster. The raw emotion in Herbert Morrison's voice is indescribable. Here's the text:
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It's practically standing still now. They've dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship, and it has been taken ahold of down on the field by a number of men. It's starting to rain again; the rain had, er, slacked up a little bit. The back motors of the ship are just holding it, er, just enough to keep it from…
It's burst into flames! It's burst into flames and it's falling, it's crashing. … Get out of the way, get out of the way! Get this, Charlie, get this, Charlie! It's burning and it's crashing! It's crashing, terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It's burning, bursting into flames and it's falling on the mooring mast, and all the folks between. Oh, this is terrible. This is the, one of the worst catastrophes in the world! Oh, my Jesus! … Oh, four to five hundred feet into the sky. It's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen, it's smoke and it's flames, now, and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here! I told you, I cannot talk to people ... I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen.

Listen, folks, I'm gonna have to stop for a minute because this was the... the worst thing I've ever witnessed.
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I also went through the Public Vault area, and they had an exhibit on immigrants and their paperwork upon entering the country. Scientists, actors, parents of famous people. I'd never seen Yul Brynner with hair before. The paperwork includes the person's race and nationality. A Chinese guy's race was given as "Oriential", and Einstein's was "Hebrew".

I stood in line to see the Declaration and Constitution again. I asked the guard at the Constitution (because he's supposed to know everything about it), if anybody ever asked why some of the s's look like f's. "Oh yeah, I get that question all the time." I got my hopes up. "It's because they had a different style of writing back at that time." And my hopes were dashed. I was hoping that he's say something about the eszett, which is sort of a double s in German. In cursive it looks like a fancy f. So I'd always figured that it carried over to English since English is a Germanic language. A word like "Congress" would have the eszett in place of the first s. But since the security guard didn't say anything about it, I may be wrong. Tragic.