Best known as a clearinghouse for viral videos, YouTube is also one of the Internet’s richest repositories of historical films, a treasure trove for journalists, educators, and history enthusiasts.
And it just got better.
The Associated Press and British Movietone, a vast newsreel archive, announced last month that they would upload more than 1 million minutes of historical footage – 550,000+ video stories – to YouTube, the biggest ever upload of its kind.
The breadth and depth of the collection, which dates from 1895 to the present, is astonishing, including everything from news coverage of earth-shaking events, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Tiananmen Square protests, to snippets of everyday life in all its bizarre, bygone glory.
Here are few of StoryKeep’s favorites:
1. The only known surviving footage of the Titanic.
2. Outlandish bridal fashions from 1966
3. The Rolling Stones get a Beatlemania-esque reception in Sydney
4. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
5. Dog-walking machines from 1937
The collection is hosted on two YouTube channels: the AP and Movietone. (Tip: Click “playlists” for curated galleries of the best footage.)
For more historical videos on YouTube, check out British Pathé’s remarkable collection, over 85,000 films, uploaded last year.