During last month’s Winter Games, the Hesburgh Libraries shared a news story about the Olympic Movement: Sport, Global Politics and Identity database. It’s a collection of digitized historical sources, telling the story of the birth and development of the modern Olympic games. The database includes thousands of primary sources from a hundred-year period, starting with the first Olympic games in Athens in 1896, up through the 1990s. To illustrate the collection’s scope, a few examples might be useful:
- The poster for the 1928 games in Amsterdam.
- An official sightseeing guide from the 1936 Berlin games – along with a large collection of newspaper clippings about complaints and protests leading up to those games.
- A 1972 letter from the US Olympic Committee to the University of Notre Dame’s Director of Bands, expressing concern that Notre Dame’s proposed marching band tour might be using the “Olympic” branding without official permission.
You might wonder why we would make such a big deal about this collection. Aren’t these sources just freely available online somewhere? Absolutely not.
Continue reading “Primary Source Databases: Bringing the Past Closer”