Search Help

How does this work?
There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar
Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching
You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching
The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches
You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.

Search Results

The War at Home The War at Home
Date: 1/1/1979Call Number: V 234Format: DVDProducers: Glen Silber, Barry Alexander BrownCollection: Videos in many formats – both camera originals as well as reference materials
An acclaimed documentary, The War at Home reveals what happened in Madison, Wisconsin during most of the 1960s and the early '70s when students and the community began to protest the Vietnam War. Directors Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown spent a long time going through the news archives of a local television station to cull footage from those years. Then they selected specific clips and first put together a background on the war. Quotes from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, along with many other public figures vividly bring back the past. Next, the events at Madison are brought forward and local public figures speak memorable lines. Demonstrations are shown, as well as news events, like the man, now in jail, who bombed an Army information center on campus and killed a student. Emotion and drama run high throughout, making this a worthy documentary for anyone who either has forgotten or never knew what those days were like. This documentary won a Special Jury Prize at the now defunct U.S. Film Festival and was nominated for "Best Documentary" at the 1979 Academy Awards.