Friends and I visited the National Archives in Washington, DC on Friday, primarily to see the Cuban Missile Crisis exhibit which was developed in partnership with the JFK Presidential Library (itself part of the National Archives network).
This is an interesting example of discovering new sources as time passes. The main feature of the exhibit are "secret" recordings that President Kennedy made of meetings in the Oval Office. The exhibit had six stations where visitors could listen to excerpts of recordings from the meetings of Kennedy's advisors during the crisis. The Archives did a good job using images to identify speakers as well as providing captioning so that you could read what was being said, and summarizing it on a nearby panel, since there were often too many people to get close to the audio speakers.
I'm not a Cold War scholar so I don't know if these recordings provided information that scholars did not previously have access to, so can't say if our understanding of the crisis changed with their release. If the information from the recordings isn't new, it could confirms other sources which strengthens our understanding of the events. In either case, historians and the public now know more.
In an interesting case study in "what is history" - there were six of us in the group. Four of us, who are in our early 40s (a PhD in military history, a lawyer with an undergrad history major, a historical storyteller, and me), read just about every label. The other two folks waited for us outside. I should note that they were 16 and 20 years old during the missile crisis, so lived through it and therefore felt that they didn't need to see the exhibit.
