Thank you for all of your help in completing this project! Zooniverse volunteers like you have completed transcribing all of the letters in the collection.
Research
Since 2017, we at the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections have developed an education resource about the War of the Worlds broadcast and archival evidence of its infamous reception. The Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collection at the University of Michigan Library preserves 1,344 letters sent to the New York City office of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in the aftermath of the broadcast, which were kept by one of Welles’s producing partners and largely forgotten for seventy years. Increased public interest in these letters, following their being featured in a 2013 PBS documentary and the 2015 book Broadcast Hysteria, inspired our initiative to create a digital archive making them more accessible to scholars and students. Not only do these letters offer a unique window into early American radio broadcasting and reception by documenting how audiences reacted to one of the most important programs in the medium’s history; they also present an opportunity to make radio history come alive by using the full story of War of the Worlds to address issues of media misinformation and “fake news” particularly relevant to our present moment.
Our project makes the War of the Worlds letters—and the many personal stories they contain—digitally available to researchers and the general public, fully searchable by city, state, and transcribed text. The digital database will also include vetted lesson plans we created in collaboration with several teachers and schools in Southeast Michigan to help teach an array of subjects aimed at middle school, high school, and community college students. Together, these resources make the letters the intellectual center for lessons about American political and media history before World War II, fact-checking and news bias and reliability, radio performance, and English.