National History Day

Each year, National History Day frames students’ research within a historical theme. The 2020-2021 theme is Communication in History: The Key to Understanding. National History Day (NHD) and students are exploring topics related to the ways that people have exchanged information throughout the past, how these methods and modes have changed over time, and how they have affected life today. Public broadcasting has been an influential form of communication for the past seven decades, and students can use the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) to explore how public media has communicated important issues to the American public through television and radio. More than 55,000 programs from the late 1930s to the present day are streaming online, including interviews with leading political and cultural figures and ordinary people, national newscasts and news from diverse communities across the nation, revealing documentaries, and live coverage of events as they occurred.

For more information on this theme, visit National History Day.

To contact AAPB staff, email aapb_notifications@wgbh.org

More than 55,000 digitized historic programs are available in the AAPB Online Reading Room (ORR) for research, educational, and informational purposes.

Use the search bar to search by keyword; use quotation marks to narrow searches to specific word phrases. Example: Equal Rights Amendment without quotes will populate search results related to each individual word in the phrase, rather than populating results based on the specific sequence of words when quotes are applied, i.e. "Equal Rights Amendment"

• Available within the U.S. for research, educational and informational purposes (download not authorized)
• Use the search bar to search by keyword; use quotation marks to narrow searches to specific word phrases
• Example: Equal Rights Amendment without quotes will populate search results related to each individual word in the phrase, rather than populating results based on the specific sequence of words when quotes are applied, i.e. "Equal Rights Amendment”.
• Use the filters to narrow your search by media type, year(s), topic, genre, contributing organizations, etc.
• Sort by relevance, date (newest), date (oldest), or title

• More than 50 Special Collections include summary information about the content, recommended search strategies, and related resources.
• Curated exhibits focus on ways public television and radio have covered issues and events of cultural and historical significance and provide accompanying essays that put the programs in relevant contexts.
• Limited Research Access (LRA) - Certain materials not available online are accessible via password-protected two-week access for bona fide research purposes. Reach out to aapb_notifications@wgbh.org for LRA requests.

The AAPB offers programming contributed by more than 130 organizations across the country. Their materials include local programs, raw interviews, news reports, documentaries, newsmagazines, and more created over the past 70+ years.

• Collections in the AAPB range from the late 1940s through the present, providing an audiovisual record of how national and international events have impacted communities on local and national levels.
• Suggested news collections in the AAPB include KPFA (Berkeley, CA), New Jersey Nightly News, NewsNight Minnesota, or PBS NewsHour collections.

AAPB provides access to full-length accounts with historians and witnesses of historic events conducted for acclaimed series. See the 1964 interviews, Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Ken Burns' The Civil War Interviews, or The Murder of Emmett Till Interviews.

Watch and listen to coverage of the Watergate hearings, the AIDS crisis, civil rights and political movements, and more. See the BackStory collection, Voices from the Southern Civil Rights Movement exhibit, or the On the Right: NET and Modern Conservatism exhibit.

• National Educational Television collection
• Broadcasting in the Public Interest: The Newton Minow Collection
• Documenting and Celebrating Public Broadcasting Histories exhibit
• National Association of Educational Broadcasters Programs collection
• "Gavel-to-Gavel”: The Watergate Scandal and Public Television exhibit

• Vegetable Soup collection
• OutCasting collection
• Say Brother collection

• Woman series collection
• Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt series
• Feminist Community Radio at KOPN collection

Additional topics include legislation, religion, music, science, gender studies, education, immigration, and diaspora communities.

For local content, visit the AAPB Participating Organizations landing page.

Although content in the AAPB is available only for streaming online, AAPB staff can connect you with the producing station to request copies for your National History Day project.

AAPB can provide you with password-protected access to certain materials via uor Limited Research Access (LRA) Policy.

Contact us at aapb_notifications@wgbh.org.