Do you remember the “Duck and Cover” drills from the 1950s? The Soviet people practiced similar civil defense maneuvers in case the unthinkable happened. What follows is the entire table of contents (omitting the authors) of Soviet Military Translations, No. 368, 24 January 1967, drawn from Voyennyye Znaniya [Military Skills, Moscow, No. 12, December 1966] and found in Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports:

• Civil-Defense Services must be Perfected
• The Actions of Civil Defense and the Armed Forces must be Coordinated
• Efficient Utilization of Machinery in Rescue Work
• Civil Defense at a Khar’kov Plant
• The Methods of Civil-Defense Training are very Diverse
• Methods of Compensating for a Shortage of Shelters
• Training of Civil-Defense Commanders is Financed Partially by the Enterprises
• Average Norms for Loading Casualties on Vehicles
• England’s Reliance on Evacuation of the Population

Civil defense was far from an abstract concept in the Soviet Union. Consider how granular their concern was, extending to the “norms for loading casualties” onto vehicles, with several articles using the imperative mood. Beneath the Cold War saber-rattling about communism “burying” capitalism and the bravado surrounding the U-2 Incident and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it isn’t much of a stretch to see in this list of articles a nation that is terrified of being nuked.

Readers of Mao Tse-tung’s ubiquitous “Little Red Book” of quotations have to wait until Chapter 6 until they make the acquaintance of Anna Louise Strong, the American journalist who elicited from Chairman Mao one of his most well known statements:

In his talk with the American correspondent Anna Louise Strong 20 years ago, Chairman Mao Tse-tung put forward the brilliant dictum that for the people who dare to make revolution, the imperialists, including the United States and all reactionaries are paper tigers.

Mao uttered his famous words during an interview with Strong that took place in the Yenan cave where he was living in 1946. Such quarters were necessary as Mao and Strong shared the perils of aerial bombardment from U.S.-sponsored Nationalist Chinese aircraft during the Chinese Civil War. Strong’s dispatch below hints at the respect with which she was treated by her Chinese interpreter, who apologized for jeopardizing the life of this American reporter from bombs that likely came from America.

Since the early 1940s, Readex has been the leading innovator in the publication of historical American resources. We started our work with massive projects, including Early American Imprints, based on the Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker bibliographies, and Early American Newspapers.

Back then, the medium was microprint and then microform, and it often took ten…or twenty…or thirty years to complete a single product. Many source institutions had to be visited; many documents had to be filmed; and many license agreements had to be drawn up. New technologies had to be developed, too, to ensure that the original images were captured as effectively as possible. These early major collections later became online digital offerings, of course. The ones mentioned above proved to be absolutely foundational back in the early days of digitization.

Today, Readex is extremely proud to be the developer of one more foundational product: Territorial Papers of the United States. This new collection—which we are releasing in four series beginning in May 2018—captures the essential history of more than half of the states of the United States when they were still territories. From Florida to California to Alaska and just about everywhere else in between, Territorial Papers is the crucial—and until now, undigitized—record of a growing, expanding America.

“Terrible Ocean Calamity: A White Star Line Steamer Lost,” read the Boston Evening Journal’s headline. The article went on to report:

It is our painful duty this morning to record the most terrible marine disaster that has ever occurred on our coast—the loss of a great ocean steamship with about 750 lives.

Readers would be excused to think RMS Titanic at this point. However, the RMS Atlantic disaster preceded the loss of the Titanic by 39 years. On June 2, 1873, 145 years ago, the Jackson Daily Citizen ran a front-page article beneath the headline, “A Watery Grave,” stating:

The White Star steamer Atlantic…while coming into this port [Halifax] for coal, struck on Meagher’s Rock, near Cape Prospect, 22 miles west of Halifax, and became a total wreck. Of about 1,000 souls on board upwards of 700 were drowned. The third officer, Brady, arrived in this city this evening. He says that the Atlantic left Liverpool on the 20th of March with upward of 900 steerage passengers and about 50 cabin passengers. The steamer experienced boisterous weather during the passage, but all went well till noon, Monday, the 31st, when the supply of coal became nearly exhausted and the captain determined to put into Halifax.