On this date in 1937, the German zeppelin Hindenberg caught fire while attempting to moor in New Jersey. The mooring was experiencing some difficulty, and newsreel cameramen had focused on the efforts of the ground crew. As a result, they missed the beginning of the fire, recording only the end. The tragic event is also recorded in still photographs and in the famous account by radio journalist Herbert Morrison, whose words were later added to newsreel footage.

Morrison, recognizing almost immediately the full implications of the fire, uttered the famous phrase, “Oh, the humanity!” as the burning craft crashed to the ground, killing everyone aboard.

The phrase became famous partly as the voice of a journalist who is helpless to stop the tragedy unfolding before him. It is echoed, though, by the radio audience and later movie audiences, recognizing the enormity of what they’re seeing.

That authentic voice is the same quality we ask our students to bring to their writing.

Reading a transcript of Morrison’s words as they watch the clip can help students understand what Morrison is reporting. It might be a good exercise in information literacy to ask students how hearing Morrison say the words affects their understanding of the events, as opposed to just reading them.

It might also be a good activity to ask them how they might edit his words. What is gained and lost by the changes?

They can then apply those insights to modern media: what are the strengths of text alone? When a journalist has strong video footage, what value is added by narration? What does this tell us about the importance of old-fashioned writing in a digital media age?

Update 6-29-08: I stand corrected. As Alpha comments, not all passengers aboard The Hindenberg died in the fire and crash.

This announcement comes from the Library of Congress:

More than 79,000 newly digitized newspaper pages, along with several new site features, have recently been added to the Chronicling America Web site at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 500,000 digitized newspaper pages, dating primarily from 1900 to 1910, and representing 61 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NDNP is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of public-domain U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic pages, as well as information about newspapers from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH’s “We the People” program, this rich digital resource will continue to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.

New features in Chronicling America include:

• “See All Available Newspapers” page - A list of all newspapers with pages available on the site.
• RSS feed and E-mail Update service - Users can subscribe to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) updates or e-mail delivery (see list under Topics/Newspapers and Journalism). Updates will include notices of added content and other points of interest.
• Newly available content includes pages from the Hopkinsville Kentuckian and Liberty, both published in Kentucky (and including coverage of the assassination of William Goebel in 1900, the only state governor ever to be killed in office); additions to The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), New York Tribune (New York, N.Y.), Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City) and others.

Highlights of content available in Chronicling America include:

• News of original discovery of the historic “Waldseemüller Map” of 1507. (More information about this map and the Library’s acquisition.)
• The assassination of President McKinley in 1901
• The San Francisco earthquake of 1906
• The construction of the Panama Canal

Ultimately, during the next 20 years, NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all the states and U.S. territories. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all types of formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative: the United States Newspaper Program. The Library of Congress is also digitizing and contributing to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership.