How to Locate Free-to-Use Archival Footage

How to Locate Free-to-Use Archival Footage

Using tools like youtube-dl, and sources including presidential libraries and Archive.org, Nick and Griffin explain how to locate and download historical news footage for documentaries. It’s the workflow behind Griffin’s weekly archival web series Rewind.

Download The Recount app on iOS or Android. Watch Rewind, Griffin’s weekly deep dive into the political video archives—including episode #12 Cuban Missile Crisis.

To download videos, Nick uses the free command-line tool youtube-dl. (Watch his short tutorial video.) Griffin uses a paid app, Uniconverter by Wondershare. Other video downloaders could contain adware, so if you download something suspicious, we recommend Malwarebytes to scan your computer.

Sources for archival footage:

  • Archive.org has the last 10 years of U.S. television news, searchable by captions

  • C-SPAN is a giant repository of U.S. government videos, including Senate sessions, presidential addresses.

  • Presidential libraries like the Clinton Library and Kennedy Library have searchable digital collections.

  • High-resolution scans from old newspapers at Newspapers.com (7-day free trial)

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