The Presbyterian Historical Society is thrilled to announce that the first batch of images digitized as part of the Religious News Service Photographs Digitization Project have been added to Pearl Digital Collections.

The 1,117 records added to the Society’s online archive include 753 images and 424 records of accompanying text including press releases and clippings. The records are the first to be digitized as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant funded project that will make 22,500 images and related documents from the Religious News Service Photograph Collection available online.

Two RNS Project Archivists, Isabella Fidanza and Megan Genovese, started the work to appraise and digitize the RNS collection in September. Starting with seven boxes from 1964, the pair reviewed each photograph and applied a rating system to select images with a high level of historic value for digitization.

The digitized images offer a mixture of candid and photojournalistic images that document a tumultuous, joyful, and complicated year in religion and politics.

Continue reading to view highlights from the collection and learn more about the Religious News Service Photographs Digitization Project.