Universal Newsreels

Between 1929 and 1967 Universal Pictures released a newsreel every Tuesday and Thursday. Each issue ran about ten minutes and packed in six or seven stories, from a presidential inauguration to a bathing-beauty contest, narrated at a gallop by Graham McNamee and later Ed Herlihy. For the pre-television audience this was the moving-image news, seen by tens of millions of people in cinemas and in dedicated newsreel theatres.

In 1974 Universal donated the surviving library to the U.S. National Archives and placed it in the public domain, which is why this is one of the safest large bodies of twentieth-century footage anyone can use. The Archives has digitised the issues that survived a 1978 vault fire; this Reel picks twenty that track the middle of the century.

The 1930s open with Extra! Special! Roosevelt Inaugurated (5 March 1933) and Roosevelt Landslide (1936), and with the Hindenburg disaster of 6 May 1937, one of the first catastrophes to be filmed as it happened and a National Film Registry title. The war years bring "American Day" at Central Park (1941), Roosevelt Warns Axis (1943) and The Arsenal for D-Day (May 1944); the reckoning follows with Admiral Kimmel's Pearl Harbor testimony (1946) and Atom Test Nears (June 1946) on the eve of Operation Crossroads.

The Cold War arrives with the Berlin Siege and Airlift issues (1948), Atom Fallout and the British H-Bomb (1957), and the space race with "Moon" Is Born on Project Vanguard (July 1957), New Moon on Sputnik (October 1957) and the Russian Sputnik exhibit (1958). Kennedy Elected (1960), his inauguration (1961) and the Berlin crisis of August 1961 lead to Kennedy Tour (1962), where the President calls for the United States to lead in space. The Reel ends in Tokyo with the 1964 Olympics.

Watch for what the newsreel omits as much as what it shows: strikes, lynchings and the civil-rights movement rarely made the cut until the 1960s, and the tone is relentlessly upbeat. That is exactly what makes the format a historical document.