Today, newsreels seem like a thing of the past—an outmoded medium that feels ancient in comparison to the way we consumer media today. But they dominated much of the 20th century, and now, the AP and British Movietone have uploaded more than one million minutes of them to YouTube.
The new upload contains 550,000 videos dating back to 1895, spread across the two organizations’ YouTube channels. On British Movietone you’ll find an enormous amount of early 20th-century material, while the AP’s channel spans more than the full century, including plenty of color footage and semi-recent current events. “At AP we are always astonished at the sheer breadth of footage that we have access to, and the upload to YouTube means that, for the first time, the public can enjoy some of the oldest and most remarkable moments in history,” the AP’s director of international archive, Alwyn Lindsey, said in a statement.
Browsing thought them would take hours, but those would be hours well-spent—here are a few interesting moments we found while browsing today.
[Associated Press on YouTube; British Movietone on YouTube]
An atom bomb test at Yucca Flats in Nevada
Mao and Nixon meeting in 1972
The aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
NASA preparing the Apollo 11 lander for flight
The Victory Parade in London after World War II
Street scenes from Tokyo in 1972
An early “driverless” car from 1971
Vesuvius erupting in 1938
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